Windows App Developer Links - 2012-10-05

posted on 04 Oct 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • 21 days and counting... (The Windows Blog)

    • "In just 21 days, Windows 8 will be available to people worldwide. And we're excited! To celebrate, we have several events taking place in cities all around the world. ... Our event in New York City promises to offer an opportunity to celebrate the launch of Windows 8. And earlier today, we began sending out invites (below). Don't worry, if you didn't get an invite we'll be doing a live webcast of the event too! More details to come..."

  • Updating our built-in apps for Windows 8 (Building Windows 8)

    • "We're super excited to be approaching general availability (GA) of Windows 8 and Windows RT. With thousands of new apps in the Store, there are a lot to choose from and tens of thousands of developers have been very busy around the world creating new apps. Across Microsoft we've been busy since August adding new features and improving the apps that come with Windows and will be updating these apps before GA. We'll introduce new features, improve performance, and increase reliability..."

Windows 8 App Development

  • Multilingual App Toolkit for developing Windows Store apps using Visual Studio 2012 (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "... The release of the Multilingual App Toolkit, an extension to Visual Studio 2012 for Windows 8 (including the free Express version), allows you to easily localize your app by yourself, using the Machine Translation Service, or with the help of localizers. This post provides an overview of why localizing your apps is worthwhile, and how to use the Toolkit to make it easy..."

  • Introducing the concept of "Consistency of Experience" (Paul Laberge)

    • "This post is Part 1 of a larger series that dives into the concept of Consistency of Experience. Through this series I will explain what Consistency of Experience is defined as (which is this post), building great app experiences on the Windows platform ecosystem (including Windows 8, Windows Phone and the web) and how to drive these apps to successful adoption by your users. By the end of this series, you will have a firm understanding of why it is important to implement your apps in a modular or patterned way to leverage similar or same code bases across platforms and also to differentiate to platform-specific functionality by addressing each platform with a UI that is catered to the right form factor..."

  • Working with Tile Notifications in Windows 8 Store Apps - Part I (Dan Wahlin)

    • "One of the features that really makes Windows 8 apps stand out from others is the tile functionality on the start screen. While icons allow a user to start an application, tiles provide a more engaging way to engage the user and draw them into an application. Examples of "live" tiles on part of my current start screen are shown next..."

  • How to check if a file exists in Windows 8 (Aaron Powell)

    • "Sometimes things are simple, sometimes they aren't when you think they should be. One such thing in Windows 8 development is checking if a file exists... ... Since we are sandboxed and don't really have file-system access we don't have the System.IO namespace as we're use to meaning we have an entirely new set of APIs for reading a writing files (although it's nice that they are built around being asynchronous). ... Yep, there's no API which will allow you to work out whether a file exists or not... So how do you do it?..."

  • Caching images and data with the q42.winrt library in windows 8 apps (Michiel Post)

    • "The open source Q42.WinRT library contains helpers for caching images and data in your application. A lot of data from API calls and images used in your app come directly from the internet. But if the user opens your app when he is offline, it would be great if all the data is still available. Caching images..."

  • Windows Store Applications-Debugging Crashes (Mike Taulty)

    • "I have a simple application in the Windows 8 Store - it's called kwiQR and it's a QR scanning application. There's a whole bunch of services that the Store provides to my application but one that I haven't seen a whole lot written about is the idea that the Store can report quality metrics for me. There is a section on the developer site about these quality metrics. My application is written in XAML and .NET and one part of those quality metrics is a collection of crash dumps and, yes, unfortunately I noticed that my app has been crashing..."

  • File system change notifications in WinRT (Andrei Marukovich)

    • ".NET framework for Windows 8 Store apps provides a subset of features included in full .NET framework profile. Microsoft excluded many APIs considered obsolete or unsafe. One of the removed classes is FileSystemWatcher, a class that proves its usefulness in applications intensively working with Windows file system. Instead, WinRT provides an alternative mechanism for folders monitoring based on queries..."

  • WinRT/XAML Colour Picker (using SharpDx) (Jose Fajardo)

    • "I needed a colour picker for an app I'm building and it turns out no ones built a WinRT XAML one yet. So this is my very simple colour picker! I use bitmaps to represent the swatch (in my case i have 3 different types). I use SharpDx to get the "Pixel Buffer" of the selected swatch. Where ever the mouse or pointer is i get the pixel under that position via the pixel buffer and from that i get the colours (RGBA). This is what the colour picker looks like..."

  • AppsWorld Demo- Windows 8 Music Player in HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript (Mike Taulty)

    • "I've posted a demo similar to this on the site before but I was at the AppsWorld conference yesterday and gave a short example of putting together a native Windows 8 Store app in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript and someone asked me to record it and put it online and so I've done exactly that here..."

  • Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 2) Windows Azure Mobile Services - Storage and Data Overview (Channel 9)

    • "In part 2 of our Windows Azure Mobile Services overview, Jerry Nixon, Josh Twist and Paul Batum discuss dynamic schematization, structured storage and how to easily connect and manage your data. Learn how you can create cloud services for Windows 8 applications within minutes with the help of Windows Azure..."

  • Microsoft DevRadio: (Part 3) Windows Azure Mobile Services - What's Next (Channel 9)

    • "Rounding out our Windows Azure Mobile Services overview, Jerry Nixon, Josh Twist and Paul Batum discuss what's on the horizon for Azure Mobile Services. From iOS and Android support, Xamarin and MonoTouch as well as standard SLAs and new feature requests , this is a can't miss conclusion to this great interview..."