Windows App Developer Links - 2012-11-12

Windows Store App Development

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day 9#: Live Tiles (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today, we're covering a very important topic: Live Tiles. As we've mentioned in previous articles, your tile is one of the most important parts of your application's success, and it's one of the most overlooked..."

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day 10#: Toast Notifications (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Yesterday, we spent some time looking at Live Tiles, and how to let your users know about important information from your app. Today, we're looking at a different type of user notification: Toast Notifications..."

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day 11#: Lock Screen Apps (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today we cover the last bit of notifications in Windows 8: the Lock Screen. If you're running Windows 8 on your machine, you've likely gotten pretty familiar with the lock screen..."

• Windows 8 Metro: Implementing push notifications (part 2) (Andrea Boschin)

  • "In this article I will cover, from the simpler to the most complex, notifications that are automatically handled by the client runtime and become badge, tile and toasts..."

• DirectX and XAML in Windows (Phone) 8 - part 2 of N - WinRT component and C# integration (Toni Petrina)

  • "Luckily, there is a way for you to write C++ code that deals with DirectX which you could then reference in C#/VB - by creating WinRT component..."

• Adapting UI of Windows 8 app for available pointer devices (Andrei Marukovich)

  • "Below you can see screenshots of Microsoft Word 2013 main menu taken on three different systems ... All three screenshots look different and here is why..."

• W8WIL #8: Creating Your Store Logo (G. Andrew Duthie)

  • "If you've spent any time at all browsing the Windows Store, you may have noticed that there are more than a few apps that show up with the default store logo, which is a simple box with an X through it..."

• Have I got a gesture for you... No, not that gesture, this "Windows 8 Gestures Guide" cheat sheet (Greg Duncan)

  • "This downloadable guide to the basic touch gestures available within Windows 8 from Official Windows Magazine can be a nice handout to give to end users not familiar with the conventions used for touch on Windows-based devices..."

• WinRT XAML GridView Performance Problems on Windows RT Tablets (Mikael Koskinen)

  • "When the grouping is enabled on the GridView, the virtualization doesn't work. And when the virtualization doesn't work, the GridView will have severe performance problems and your app will crash..."

Windows Phone App Development

• Increase monetization by adding in-app purchase to your apps (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

  • "In-app purchase is rapidly becoming the leading way to grow app revenue. Now, you can add it to apps and games that run on Windows Phone 8..."

Free Training Materials

• Building Windows Store games with the Unity engine (Jaime Rodriguez )

  • "Our Windows Evangelism team is partnering with Unity to put a great two-day workshop on building Windows Store games with Unity..."