Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-11

posted on 11 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Metro App Development

  • Tackling performance killers: Common performance problems with Metro style apps (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "I want to dig into the common performance killers I have seen in apps. In this post, I go over the top guidance points which I have observed to result in measureable and noticeable improvements for Metro style apps, both written in JavaScript and in XAML. Plus, I tell you about 5 specific practices that I know will make a big difference, regardless of what language you are using. The good news is that they don’t depend on clever tricks or complex operations. I am confident that following these guidelines will hugely improve your app’s performance. Let me know in the comments how these help you, and share your own tips."

  • Metro: Declarative Data Binding (Stephen Walther)

    • "The goal of this blog post is to describe how declarative data binding works in the WinJS library. In particular, you learn how to use both the data-win-bind and data-win-bindsource attributes. You also learn how to use calculated properties and converters to format the value of a property automatically when performing data binding."

  • Win 8 exploration: Simple Databinding (Bill Wagner)

    • "This is another in my post series on WinRT programming for C# developers. The next sample provides an overview of WinRT data binding. This sample actually has seven different scenarios; it’s one of the biggest samples so far. However, I’m only going to briefly cover this sample. TLDR Version: If you’ve used DataBinding in WPF or Silverlight, it is very familiar."

  • Launch Internet Explorer from HyperlinkButton in Windows 8 Metro app (Zubair Ahmed)

    • "If you are building a Metro app for Windows 8 with XAML/C# and need to launch your link in a browser, there is HyperlinkButton control but you need to wire up the Click event and launch it from the codebehind file."

  • Windows 8 JavaScript - FlipView Control (Shai Raiten)

    • "Windows 8 Metro App has couple of wonderful ways to display data, the more common way is Grid and Split Application Template. But there are several other ways to display information, in this post I’ll demonstrate a FlipView control, that represents an items control that displays one item at a time, and which enables "flip" behavior for traversing its collection of items. The items on this FlipView control will come from my Blog Rss using SyndicationClient."

  • Windows 8 and the future of XAML: Part 4: Contracts in WinRT/Windows 8 (Gill Cleeren)

    • "In the previous article of this series, we wrote our first lines of code for WinRT. The main message was that although WinRT is a new API, we can still use our familiar languages to create Metro style applications. ... in this article, we’ll focus on some specifics around contracts, more specifically, the Search contract. Contracts enable Metro applications to communicate with each other or with Windows itself without there being a hard reference in place."

  • GridView SelectedItem Binding Gotcha in WinRT (Derik Whittaker)

    • "Last night when I was doing some WinRT hacking I was trying to setup databinding to the selected item in the GridView control and I ran into a gotcha that I thought I would share."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Windows 8 Metro style simple music app example (Mike Taulty)

    • "I had a bit of spare time to put together a make-it-up-as-you-go-along screencasts around a simplistic Windows 8 metro style app that lets me play music from albums found in my music library. I chose to do this in HTML and JavaScript."