Windows App Developer Links - 2012-09-12

posted on 11 Sep 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Windows Store now open to all developers in 120 markets (Windows Store for developers)

    • "Today's an especially great day to be a developer. We're very excited to announce the last significant milestone in the rollout of the Windows Store before the general availability of Windows 8 on October 26. The Store is now open for app submissions from all developers - individuals and companies - in our supported markets, and we've added 82 more app submission markets! Now, developers from 120 markets can publish Windows Store apps..."

  • Building a Windows 8 Touch application with WinRT JavaScript and Html5 (Peter Kellner)

    • "... Our Goal Today: We will be using Visual Studio 2012's support for building a WinRT application using JavaScript and HTML5. The application will be a simple conference track viewer that lets its users navigate tracks and the associated speakers. This data will be downloaded asynchronously from a remote server in JSON..."

  • Building Your First Win8 Enterprise App (Jesse Liberty)

    • "You are a business analyst charged with understanding the retail market. You've decided to create an application that will display the relative revenues for the key stores in your district. Obtaining the data is easy, but you'd like a graphic representation of the revenue volume for each of the key stores. Start by storyboarding your application..."

  • Windows 8 Metro: Enforce fluidness with animations and transitions (Andrea Boschin)

    • "Animations and mostly transitions are something that may change drastically how your application looks to the end user. This is true twice in a touch enabled application where the usual strategies for giving feedback to the user, about its interaction with UI elements, are not really effective..."

  • WinRT GridView with inline group headers and semantic zoom (Richard Garside)

    • "My Windows 8 app had a GridView with grouped content and also made nice use of semantic zoom to make navigating between those groups easy. All I wanted to do was to make the headers appear in the content like the People App. I thought this would be a simple case of finding the right container template to use, but after reading this post by Mike Taulty it turns out that using the group style built into GridView can't do this. His post goes into a lot of detail about how to figure out your XAML and shows a GridView with inline group headers. I've taken his method and extended it to include semantic zoom..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 7: Using CollectionViewSource in WinRT (Iris Classon)

    • "Welcome back! As promised we will be working more on the presentation of data today! I'm not sure if you noticed, but the items in the list were not grouped, and we would of course love to have them grouped by category, it makes more sense that way. And we would also love to have the list sorted by Titles and Category. We will do the grouping by using CollectionViewSource and IGrouping, and if you have used CollectionViewSource before I will have to warn you that we are a bit more limited in the XAML in WinRT,- and that it is done differently here. This is how it can be done..."

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

    • "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 one 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..."

  • Tutorial Series: using WinJS & WinRT to build a fun HTML5 Camera Application for Windows 8 (3/4) (David Rousset)

    • "In this third tutorial, we will use the WinJS FlipView control to navigate between our live preview UI and the various photos & videos taken during the life of the application. For that, we will need a specific template for each case: camera live preview, photo & video. To do that, you need to use a JS function as a template renderer that will return the appropriate piece of HTML for each case. We will also see that the FlipView is doing some virtualization by default which could lead to unexpected behavior if you're not prepared for that..."

  • Consuming the Amazon S3 service from a Win8 Metro Application (Pablo M. Cibraro)

    • "As many of the existing Http APIs for Cloud Services, AWS also provides a set of different platform SDKs for hiding many of complexities present in the APIs. While there is a platform SDK for .NET, which is open source and available in C#, that SDK does not work in Win8 Metro Applications for the changes introduced in WinRT. WinRT offers a complete different set of APIs for doing I/O operations such as doing http calls or using cryptography for signing or encrypting data, two aspects that are absolutely necessary for consuming AWS. All the I/O APIs available as part of WinRT are asynchronous, and uses the TPL model for .NET applications (HTML and JavaScript Metro applications use a model based in promises, which is similar concept)..."

  • Add a "Rate and review" button to your settings pane (Rudi Grobler)

    • "All marketplaces are based on ratings submitted by users, why not making it easy for them to submit a rating and review your application? ..."

  • Windows RT App Developer Contest (Qualcomm Developer Network)

    • "Developers: send us your most innovative, creative, and original Windows RT-style apps for the 2012 Windows RT App Developer Contest by Qualcomm. We invite you to dazzle us with how your app on Windows RT creates a compelling and unique experience. Five winners will be chosen for $200,000 in prizes and marketing support from Qualcomm. One overall and four individual categories offer developers the chance to be recognized for work in the areas of connectivity, gaming, productivity, and peer-to-peer..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • Code Snippets for Windows Store Apps (Brian Peek)

    • "In partnership with the Visual Studio team, we are launching Code Snippets for Windows Store apps, a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for common Windows Store app programming tasks. The snippets are available for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers..."

Free Training Materials

  • Hands-on labs for Windows 8 (Microsoft Download Center)

    • "A series of eight hands-on lab modules that guide you through development of Contoso Cookbook, a realistic Windows Store app that incorporates many of the key new features available in Windows 8. You'll learn to work with Windows 8 controls, view states, contracts, tiles and notifications, the Windows Store APIs, and other Windows 8 features. Choose the version of the lab series for the programming language you prefer: JavaScript and HTML, or C# and Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML)..."