Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-27

posted on 26 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Why start learning to build for Windows 8 (Lee Stott)

    • "If you have done any reading about Windows 8, one thing all the press is focusing on is Windows 8 offers and unprecedented opportunity to monetize your developer skills. Combining the broad reach of Windows which already exists, a new developer platform in the form of Windows Store Apps, best-in-class developer tools Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server, a reimagined user experience with Windows Store, Metro Style Apps, support for new chipsets Intel and RTM, and a built-in Store with industry-leading business terms, with initial revenue share of 70% revenue for you 30 % for Microsoft and 100% in app purchase revenue to you. Windows 8 is the largest developer opportunity, ever!..."

  • Discovering data formats supported by Windows 8 share contract target apps (Andrei Marukovich)

    • "Windows 8 apps run in sandboxed environment where all direct communications between apps are prohibited. Instead, Windows 8 provides several mechanisms to facilitate indirect communications - protocols, file type associations and share contracts. All these mechanisms allow transferring data between independent apps - in most of the cases developers don't care about data source or destination. However, occasionally there is a need to support communications with a particular app. In this case all protocols, associations and contracts supported by target app need to be identified. Declared protocols and file type associations can be determined through Control Panel..."

  • Using OData in Windows 8 Apps for Windows 8 RTM (Jeremy Likness)

    • "The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my book, Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML. The Open Data Procotol (OData) is a web protocol used for querying and updating data. It is a REST-based API built on top of Atom that uses JSON or XML for transporting information. Windows 8 applications have native support for OData clients once you download and install the client ... To access OData services, you simply add a service reference the same way you would for a SOAP-based web service. A popular OData service to use for demonstrations is the Netflix movie catalog..."

  • Getting Started w/ Windows 8, MVVM Light and EventToCommand (Shayne Boyer)

    • "Now that Windows 8 and Visual Studio are in RTM I wanted to put together a quick entry for those Windows Phone developers making the transition to Windows 8 development with their MVVM Light skills. Laurent Bugnion, is the creator of the MVVM Light toolkit and I, as well as many others, have been using this for Windows Phone development for a while now. I am porting on of my applications to Windows 8 and wanted to take the knowledge of this toolkit to the new platform hoping that there were either some new enhancements and/or not many changes so that I could just go. Well that was the deal..."

  • msMatchMedia: programmatic access to media queries (Jeremy Foster)

    • "If you throw down with a media query like this ... then you're going to get purple text in all of your paragraphs, right? Well, what if you wanted to check to see if you were in fullscreen-portrait from your code so you could do something fancy. Of course, you get some help from Windows with that. If you're using the navigation project template then you can implement an updateLayout method when you define a page and one of the parameters you'll receive is viewState. But you might not be in the updateLayout method and you might want to check some other media query property such as whether the screen is at least 600px wide..."

  • VisiblityControl - An Alternative to Converters (Phil Muhlenkamp & John Michael Hauck)

    • "If you are interested in exploring alternatives to the BooleanToVisibiltyConverter, then this post is for you. Suppose you have two user interface elements. You want to display the first if a boolean value is true, and the second if the boolean value is false..."

  • VisibilityControl - The Design (Phil Muhlenkamp & John Michael Hauck)

    • "In this post, I briefly discuss the design behind the VisibilityControl. ... If you look at the source code history at codeplex, you will notice that I first designed this control with two dependency properties, one for the true content and one for the false content. The resulting XAML that the user needed to enter to use the control seems a bit clunky to me. Therefore, I switched to an ItemsControl-derived solution. I ask the user of the control to load the Items property with the false and true content respectively..."

  • How to Integrate SkyDrive Backup in Windows 8 App (Binoj Daniel)

    • "Windows 8 currently does not support an in built app backup to cloud feature as of now. It might be something Microsoft is working on. So for now we will use the alternative approach and use sky drive storage to backup app specific data to cloud..."

  • Win8 Development: coping without EntityRef and EntitySet (Philip Colmer)

    • "In a recent post, I mentioned that the version of the .Net framework being used by Windows Store apps doesn't have any support for EntityRef and EntitySet. I have used these extensively in my WP app to link database tables together. I posted on StackOverflow to see if there were any suggestions and one was to use System.Data.SQLite, which provides ADO.NET interfaces to SQLite. However, I was put off this suggestion for a few reasons..."

  • A new pattern for Win8 ApplicationViewState handling (Anthony Wieser)

    • "While trying to port our app Bridge Stenographer I was faced with the problem of supporting the new ViewStates in Windows 8. I didn't really like the idea of having a bunch of duplicate controls on my UI that I hid. I didn't really like the idea of having a frame that I navigated to a completely separate set of controls. And I really didn't like the messy syntax for managing view states with the VisualStateManager, particularly in light of my previous experiences of Visual States never doing what you expect. So here's my idea..."

  • A C#/XAML FlipView Context Indicator for Windows 8 (Diederik Krols)

    • "This article presents a FlipView context indicator control for Windows 8 UI Style apps. FlipView is a Windows 8 items control that displays one item at a time. It allows traversing its collection of items through a horizontal flick gesture. There are some limitations in its usage. In an app, the maximum size of a flipview is the size of the page. If you make the FlipView wider than its container, you're just going to confuse your user (and probably also the runtime): does a horizontal flick triggers scrolling, or are we moving to the next (or previous) page ? This is one of the reasons why I personally prefer the single page GridView style over a FlipView..."

  • New Screencast: Adding Touch Support to a Windows Store App using HTML and JavaScript (David Isbitski)

    • "This is the fourth in a series of short screencasts that will teach you Windows Store App development in a fun and immersive way via casual gaming. This screencast covers adding Touch to your Windows Store App using HTML and JavaScript..."

Tools, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • WinRT XAML Toolkit v1.2.0 Released (CodePlex)

    • Version 1.2.0 of the WinRT XAML Toolkit has been released. This version is based on and compatible with the Windows 8 RTM release.

Books

  • XAML For Windows 8: Read Me First (Jesse Liberty)

    • "I'm pleased and proud to announce my newest book, from Apress, named either XAML For Windows 8: Read Me First or XAML Primer (we're still discussing! Which name do you prefer?) ... This book's first draft is complete and we should have an e-version very soon...."