Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-13

posted on 13 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 11

  • Improving Find & Replace in Visual Studio 11 Beta (Visual Studio Blog)

    • "With the huge number of responses we received from the Developer Preview, we knew that our top priority for the Beta release was improving the quality of Find. ... Along with fixing bugs, we took a hard look at addressing the top customer suggestions. Here are some of the top suggestions reported in the Developer Preview that are now available in Beta"

Metro App Development

  • WinRT: App Activation, Resume and Suspend (Bill Wagner)

    • "This post doesn't have much code, but there's a few important points to remember for working with WinRT apps and application suspend and activation."

  • Hello World, WinRT! (Jeremy Alles)

    • "In this post, I'm sharing the aspects I discovered this afternoon while trying to port one of the project from Windows Phone to WinRT. Let's be clear my goal was just to see what it's look like to port the code, I wasn't able of course to port the WP7 app to WinRT in an afternoon..."

  • DirectX in your WinRT-XAML/C# apps (SharpDx) (Jose Fajardo)

    • "So you want to do some DirectX immediate mode rendering in your C#/XAML app ? Let me walk you through how to do that using the SharpDx library."

  • Effect-Graphs in our XAML/C# metro apps using SharpDx (Jose Fajardo)

    • "Thanks to SharpDx we can now create complex effect graphs (in code) in our WinRT-XAML/C# apps. I took the Xaml/Cx D2DBasicEffectGraph sample from the consumer preview and pretty much redid it to work with SharpDx for us managed programmers."

  • Lighting Effects in your XAML/C# metro apps (Jose Fajardo)

    • "So there's a cool Dx/Cx demo in the consumer preview bits "Direct2D lighting effects sample". It uses an effect graph to give cool lighting effects to your surfaces. I wanted to turn that Cx sample into a C# sample, via SharpDx, so that I can use it to give my backgrounds a dynamic lighting effect."

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Introduction (1 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "During the following weeks we'll take a real (is-deployed-to-marketplace-real) Windows Phone application and convert it, step by step, to a Windows 8 Metro application. Our hopes and dreams are, because the similarity between the platforms and the mutual design language, Metro, we will be able to reuse a lot of the C# code and XAML that we already have."

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Conversion strategy (2 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "We have a working Windows Phone application and we have nothing when it comes to Windows 8. So, what's the next step, or more correctly, what's the first step. In this article we'll list the different porting strategies that we considered, say which one we chose and why."

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Setting up the project (3 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "As concluded in the previous post on porting strategy, we'll simply copy the code files from the Windows Phone project and create a new Windows 8 project. It won't build right away, let alone run, but it's a start. The goal for this part is to have a Windows 8 project that does not build but has all the files from the Windows Phone project."

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | XAML has a new home (4 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "The perhaps most obvious difference between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is that XAML is no longer a part of .NET in Windows 8. ... In this post we will discuss why XAML has moved and how you deal with it."

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | HttpClient vs. HttpWebRequest (5 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "Usually, I prefer to do a web request using HttpWebRequest instead of WebClient. Mostly because a callback from a HttpWebRequest is not executed on the UI thread (explained here by Andreas). This gives us the opportunity to do some heavy lifting on a background thread (such as parsing JSON or XML) not ruining the user experience. But now - the much loved HttpWebRequest, must step aside for HttpClient that came with .NET 4.5."

  • Metro: Wire events to ICommand with a (not so simple) extension (Andrea Boschin)

    • "Looking to the new Metro style applications in Windows 8, I recently found that the easiness of Silverlight lost some points in the move to the new Metro application environment. ... Unfortunately behaviors are not supported in Metro applications (at least for the moment) so the sole way to handle events is to use codebehind to programmatically call commands of the ViewModel. For this reason I started to work hard to find a way to create a behavior's surrogate, and I finally achieved this result."

  • Visual Studio Toolbox: Building Metro Style Apps with JavaScript (Channel 9)

    • "In this episode, Robert shows you how to use JavaScript, demonstrating each of the three project templates Visual Studio provides as well as building an app that uses real data instead of sample data."

  • Windows 8 Developer Events - Updated (Chris Bowen)

    • "There's certainly a lot of interest in Windows 8 and the developer opportunity around it, so here's an update and summary of various events that can help you learn more."