Windows App Developer Links - 2012-08-30

posted on 30 Aug 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Add cloud to your app with Windows Azure Mobile Services (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "Great Windows Store apps are connected. They use live tiles, authenticate users with single sign-on and share data between devices and users. To get all these great benefits of being connected, your app needs to use services in the cloud. Building cloud services is hard. Most cloud platforms offer general purpose capabilities to store data and execute code, but you have to author reams of infrastructure code to glue these capabilities together. I'm sure you are up for the challenge, but I bet backend infrastructure code is not your first priority. You want to focus on realizing your awesome app idea. Addressing this difficulty, earlier this week we announced a preview of the new service in Windows Azure: Mobile Services. Let me show you how you can add the cloud services you need to your app in minutes, using Mobile Services..."

  • Building an End-to-End Windows Store App - Part 2: Integrating Cloud Services (S.Somasegar)

    • "In my previous post, I started building a Windows Store app using Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8, and along the way integrated a few Windows features like live tiles and search. These days, however, many applications benefit from consuming and integrating with a variety of backend services running in the cloud, and I'd like mine to do so, as well. ... today we announced a preview of the new Windows Azure Mobile Services. The release includes client SDKs for Windows Store apps written in JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic, or C++, and provides capabilities around storage, push notifications, and more (including the ability to write JavaScript scripts that run on the server). In this post, I'll extend my application with a variety of forms of backend services, including utilizing Windows Azure Mobile Services..."

  • Publishing Metro App to Windows Store (Not Really Code)

    • "In this article I will focus on Windows 8 Metro app publishing to Windows Store. At the end of the article you'll find a screencast of whole publishing process. Before we can start there are several things that you must already have..."

  • How to Make Portable Class Libraries Work for You (Daniel Plaisted)

    • "A Portable Class Library is a .NET library that can be used (in binary form, without recompiling) on multiple .NET platforms. When you create a Portable Class Library in Visual Studio, you can choose which platforms to target. Portable libraries support targeting the .NET Framework, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store apps, and XBox 360 XNA games. This can be a big improvement over creating a separate project file for each platform you want to target, and keeping them all in sync. For example, shown below is the project structure for the MVVM Light Toolkit..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 4: Adding RadControls for WinRT/Metro (Iris Classon)

    • "We have created the project and the basic UI, but something important is missing,- RadControls for WinRT/Metro ! We will be using the controls to achieve a consistent look and feel, and it will save us heaps of time so we can finish and publish the application in no time while adding some cool functionality that will separate the app from the other apps in the the store. Adding RadControls for WinRT..."

  • Snap to Your Tiles (Jeremy Foster)

    • "Let's say you have a bunch of tiles in your Windows 8 app. And the user grabs this list with their finger and pans some distance to the right. There's a chance the list will end up landing in a position like this... Notice that the tiles at left are cutoff. The list has panned some arbitrary distance and stopped where fate stopped it. I know it's all scientific, but it's fun to say that fate landed it here. But what if you don't want to put your app in fate's fickle hands and would rather stop every time at a tile's edge. That flick from my last example, then, should find you here... with the edge of tiles 9, 10, and 11 neatly lined up on your left margin. Is that possible? Of course it is. Is it easy? Yep. That too..."

  • WP to W8: API Mapping (Jared Bienz)

    • "This article will be what my co-worker and friend Ryan Lowdermilk likes to refer to as a "SEO piece". What Ryan means is while it may not make for easy chair reading, it will still meet a need for those searching for a particular piece of information. The information in this article is how commonly used Windows Phone APIs and XAML features map (or do not map) to their Windows 8 counterparts. There won't be a lot of dialog in this article. I'll mention what the API is used for, show the Windows Phone version and show the Windows 8 version. If there are any important tricks to note, I'll list those too..."

  • Debugging binding failures with Visual Studio 2012 (Michael VanderHelm)

    • "One of the frustrating things I've run into when developing XAML applications using the MVVM pattern is binding failure. This happens when your view is trying to bind to a property that doesn't exist on your viewmodel. Most frustrating is when it fails silently behind your back, or in a way that you don't notice. There is a way to have some debug output when a binding failed, but there was no way to set a breakpoint when a binding failure happened. ... Microsoft's Tim Heuer tweeted that a better way to do this was coming when Visual Studio 2012 is released. Now that VS 2012 is here, I've seen what he was talking about. ... There's a new property exposed on an Application object called DebugSettings..."

  • Customize the color of an indeterminate progress bar (Johan Lindfors)

    • "To keep your users aware of the fact that there's asynchronous actions in progress, the indeterminate progress bar is a common practice. One thing I've noticed is that when you add a ProgressBar element to a page in your Windows 8 page, the color of the indeterminate state is static meaning that there's no public property that you can use to set a specific color. One approach might be to retemplate the entire control, but it's a bit drastic when there's actually an easier approach..."

  • Unable to start debugging WWAHost.exe error with Windows 8 HTML Apps (Michael Crump)

    • "All throughout my blog you will find tons of blog posts for common problems that I have encountered while developing applications using Microsoft Technologies. This post is no exception. While I was recently working on a Windows 8 HTML application, I kept getting the following error from VS2012 RTM. ... I searched and searched the net for an answer and came up empty. Most everyone said, "Upgrade to the RTM bits!" But I was already on the RTM bits of VS2012 and Win8. So what next? The first thing I decided to do was figure out what exactly WWAHost.exe was..."

  • Wanna see the Unreal Engine running on Windows RT? (Jerry Nixon)

    • "NVidia has done it. They, with their partners have ported the full (yes, full) PC version of the Unreal engine over to Windows RT. You heard me! That means games that are currently on Xbox (like Mass Effect) and the PC can be easily ported and you can hold them in your hand! Awesome..."

  • Microsoft DevRadio: Top 10 Windows 8 Secrets for App Success (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "'m pleased to have had the opportunity to host another episode of Microsoft DevRadio. In this episode, Chris Bowen shares with us his Top 10 Windows 8 secrets for App success. Tune in as Chris and I discuss the incredible money making opportunities available for developers who jump in and develop applications for Windows 8 as well as what free tools and services are available to help you along the way..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Introducing Windows Azure Mobile Services (Carlos Figueira)

    • "... Today we released a new service in the Windows Azure family - mobile support. The idea is to provide functionality for client developers who may have a good experience in client-side programming may not have a lot of backend experience. Things such as cloud storage, authentication and push notifications typically require knowledge of a bunch of different components - SQL Azure or some other cloud DB for storage, with their own client libraries or REST-based APIs; Windows Live or other providers (usually oData-based) for authentication; Windows Notification Services (with their REST/XML-based API) or other notification services for other platforms... Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) attempts to bridge this gap, with a unified service which provides that functionality for mobile application..."

  • Introduction to Windows Azure Mobile Services (Scott "The Gu" Guthrie)

    • "In this video Scott Guthrie shows how using Windows Azure Mobile Services one can add a cloud backend to a Windows 8 application in literally minutes..."

  • ReSharper 7.0.1: Bugfix Update Available (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)

    • "We've just released ReSharper 7.0.1: a minor update that fixes many of the issues that users have encountered with the initial 7.0 release. Please download ReSharper 7.0.1 if you feel that any of the following improvements are relevant to you..."

Other

  • Windows 8 Development Chat (JabbR)

    • If you're developing Windows Store applications and have questions or if you want to show off your mastery of all things WinRT by answering other people's questions, come join us in the #Win8Dev room on JabbR.net (JabbR is a web based real time chat application built on ASP.NET MVC and SignalR).