Windows App Developer Links - 2012-12-14

posted on 13 Dec 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows Store App Development

  • Building Great apps step 1 : Refining your app idea (Susan Ibach)

    • "An app can't be great at everything, what will your app be best at? Figure that out you are well on you way to a great app..."

  • Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Windows Azure Mobile Services (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "To round out the group of solutions I'm exploring in the series, in this post I'll show you how to build the same game leaderboard service on top of the new Windows Azure Mobile Services (in preview as of this writing)..."

  • Windows Development Tips #5: Understand the templates (Brent Schooley)

    • "Sometimes even the best developers need a great starting point from which to develop their masterpieces. Given the importance of solid design and platform consistency, it should come as no surprise that Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio ship with templates that help developers get off to a great start..."

  • State of the Windows Store on December 2012: number of apps, average price, popular categories (Andrei Marukovich)

    • "According to the number of individual app pages on apps.microsoft.com, almost 30000 apps are currently listed (December 12) on the Store. Some of this apps are published just for selected markets and as a result the effective number of the apps available for the users may vary from country to country..."

  • Windows 8: Storing JSON Data for Conference Buddy (Jesse Liberty)

    • "... Once we gather the data, we'd like to save it to a format that will be consistent across Windows 8 C# and Windows 8 Javascript, as well as Windows 8 Phone. For now, we've settled on JSON as a common persistence and wire-format..."

  • [Writer] An AnimatedFlipView to use in your Windows Store apps! (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "One of my co-worker wanted to have, in its application, a FlipView that can change automatically its content. Changing the SelectedIndex property is quite good but not enough because the change is hard and he wanted to have an animation when the item change..."

  • Win8 XAML video player : easy globalization / translations (Jonathan Antione)

    • "Now that you can easily stream videos from Azure's blobs, you may want to translate the strings used in the player Framework. Today, I struggled a lot doing something basic : translating in french the text of the "error view" in the player framework. As usual, there is an easy solution!..."

  • Enumerating Cameras and Camera Locations on Your Surface RT (Jeff Prosise)

    • "When I teach classes at Microsoft, I often precede a juicy tidbit of information or code sample with the statement "Here's a good interview question for you." Well, here's a good interview question for you - especially if you want the interviewee out of your office as fast as humanly possible. How do you get a reference to a front-facing or back-facing camera on a Surface RT?..."

  • Hey, students, a Benjamin for an app! (Jeremy Foster)

    • "I'm talking to you, students. You know you are going to have some spare time this holiday season. Maybe you have some hours in between family dinners and last minute shopping trips, or maybe Aunt Mildred is coming over and you're looking to get away. How about you build an app and win some cash!..."

Windows Phone App Development

  • Windows Phone "App to the Future" Design Challenge (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "Although this blog is primarily a destination for developers, we all know that design is important. So today, we'd like to make a call for designer talent. For the second year, we've joined Core77 and its design community to organize the "App to the Future" challenge..."

  • Windows 8 Style CheckBox/RadioButton in Windows Phone (Matthias Shapiro)

    • "I love the "checked" style in Windows 8. Clean, slick, I just like the style. So I implemented it in Windows Phone as a style. The color in the style matches the phone theme, so it's pretty flexible..."

  • Working With Static NFC Cards on Windows Phone 8 (Den Delimarsky)

    • "With the release of Windows Phone 8, developers are able to create applications that take advantage of the proximity (NFC - Near Field Communications) sensor. This capability enables a variety of sharing scenarios, both with other devices (not necessarily Windows Phone), as well as with other static items, such as NFC cards, which is going to be the focus of this piece..."

  • Robot Work - Reducing the Windows Phone Localization Friction a bit (Rene Schulte)

    • "Windows Phone 8 now supports 3 different screen resolutions which is very nice since there are some great high resolution devices out there and the user has the choice and isn't forced into a one fits all model. However there's also a downside for Windows Phone developers since now also 3 times the amount of screenshots have to be submitted to the Store. If an app has localized versions this adds up very quickly..."

Other

  • Talking about .NET in the Community Press (.NET Framework Blog)

    • "For this post, I wanted to call out some of the journalists in the community press that have been regularly including links to our posts. We've noticed the traffic from your domains! Thanks for expanding awareness to our blog and many other great .NET blogs..."