Windows App Developer Links - 2012-09-13

posted on 12 Sep 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Integrating your cloud service with the file picker contracts (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "In the past, users organized, shared, and maintained their documents, photos, videos, and music on the local PC. But the cloud is quickly providing users with much richer ways to access, experience, and manage the files they care about. Windows 8 embraces these new scenarios by allowing you to deeply integrate cloud services directly into your apps to create completely new experiences that were not possible before. You can see many of these scenarios highlighted in the SkyDrive app which uses the file picker contracts..."

  • Searching in Windows 8 (Jesse Liberty)

    • "Windows 8 Store Applications can take advantage of the shared "Charms" that you see when you swipe in from the right edge of your Windows 8 device (or press Win-C). The top charm is searching and it provides tremendous functionality at relatively little programming effort..."

  • Windows 8 License Checker / tester / thingy (Simon Jackson)

    • "... It goes like this, AdDuplex have an offer on for Early release apps into the store but I only found out about it after my title was published to the Store, so during my lunch at work I had a go at implementing the new AdDuplex Windows 8 control into my app and it was easy as pie (some might say too easy!). Then came the problem of hooking it up to the trial information provided by the Windows 8 API, which is easy enough if you have everything in one project, I don't and so began the tale..."

  • How to market yourself with your windows 8 app quickly (Simon Jackson)

    • "This article was inspired by a prominent Silverlight MVP and evangelist Kunal Chowdhury who wrote a nice little post on how to market your WP app better... So seeing this I couldn't help to quickly morph his article to fit Windows 8, what becomes obvious as you compare the two is that there are so many things that are just basically easier with Windows Phone, hopefully the Windows 8 API will mature more over the coming months..."

  • App Bars-What to watch out for (Simon Jackson)

    • "... AppBars are Windows 8 version of the good old Application Bar in WP7, similar name just a whole load of more functionality and not as many constraints as WP7 had. Adding AppBar's is also very quick and painless as they are basically just Grid's with all the same layout features you'd expect. ... Anyone who knows me know I don't do puff articles that re-iterate what is already documented quite clearly in the manufacturer documentation, so why the post? Well there are a few other little pieces i found while doing my app that I found useful and had to pass on..."

  • I think I just snapped (Simon Jackson)

    • "One of my biggest pains with porting my WP7 app to Windows 8 is the "Snapped View", an interesting feature added to Windows 8 to provide "smart" docking for apps and properly allow 2 apps to run simultaneously on screen, as a user this looks great, as a developer it is a right royal pain in the rear. I say this because there is no opportunity as a developer to choose NOT to provide this feature, it's mandatory and you HAVE to do something..."

  • How to call WinRT APIs from .NET desktop apps (Lucian Wischik)

    • "This article shows the steps you need to make a .NET desktop app that invokes the new WinRT APIs that come with Windows 8..."

  • Windows 8: Windows Store apps and the WebView control (C. Gerard Gallant)

    • "I recently started looking into creating a simple Windows 8, Windows Store app, that would contain a browser window and a setting somewhere to allow the URI to be modified. The app itself is quite simple in concept so I figured it would be a breeze to implement for Windows 8. To display a web page I needed to use a WebView control and I simply set the Source property to the desired Uri..."

  • Exporting an image from a DirectX 2D Image in Windows 8 C#/XAML Using SharpDX (Geoff Webber-Cross)

    • "I'm working on a Windows 8 app which has a drawing element to it. The original WP7 app in Silverlight was fine because a simple drawing rendered in XAML was captured using WritableBitmap.Render and written to a file stream. This feature is missing from the Windows 8 API, so it's impossible to write a pure C#/XAML app which can export a user created image. To get round this it's possible to use DirectX/XAML/C++ to create a XAML UI which can draw DirectX images..."

  • WinRT XAML Toolkit v1.2 for Windows 8 RTM - One Library, tons of features... (Greg Duncan)

    • "In our WinRT Wednesday post we're featuring a toolkit to help you build your apps faster, letting you focus on adding cool features and not worrying about plumbing. We're talking one official boat load of cool features, controls and capabilities... Free! WinRT XAML Toolkit..."

Visual Studio 2012

  • Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5 Launch (S. Somasegar)

    • "Today is the formal launch event for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5, a state-of-the-art development solution for building modern applications that span connected devices and continuous services, from the client to the cloud. This morning's launch keynote covers how Visual Studio 2012 takes you into the next era of software development. ... This content is available live and for subsequent on-demand viewing from http://visualstudiolaunch.com. In addition, the Visual Studio development team has put together over 60 videos to help you learn about the new Visual Studio 2012 capabilities in more detail, and all of these will be available for watching starting this afternoon. These videos provide a great point of reference across a wide variety of features and capabilities..."

  • Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop is Here (The Visual Studio Blog)

    • "A few months ago, Soma announced plans for a Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Desktop. Today, we are happy to share that this new Express product is available for download. (You can find the system requirements and download details here.) This post is written by Jennifer Leaf, one of the program managers working on the new product..."

Windows Phone 8

  • Windows Phone 8 SDK Preview program is now open (The Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "Today we begin accepting requests for access to the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview program. The objective is to let developers of our most-downloaded apps start optimizing them for Windows Phone 8, and we expect the majority of published developers in this situation to qualify for access. To apply, please visit the Microsoft Connect site and complete a short application..."

  • Future proofing your apps (The Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "How do you ensure that an app built for an earlier release of Windows Phone continues to work great on Windows Phone 8? Whether you participate in the SDK preview program Todd Brix talked about today or not, here are some tips for future proofing your apps and readying them for the next release of Windows Phone. There are three aspects to this issue that I'll touch on..."