Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-17

posted on 17 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • How to Disable Application Switching in Windows 8 (How-To Geek)

    • "Application switching allows you to quickly switch between your open Metro apps by sliding your finger across the left side of the screen, or moving your mouse to the corner. If you don't like this behavior, it's easy to disable."

Visual Studio 11

  • Visual Studio 11 Fakes Part 1 - Stubs (Peter Provost)

    • "In VS11 Beta we included the first publicly available version of the VS Fakes framework. Our goal with the Fakes framework is to enable developers to quickly and easily isolate their unit tests from their environment. The Fakes framework is derived from the Moles project created by Microsoft Research. While it isn't backwards compatible with Moles, the migration is pretty straightforward."

Metro App Development

  • Creating a great tile experience (part 1) (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "A live tile is one of the best ways to entice users back to your app. This post shows you how to update your app's live tile using polling and local APIs so that you can show off what is great about your app directly on the Windows 8 Start screen. Your tile can put front and center the best of what's going on inside of your app. The app tile is a core part of your app, and quite possibly its most frequently seen part - take advantage of the tile to get users back into your app!"

  • Working with Image Paths in WinRT-Something odd here (Derik Whittaker)

    • "Over the weekend I was pounding away at my first ‘WinRT' application which I plan to submit to the marketplace. During this process I ran into some really odd issues with getting images to display in the UI at runtime."

  • [Windows 8] How to print a document ? (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "Here is a simple code sample that can help you if you plan to add the Print feature in your application."

  • [Windows 8] Some code samples about Windows 8 development (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "In my day to day job, I have the chance to work on some Windows 8 apps thus, I wanted to share with you some code I've found/used and which could be, I hope, useful for you too !"

  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Working with third party libraries and JSON (6 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "Right now, one of the big differences between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is what third party components you can use. ... If we had been lucky we would have been able to re use the same libraries in Windows 8. If we had been smart we would have isolated all third party libraries so we easily could swap them. Since we where unlucky and did not isolate third party libraries properly, we are now writing a blog post about the importance of isolating external components and how to use the built in JSON parser in .NET 4.5."

  • Hacking for fun: porting a Silverlight Windows Phone app to WinRT in 9hours (Jeremy Alles)

    • "Today I woke up and took a look outside: the weather was so awful I decided to so something cool, at home. Today, I ported a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 game to WinRT in 9 hours. In this post, I share the "journal" I wrote will porting the app so that you can follow this process with many detail. I hope you will learn interesting stuff. Warning: the post is much longer than usual."