Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-20

posted on 19 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Managing "BYO" PCs in the enterprise (including WOA) (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "This post focuses on managing WOA PCs, which are designed with this "consumerization of IT" in mind. PCs of all form factors built on x86/64 architecture have the full complement of management tools available to them, especially those supported by third-party code running on the system. Since WOA PCs only support third-party code through the Windows Store and WinRT-based applications, we set out to develop industry-leading management capabilities that support BYO or company-deployed WOA PCs."
  • Add shutdown, reboot to Windows 8 WinX menu (Jan Hannemann)

    • "Maybe you like me and found it a bit too much clicking to do a simple shutdown or reboot in Windows 8 CP. Fortunately there is this nice menu (called WinX menu by other bloggers) in the left bottom corner that pops up when you do a right click. It has tons of useful commands for power users and would be a nice fit for a shutdown/reboot command as well."

Visual Studio 11

  • What's up with MFC in Visual Studio 2011 Beta (Pat Brenner)

    • "Hello, I'm Pat Brenner, a developer on the Visual C++ Libraries team. Through this blog post I wanted to share some information about the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) Library, since I am the primary developer working on MFC."
  • Solarized Colors for Visual Studio 11 (Peter Provost)

    • "I'm sure everyone and their dog knows by now that we changed the color theme in VS11 Beta to something a little more... ummm... monochromatic. ... Regardless of what you think about it, I do know that the UX designers had an admirable goal in mind, and that was making the code be the bit you see the most, and take the chrome out of your line of sight. The idea is to let you focus where it matters ... Regardless, I'm not here to comment on all that, but on what I like to do to make the experience even better. SOLARIZE IT!"

Expression Blend

  • Visual Authoring for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview with Blend and Visual Studio (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

    • "As in the Windows 8 Developer Preview released in September, Blend is part of Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8. In addition, starting with the Visual Studio 11 Beta, Blend is now also included in Visual Studio 11 Ultimate, Premium and Professional. If you install any of these editions of Visual Studio 11 Beta on Windows 8, you will have the Blend and Visual Studio capabilities that this post describes."
  • Mysteries of XDesProc - Revealed! (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

    • "In Christian's post Visual Authoring for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview he mentions that one of the changes to Blend is the introduction of an architecture that isolates the designer into its own process. In fact, this new architecture is used in both Blend and the XAML designer in Visual Studio. In this post, I'll give a little more detail into what this means to you as a Metro style app author."

Metro App Development

  • Getting the Most out of Your Pixels - Adapting to View State Changes (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "In Windows 8, your apps run on a variety of screen sizes and under various view states. A user might have your app snapped to the side of a 25-inch desktop monitor, or fill the whole screen of a 10-inch widescreen tablet. In each case, you want your app to take full advantage of the available space. In this post, I show you how you can track the current size and view state of your app in code, and give you tips on how to write your app in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview to handle screen size and view state changes."
  • Windows 8 Quick Tip: Debugging Managed Code Referenced by HTML 5 Applications (Yasser Makram)

    • "You can write libraries in Managed C# or VB, or native C++ that can be used from Windows 8 HTML5 applications as long as they are exported as WinMD libraries and conforms to WinMD rules. This is very useful especially if you want to use features in the managed world like Linq or consume SOAP services with the strongly typed WSDL proxy generator. While I was trying to debug the managed code referenced by the HTML applications, no breakpoints were hit. After some poking around I discovered a setting that can enable debugging managed code in HTML applications."
  • How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week - Day 0 (David Catuhe)

    • "The goal of these articles is to provide a pragmatic recipe to create a complete Windows 8 application from scratch. The application I use as sample is called UrzaGatherer and it is used to help Magic The Gathering collectors to handle their cards collection."
  • How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week - Day 1 (David Catuhe)

    • "The day 0 was dedicated to creating the home page and setting up the connection with data. Today, you will focus on creating the missing screens and adding offline support."
  • Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Cache and Working with Storage (7 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "Just as with most Windows Phone applications, you typically add value to a Windows 8 application when caching data. You gain some offline ability as well as a quick and snappy application that doesn't need to go online and download data all the time. In Reseguiden's application ... we save previous searches (only the query, not the result) that makes it possibly for users to flip through previous searches in a pivot even in the application is restarted. The plan is to implement the same functionality for the Windows 8 client."
  • Heads Up: Working with JSON on Windows 8 (Jeff Brand)

    • "Just a quick heads up for working with JSON on Windows 8. If you have worked with JSON on Windows Phone 7, you are most likely very familiar with the DataContractJsonSerializer class. When working with JSON, using DataContractJsonSerializer is the most common approach I see. The approach typically looks something like this."
  • Consuming HTTP Streams in Windows 8 with C#/XAML (Jeff Brand)

    • "Let's say you play a multiplayer game online that provides updates via a Twitter stream. Let's say it's a game like QONQR. Now, you may be a little bit addicted to playing that game. I'm not saying I know anyone that is, but if someone was, they may want to consume that Twitter stream and do some fun things with the information. You could mess around with some kind of traditional polling client, but Twitter has a Streaming API available, so why not use that? Of course, if you were going to write some cool new app to leverage that data, you would certainly test it out on Windows 8, right?"