Windows App Developer Links - 2012-10-10

posted on 09 Oct 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Updating Windows 8 for General Availability (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "We are pleased to be releasing a set of improvements to Windows 8 in broad areas of performance, power management and battery efficiency, media playback, and compatibility. These improvements are available starting today via Windows Update. We wanted to briefly talk about our improvements to the engineering system and in particular the speed at which we were able to deliver these updates to you..."

Windows 8 App Development

  • Walkthrough: the Windows 8 Settings and About Dialogs (Jerry Nixon)

    • "Windows 8 is a new user experience. One of the best parts is a uniformity and consistency across applications to handle common tasks the same. Specifically, I mean the charms. Users search consistently. Users share consistently. And, users access settings, preferences, options, personalization, and about screens consistently..."

  • Windows 8 submission trials and tribulations (Simon Jackson)

    • "Boy what a crazy couple of months, to kick things off I got my first Windows 8 game up and running and through the App Excellence labs on to the Store in prompt fashion, not a glitch (if you don't count the first lab I attended not understanding what the labs were really there for, putting a tick in the box for your app to go on the store). Not one single issue in submission, it was in and done in about 4 days. ...as soon as I could I edited my release on the store and submitted version 2, only difference, it had ads in it, and this is where the party started, hence the article..."

  • Windows 8 Javascript Tips - TypeScript support (Fons Sonnemans)

    • "Microsoft has announced TypeScript last week. TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that combines type checking and static analysis, explicit interfaces, and best practices into a single language and compiler. It is an open source programming language developed by Microsoft. ... What Microsoft didn't do (yet) is add TypeScript support to JavaScript Windows Store apps. In this blog I will explain how to add this support to Visual Studio so you can use TypeScript in all your Windows 8 apps..."

  • TypeScript for Windows 8 Store Apps (Shayne Boyer)

    • "TypeScript was recently released and has become the new hot topic. One of the questions I have asked and heard is can we use this for developing Windows Store Applications with Javascript and have the cool features that have been shown in the videos and examples. ... So I fired up a new Javascript Windows Store project in Visual Studio to give it a shot to see if it all works..."

  • Windows Store app Development Snack: Debugging a background task (Robert MacLean)

    • "So you have created your background task and now you want to test it - do you wait for 15min and hope it runs? Nah - there is an easier way (which is unfortunately hard to find)..."

  • Using User-Provided Images for Secondary Tiles (Morten Nielsen)

    • "Often when you are creating a secondary tile in Windows 8, it will be based on images coming from the internet. However a requirement of secondary tile images are that they need to be stored locally. I initially had some problems getting this working right and the streams closed correctly for this to work, so here's the code for other to use and save the hazzle..."

  • Don't forget your Logo background color (Nigel Sampson)

    • "In continuing with the previous post on things to watch out for when submitting your Windows 8 app to the Store. If you browse through a category (Games seems especially affected) you'll notice a lot of drab grey tiles for the apps. Combined with dark text gives you a tile that does the opposite of drawing attention to the app you've spent weeks lovingly creating. If you then click through to the app details you can see the background and text colors are repeated in the left hand sidebar, Very unappealing..."

  • HTML5 Game Starter Kit for Windows 8 (Ed Donahue)

    • "Yesterday, Petri (@petriw) from Microsoft Norway published this awesome resource for creating HTML5 games for Windows 8. ... The download, a guide and a video on how to use the starter kit can be found on his blog: http://digitalerr0r.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/html5-game-starter-kit-for-windows-8/. Get started on your game and let me know how it's going!..."

  • Windows Store apps and 3rd-party JavaScript Libraries (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "If you've attended one of my talks on building Windows Store apps with HTML5 and JavaScript, you've heard me say that although the default for our app templates is to use the WinJS library for providing rich databinding, controls, and a great look and feel that makes your app fit into the Windows store ecosystem, we also support the use of 3rd party JavaScript libraries as well, with a few caveats..."

  • Microsoft DevRadio: Developing for Windows 8 in 1/2 the Time (Part 9) How to Develop for Various Device Features (Channel 9)

    • "Ever wonder how you can develop for device features you really like even though your personal device doesn't support it? Well in this episode, Michael Palermo shows you the power of the Simulator in Visual Studio and how you can test features for various devices..."