Windows App Developer Links - 2012-10-11

posted on 10 Oct 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8 App Development

  • Windows Runtime Components in a .NET World (Jeremy Likness)

    • "... Windows Store apps run on a new set of APIs called the Windows Runtime (WinRT). The Windows Runtime exposes components that are built as part of the Windows 8 OS along with third-party components you can develop yourself. Although some core Windows Runtime Components are accessible from desktop apps, third-party Windows Runtime Components are only available from within the Windows 8 environment..."

  • Walkthrough: Adding Text Translation to your Windows 8 App (Jerry Nixon)

    • "The Microsoft Translator is a powerful service that developers can leverage in their Windows 8 apps. It's core functions are to detect the language of some text. To translate text from one language to another. And, to read text to you - that's right! The API is hosted on Azure's Data Marketplace. It has a pricing schedule, including a free tier that developers can leverage to develop with the API..."

  • Near Field Communication in Windows 8: Part 2 (Walter Ferrari)

    • "In the first part of this article series we have described the main concepts of Near Field communication and how Microsoft has provided support for this technology in Windows 8. Then we have seen how to set up two Windows 8 virtual machines with a proximity driver, i.e something which allows us to simulate a tap gesture. In this second part we will learn how to use the sample proximity driver and explore the functionalities exposed by the Proximity API..."

  • Why you should (almost) never write void asynchronous methods? (Toni Petrina)

    • "I came across this interesting post by Christian Jacobsen titled async/await in C# - a disaster waiting to happen? in which he describes that simple refactoring can introduce serious bugs in async code. While there is definitely something to be said about possible problems with the new Async feature, his example can teach us something. I will borrow his code to illustrate the point..."

  • Porting Windows Phone App to Windows 8 (Hermit Dave)

    • "The main message of HHGTG was "Don't Panic". It's universally applicable and the case for porting you WP app to Windows 8 is no different. As WP Devs, we are already used to restrictions on what can and cannot be done. Windows 8 is a different beast that uses the same idea but being a full-blown OS, APIs exposed are different..."

  • Interacting with Windows 8 Maps app using WindowsMapsHelper library (Andrei Marukovich)

    • "Windows 8 is shipped with preinstalled Maps application. This app provides all basic mapping features such us showing current location, searching for place or local business and calculating driving directions. Even better, Maps app implements bingmaps protocol to allow 3rd party applications to activate these features. There is just one disadvantage of the protocol: it's basically a URL string and all numerous parameters need to be properly formatted. WindowsMapsHelper library aims to simplify communications with Maps app. It encapsulates maps protocol into a few strongly typed classes..."

  • Navigation with Caliburn.Micro for WinRT (Nicolas Humann)

    • "Caliburn.Micro for WinRT provides a full implementation of the MVVM pattern for the Windows 8 apps. The approach of a standard app is the pattern ViewFirst. This means, that you have to give the complete url of a new page to navigate. With Caliburn.Micro you have the ViewModel first approach. With that, it's very easier to navigate from a viewModel to an other. The purpose of this post is to show you how to pass a parameter between 2 pages, so 2 viewModels..."

  • Windows Store app Development Snack: What do you get from being a lock screen app? (Robert MacLean)

    • "When you start with development of Windows Store apps, you may want to run tasks in the background and an important aspect of that is deciding if you want to be a lock screen app or not. Microsoft has a guide on this, which is ESSENTIAL reading so this post should be seen as a cheat sheet for a portion of that document..."

  • Simple TypeScript Example: Windows Store App using TypeScript with classes, inheritance and interfaces in 6 steps (Iris Classon)

    • "Ah, the sweet revenge when an evil Javascript dev laughed at my question about how I can fake classes in jS Introducing yet another lets create classes in js! Muahahahaha. Oki, so coffeescript is nice, but I don't like the syntax. Dart is pretty cool but I can't take it serious. TypeScript? I like it - so far. Before we get started creds must be given..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 11: Using a valueconverter to work with element visibility (Iris Classon)

    • "We are getting closer now! We need to add function to add and edit category names. To do this I've added a neat field within the edit field that is bound to the selected listview item, all this is in XAML wich is great, it saves us from more mess in the codebehind. Now, whenever the category name is edited it will be updated. If a new item is added with a new category, the new category is also added. Unfortunatly for now the category will only be updated for that item - just to keep it very simple for now..."

  • Super simple XAML text arithmetic manipulation (Sam Stokes)

    • "For the first time C++/CX has a modern way of interacting with the end user. In the other Windows 8 Visual Studio Windows 8 Store app languages interaction with the user interface is easy. Documentation on how to change the string output from the textbox object is difficult to figure out how to get a number out of the text. This tip assumes that the user input is a number only..."

  • [Windows 8] Using SQLite in your Windows Store application (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "SQLite is a small but very useful database engine widely deployed in the world. The folks on the team have been working hard to release a version compatible with Windows 8 and this one is available as an extension to Visual Studio..."