Windows App Developer Links - 2012-10-01

posted on 30 Sep 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C# (Dan Wahlin)

    • "Technology is fun isn't it? As soon as you think you've figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I've been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. ... Here's a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8..."

  • Windows 8 Corrupt Packages (Simon Jackson)

    • "Like with any new system there are bound to be some kinks in the road, issues or just downright annoyances that will send you spiralling into the deepest dark pits of annoyance (the last has been me for the last few weeks). A situation exists (which unfortunately is not reliably or easily repeatable) where you start your app/game, the splashscreen shows and then it just sits there, no prompt, no move, no crash, just sits there..."

  • Resolution: Unable to Activate Windows Store App. The activation request failed with error E_Fail. (Michael Crump)

    • "I've recently been working on several HTML applications and sharing the code through DropBox through my various machines. (Yes, I have TFS - but this is sample code). One problem that I've experienced is that sharing the code on different machines will result in the following error when the app is launched..."

  • Implementing Search Contract in Windows 8 application (Arun Mahendrakar)

    • "The Search Contract feature helps improve the accessibility of your application. When a user is trying to search for something through the charms, you see a bunch of apps that get listed below. ... You see that Store, Howzzat Book and Live Reader apps have implemented this feature. So a user types in some text and clicks on one of these apps and this text is passed to the app where you can show the results of this search directly. Let's see how to get this implemented..."

  • W8WIL #5: Bringing the Awesome in Search (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "In this, the 5th, installment of Windows 8, What I've learned, I'm going to share a single line of code that can make your search-enabled Windows Store app absolutely awesome! Start by enabling Search..."

  • Getting Started with Azure Mobile Services and More (Sergey Barskiy)

    • "In this post I will describe what I learned in creating my first Windows Store App projects using Azure Mobile Services..."

  • Part 8 - Windows Store - FlipView (Sumit Dutta)

    • "In this article I will talk about one of the interesting control of WinJS in Windows Store and that is FlipView. I personally liked the control because with minimum code it can provide nice feel of your app specially if it is photo or image app..."

  • Part 9 - Windows Store - Styling of ListView (Sumit Dutta)

    • "In one of my previous article I talked about ListView control of WinJS, In this article I will talk about how to perform styling and layout of ListView control of WinJS in Windows Store. Let's write code..."

  • Add a Restart/Shutdown/Hibernate Desktop Context menu to your Windows 8 Desktop (Greg Duncan)

    • "While I'm happy with Windows 8 user and look back on Windows 7, as Windows 7 users look back on Vista and XP, there are some things that do bug me a little. One thing, the number of steps it takes to Restart/Shutdown/Hibernate my system. ... When I saw this post today, Add Shutdown and Restart to the Right-Click Context Menu in Windows 8, it was as if it were written just for me... That said, there were some tweaks I had to make to make it work for me. First I wanted a Hibernate option, also I had to tweak the parameters and finally I wanted to also provide a remove regfile too..."

  • UPnP via WinRT and Managed Code for Windows 8 (Channel 9)

    • "I'm not sure if today counts as a "hardware" project, but I thought it cool and something we've not highlighted before and is hardware'ish, so... Lucian shows us UPnP for Windows 8, how we might use it and generally helps us understand it by writing code for it..."

  • Migrating the Khan Academy Windows Phone app to Windows 8 (Channel 9)

    • "In partnership with Joel Martinez, the creator of the Windows Phone Khan Academy app (4/5 stars with 100+ ratings, Top 10 most popular app in Education category), we have finished a step-by-step video-series that shows how to migrate a popular, real-world Windows Phone app to the Windows Store..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

  • SharpDX 2.3: new version released (SharpDx)

    • "Release Notes (2012-09-28). General Information: New release of SharpDX 2.3.0. This version is compatible with Windows 8 RTM and Visual Studio 2012 RTM. New target assemblies released : Signed-net40, Signed-winrt. Nuget packages are now providing signed assemblies. Lots of small enhancements, changes, bug fixes. See complete listing below. SharpDX.Toolkit, a high level XNA like API for Direct3D11 is under heavy development..."

  • MarkedUp Analytics Beta for Windows 8 is Now Available (MarkedUp)

    • "We are thrilled to announce that MarkedUp Analytics for Windows 8 is now available for public use! Our team worked lots of long hours delivering MarkedUp in time for WinRT developers to get their arms wrapped around it well before the public ship date for Windows 8 (October 26th, 2012) and we are really, really happy with what we built..."

Expression Blend

  • Blend confusion. Which Blend for WPF, SL4, SL5 and Windows Store Apps? (Iris Classon)

    • "Confused in regards to which Blend to use for your XAML project (or Html- sorry still not used to that)? No wonder, I sure was. Now I got myself a nice little collection on Blends on my computer right now Since I've been getting quite a few emails about this I might save some frustrated souls and some time by posting this mini-guide from Blend-insider..."