Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-16

posted on 16 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 11

  • What's New in Visual Studio 11 Beta Unit Testing (Peter Provost)

    • "For those of you who haven't been following the changes to unit testing that we first previewed back at the //BUILD/ conference, and for those you who did but want to know what has changed, this post is going to take you through the whole thing. We have made a lot of changes to testing in Visual Studio. These changes are pretty drastic in some cases, but were driven by years of customer feedback and a clarification of our focus and vision."

  • Visual Studio 11 Express for Web for Front End Development - JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 (Scott Hanselman)

    • "I wanted to work through a new tutorial by former Microsoftie, now Googler Pete LePage along with Chris Wilson. They have a great lab called "WReader" that uses Ember, HTML5 Boilerplate, Moment.js, Bootstrap CSS and LawnChair.js that builds a single page JavaScript application over 12 exercises. ... I wanted to see if VS11 Express Web (the free version) would work well for "front end" web development. This lab that Pete made is all client-side. It doesn't use ASP.NET or anything server-side that Visual Studio is typically built for. However, a lot of work has been done in Visual Studio lately to make web development easier and I wanted to see if it stood up, even when doing all client-side HTML/CSS/JS."

Metro App Development

  • How to share your Metro style Windows 8 app with another developer (Matt Harrington)

    • "If you're writing a Metro style app for Windows 8, here's how you can share it with another developer."

  • Build a WinRT Metro App to Access the Windows 8 File System (Michael Crump)

    • "Because file system access is one of the first things any developer needs to understand when learning a new platform, a good way to help you get your feet wet with WinRT is to use it to build a file system-access application. I'll walk you through the process of creating a Windows 8 C# and XAML Metro application and demonstrate how to manipulate files programmatically. After building the app, we'll explore additional file features, including reading file properties and adding a file to the Windows most recently used (MRU) list."

  • How to create a WinRT WRL C++ Component from scratch that can be consumed by .NET components (Kevin Stumpf)

    • "If you have to develop Hybrid WinRT Components that expose both COM and WinRT components you have to either write bare metal C++ or use the new Windows Runtime Template Library, which supports you in dealing with COM. ... Microsoft provided a few sample WRL C++ Projects. However they did not include a WRL C++ Project Template in the Visual Studio 2011 Consumer Preview. I reverse-engineered the Sample Projects to find out what is necessary in order to develop a WRL Component from scratch as I didn't want to use the available Sample Projects as my Project foundation."

  • Introduction to Windows 8 Metro & WinRT (part 1) (Ira Lukhezo)

    • "In this two part series, I will demonstrate just how easy it is to create your first Windows Metro application, and highlight some of the changes that you will need to be aware of if you are coming from a WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone background. ... The first part will demonstrate how to create a blank Metro application, familiarise yourself with the location of the resources and files, and finally demonstrate how to load some data from your computer using the new async and await keywords in C# 5.0."

  • Introduction to Windows 8 Metro & WinRT (part 2) (Ira Lukhezo)

    • "Welcome to the second in this two part series on developing Metro applications in Windows 8. In this part you see how to utilise both the Grid and Split application templates"

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Channel 9 Windows 8 Application (Microsoft UK Faculty Connection)

    • "We are excited to announce that the team has just released a Channel 9 application in the Windows 8 App Store. So Install the application today on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and easily browse the latest content on Channel 9, share content with your friends and view content on any of your Play To Enabled devices. To find the app, Search the Windows 8 App store for Channel 9."