Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-23

posted on 23 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • WinRT app guide: Step 2: The Plan (Iris Classon)

    • "Great! So we have talked about the idea now, and it is time to sketch out a plan. Here is the plan: 1. Decide what your app is great at. MIH!SP is great at planning and registering studying activities in an efficient and motivating way and letting the user evaluate his/her efficiency and prioritizing through statistics with the goal of making it (studying) happen!..."

  • The Unofficial Windows 8 Developer FAQ (Scott Barnes)

    • "Early this week I've been talking to a few current and former Microsoft staffers about all things Windows 8. In my discussions I've started to gather some gossip in around what happened to Silverlight and lastly the specifics around the DevDiv fall out between Steve Sinofsky and Soma. ... Today, I'm going to attempt to dos something Microsoft staff should have done long ago or didn't do correctly or simply were held back from doing so. I'm going to release the Unofficial FAQ on "What Just happened" in Microsoft for developer(s) worldwide..."

  • Most people are doing MVVM all wrong. Are you? (Jerry Nixon)

    • "Model View View Model or MVVM is, without question, one of the best things to ever come out of XAML development. MVVM separates the logic necessary to interact with the data from the logic necessary to interact with the UI. Where together it makes a muddled mess, separate it makes an elegant approach that is more easily maintainable..."

  • Hooray! Here's all 316 pages of the Windows 8 UX Guidelines in one cool PDF (Jerry Nixon)

    • "Fortunately, we are providing UX guidelines to developers. Unfortunately, those guidelines are seriously comprehensive (aka long). As a result, and to all our benefit, the UX guidelines have been consolidated into a single PDF document. Get the full PDF here..."

  • Connecting Windows 8 applications with services: Part 2: Working with REST, oData and RSS from Windows 8 applications (Gill Cleeren)

    • "In the first article of this series, we looked at how Windows 8 applications can work in general with services. We saw that the way that Windows 8 apps communicate with a service layer, is similar to how we performed the communication in Silverlight. ... We've seen how communication with ASMX and WCF services is done. Let's know look at some other common types of services: REST, oData and RSS..."

  • WinJS: Unpacking Promises (Christopher Bennage)

    • "Promises are an abstraction for asynchronous programming. If you don't know anything about them, I recommend that you first read asynchronous programming in JavaScript before you continue. A promise is an object. It is not a function and it is not the value returned from the async operation. To get to the value, you need to call the then method on the promise object. You pass a callback function as an argument to then. The promise invokes the callback and passes the value you're interested in into the callback. Clear as mud, right? ..."

  • But WHY do we pan horizontally? (Jeremy Foster)

    • "You may have heard or read or noticed, that in Windows 8, things move side to side. What's with that? We've been scrolling vertically on the web since the stone age (and by stone age I'm referring to the early 90's). And while we're on the subject, what's the difference between panning and scrolling anyway?! Hold your britches... you're about to find out..."

  • Windows 8 XAML Tips - Async Search Suggestions (Fons Sonnemans)

    • "There are a lot of examples on the web how you can add Search Suggestions to the Search Charm of a Windows 8 Metro application. But all the examples I found only demonstrate how to implement a synchronous version. In this blog I will show you how you can do this also asynchronous. I use this technique to fill my Search Suggestion by calling a web service asynchronous. Something which is very common because your data will problably be stored in the Web/Cloud..."

  • Windows 8 Splash Screen: Top 10 Do's and Don'ts (Ratio Interactive)

    • "Last week we brought you a post highlighting the Top Ten things to avoid when designing Win 8 Live Tiles. With only 9 days remaining until the Windows 8 Design Contest ends, today we present our next blog entry, the Top Ten Windows 8 splash screen do's and don'ts. Every Metro style app must have a splash screen which displays immediately when a user launches an app. The purpose of the splash screen is to provide immediate feedback to users while the app initiates..."

  • Windows 8 - Getting started with ListView binding (Caffeinated Geek)

    • "Most of the tutorials and quickstart articles on binding data to a list on the interweb at the moment, shows how to bind the data from a static array of data. ... What i want to show quickly is how to retrieve data from an external source (I'll use Scott Guthrie's blog as an example here and consume the RSS feed, the principle is the same for pretty much any other type of structured data) and bind it to a list..."

  • Getting started with SQLite in Windows Store / WinRT apps (ErikEJ)

    • "In this blog post I will expand the blog post by Tim Heuer to include information on how to include and access a pre-populated SQLite database file, maybe even a file created by migrating from a SQL Server Compact database file, as I blogged about recently..."

  • Migrating Windows Release Preview application to Windows 8 RTM - "Xaml Parsing Failed" Error (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

    • "After installing windows 8 RTM and starting to work on my project I found there is a problem in my UserControls that was built in a separate project it always show and exception "Xaml Parsing Failed" ... Check the below Article on technet for more details..."

  • Introduction to the Multilingual App Toolkit (Channel 9)

    • "The Multilingual App Toolkit will help you to create your apps in mulitple languages to reach more markets..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified Windows To Go drives (Heath Stewart)

    • "Windows To Go is a cool new enterprise features to enable a mobile workforce to carry around an enterprise-managed installation of Windows on a USB thumb drive. However, only certified thumb drives appear as fixed drives and, therefore, Visual Studio 2012 can only install to certified drives. ... If you install Windows To Go (aka WTG or W2G) on a non-certified drive then boot to it and attempt to install VS2012 - or even try to install VS2012 to a separate removable drive - you will see an error..."

Other

  • Unity announces Windows Phone 8 support (Edge)

    • "At Unite 2012 in Amsterdam today, Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason has announced that its game creation platform Unity will soon support Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8..."