Windows App Developer Links - 2012-09-20

posted on 19 Sep 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Make your HTML/JavaScript app accessible (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "One of the hallmarks of a Windows 8 app is that accessibility is built into the platform. You can use accessibility features to widen the reach of your app with very little effort. ... Now we walk you through how to think about accessibility in your HTML and JavaScript apps during the design phase, show how to implement and test accessibility for some of the common UI patterns, provide some best practices we used when creating custom UI controls, and discuss the opportunity you have in reaching the full spectrum of Windows users by addressing accessibility..."

  • The Windows Store is Open: Let the Games Begin (Jim O'Neil)

    • "As the march toward general availability of Windows 8 (on October 26th) continues, I've had the opportunity to chat and work with lots of Windows 8 developers via hackathons, mini-meetups, and in-person and e-mail conversations. Many of them are well on their way to, or already have apps, in the Windows Store... They got there because they recognized the significance of the first-mover advantage; there's nothing better to increase your visibility - and profitability - than being the first (and perhaps for a while, the only) application that provides a given function or caters to a specific audience. The time to secure your brand is now..."

  • Windows 8 - Who Cares? (Jesse Liberty)

    • "I am in Europe this week and for the next three weeks, traveling from city to city and giving presentations on Windows 8. ... Last evening I gave the second of these, and as I often do, I begin with a core question: Who Cares? Why, after all, should developers turn their lives upside down for a new, unproven operating system? It could be that Win8 will be a tremendous success, but there are no guarantees. And unlike the change from Vista to Win7, coding for Windows 8 requires a new set of skills. ... So again, why bother? The answer lies in two facts..."

  • Sign up and Become a Windows Store Developer (Dr. Zhiming Xue)

    • "Windows Store now open to all developers in 120 markets. Read the Windows Store blog post for more detail. All eligible MSDN subscribers receive a free, one-year Windows Store developer account as part of their MSDN benefits. (Eligible subscriptions include Visual Studio Professional, Test Professional, Premium, Ultimate, and BizSpark.) We have a program for students—DreamSpark—that similarly waives the subscription fee. And we have an offer for businesses in our BizSpark program, as well..."

  • Adding Notifications to Your Windows 8 Game (Jim O'Neil)

    • "Successful apps are sticky; they make us want to come back again and again, whether it's to check in on Foursquare, send a Tweet, or get a quick answer from ChaCha. Of all the types of apps, games can be the stickiest - Angry Birds anyone? or in my case Wordament! A great idea and implementation are obvious ingredients for success, but you also want to capitalize on opportunities to get your users re-engaged when they aren't running your app or game. Enter notifications, which come in two main flavors - tiles and toast..."

  • How to measure rendered string dimensions in #Win8Dev (Hermit Dave)

    • "While Windows 8 WinRT supports ViewBox control (its a control that allows text to auto resize depending upon available space), with my alarm clock app, I noticed substantial jittering (and resizing) as time changes between seconds. Of course you don't want that happening. The solution is to find optimum font size at start and then sticking with it until a resize is desired. Once you set the font family and font size to a textblock (tb), you can try getting its height / width..."

  • W8WIL #3: Pinch-to-Zoom and Rotate in the Simulator (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "As most of you may have figured out, I've been doing a fair amount of Windows 8 development over the last year or so, much of it focused on HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript apps. In this 3rd installment of my Windows 8: What I've Learned series, I'll share some tips on using the Windows Simulator for testing your Windows Store apps..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.3 (Filip Skakun)

    • The WinRT XAML Toolkit has released version 1.2.3. The WinRT XAML Toolkit is: "A set of controls, extensions and helper classes for Windows Runtime XAML applications..."

Free Training Materials

  • Windows 8 Store Apps Starter Kit (Alessandro Del Sole)

    • "Developing Windows 8 Store Apps is a new experience, which not only allows reusing existing skills based on XAML and managed languages, but that also involves interacting with operating system's features like Charms. It is difficult to find examples that show how to implement the Search contract, the Share contract, and the Settings contract to interact with related charms, or to implement secondary tiles to pin contents to Start. The Windows SDK does a great job, but often examples do not target real usages of various features. Also, it is very difficult for developers using Visual Basic to find specific examples. This is the point in which this Starter Kits comes in..."

Other

  • $Linq - A Javascript LINQ Library V1.0 Released (Senthil Kumar)

    • "Few days back, $linq v1.0 was released which is now available for download from codeplex website. $linq is a Javascript version of .NET's LINQ to Objects and implements most of the corresponding .NET LINQ to Objects methods like select , select many, where, order by, distinct, group by, join, except etc. $linq also implements some of the methods that are inspired by MoreLinq and can work with arrays and JQuery collections..."