Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-24

posted on 23 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "In February, we told you about our goals for connecting your apps, files, PCs, and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8. Since then, we have provided the App Preview of a Windows 8 app to access SkyDrive, and we've updated the SkyDrive web experience. Today, we are delivering new capabilities for SkyDrive across the Windows platform."

  • Windows 8: Prevent Users from Uninstalling Metro Apps (Tech-Recipes)

    • "In Windows 8 the process of uninstalling metro apps is rather easy. Therefore, when you have established the metro apps in Windows 8 the way you want, you may wish to prevent other users on the computer from uninstalling them. This tutorial will show you all the necessary steps to disable the uninstall metro apps feature."

  • Add a Guest Operating System (Linux, etc.) to Windows 8 (Don Burnett)

    • "You can use the hardware virtualization built into many CPUs to run a guest operating system directly inside Windows 8.. So you can run Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc. Right inside of Windows 8.."

Metro App Development

  • WP to W8: View States using Visual State Manager (Jared Bienz)

    • "In my last blog post I talked about using the Visual State Manager to deal with different screen resolutions and the new Snapped view. I thought it would be helpful to share an example of how to do it."

  • How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week - Day 2 (David Catuhe)

    • "Today, the chief proposes you to delight yourself with the following dishes: Internationalization, Managing the activation of the offline mode, Adding a flipView to the cards page, Handling snapped views, Supporting different form factors, Supporting different cards sizes"

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

    • "Navigation in Windows Phone has a clear legacy from Silverlight, you get around using Uris and query strings. What might have been the best solution for the web is clumsy and cumbersome in a native environment. This has often led to custom wrappers around the navigation APIs. All this has changed in Window 8, navigation feels more modern and easy to use. In this article we'll take a closer look at the old and new way of navigating."

  • [Windows 8] CSharp targets not found in Blend 5 after Windows Phone SDK (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "I had a little accident last week and needed a computer fast. The only thing I could get was a computer with Windows 8 Consumer Preview already installed. That was actually no problem as I'm currently working on a Windows 8 project. Problem is that I also work on a number of Windows Phone projects. Apart from the XNA installation problem, the WP SDK was no problem to install and all seemed fine, until I opened up the Windows 8 project in Blend... or actually tried to open it up."

  • Getting Started with Windows 8 Application Development (Ubelly)

    • "There are a lot of amazing new capabilities in Windows 8 such as a completely revamped Start screen with customizable Live Tiles, roaming profiles and preferences. Also included are a set of great new apps including: mail, calendar, people, SkyDrive, Bing Maps, video, photos, and more. With Windows 8 and Contracts, apps can communicate with one another making it easier than ever to access, search and share your apps content with the rest of the Internet. If you want to experience Windows 8 for yourself and get to know the development tools you'll need to create compelling Metro style apps for Windows 8, follow these simple steps."

  • Metro - Design Inspiration (UBelly)

    • "I thought I'd post some links for inspiration when working on Metro applications. I've split this where I can into the areas I refer to when talking about Metro as a design language for Windows Phone, but I've also added to this list so that it's also relevant for Metro Style Apps on Windows 8. Please, let me know in the comments if there are any other sites that you feel should be added to any of these categories and I'll update the page."

  • The MetroPad Project: Designing and Building for Win 8 (Don Burnett)

    • "When I saw the Windows 8 Metro interface for the first time I started doing some free association about what I thought of it as a design language. What it meant for touch and the first time I wanted to touch a computer's screen. I got that same feeling again when I started looking at "METRO" apps on a Windows 8 Tablet."

  • Background Downloads in a Windows 8 Metro style app (Mike Taulty)

    • "It's common for an application to want to download (or upload) content from the internet possibly with a view to caching that content so that a user doesn't have to wait to access it in the future. ... WinRT has explicit support for background downloads and uploads via the BackgroundDownloader and BackgroundUploader classes that live in Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer."

  • Metro WebView Source and HTML workarounds (Brent Schooley)

    • "In the process of writing my first Windows 8 Metro style app using C# and XAML, I came across some limitations of the current WebView control's implementation."

  • Windows 8: make a toast notification (Quentin Sallat)

    • "You've probably noticed, in the. NET framework 4.5, the famous MessageBox class, as we know, has disappeared. But how to post messages to our users? First, be aware that a modal dialog (which blocks the rest of the application) is generally discouraged. Indeed, it disrupts the user in his use of the application. So the best is simply to notify the user of something without the block. This is the principle of the Windows Notification Toast 8."

  • Declaring an ICommand in Windows 8 Consumer Preview (Laurent Bugnion)

    • "I stumbled upon an interesting issue in Windows 8 Consumer Preview: When you declare a command and try to bind to it, the command will only be invoked if the property is declared as ICommand. If you declare it with the class that implements ICommand (for example RelayCommand for MVVM Light), the command will never be executed. This is not discoverable at all, because the command execution fails silently, without any hint of what happened."

  • Video: Teach Your Apps to Live and Die with the Windows 8 Metro App Lifecycle (the pluralsight blog)

    • "Windows 8 Metro Apps are designed to optimize battery life, which in turn requires developers to build their applications based on a new execution lifecycle. In this video excerpt from Ian Griffiths course Building Windows 8 Metro Apps with C# and XAML you'll see the new events that you can use to adapt your application to that new lifecycle as well as how to debug your application during new events such as Suspension and restarting after termination. In the full course Ian covers other important topics for Windows 8 Metro development including the new Metro layouts, how to use controls, and databinding."

  • Deep Dive into WinRT: MSDN Session (Sasha Goldshtein)

    • "In this session we talked about the following: Refreshment of how COM objects work, WinRT object layout and relationship to COM, The WinRT type system and threading model, Asynchronous operations in WinRT, Windows metadata, files and projecting WinRT APIs to C#, C++/CX and JavaScript, Designing and developing WinRT components, Performance interoperability tips for WinRT, Profiling WinRT applications with Visual Studio Profiler"

  • Building Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML - Slides & Demos (Joe McBride)

    • "Thank you to everyone at the Utah .NET User Group who attended my presentation on Building Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. Here is a link to download my slides and demos. Thanks again to John Papa who let me utilize some of his slides and demos."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • Simple Windows 8 Metro style ‘Maps App' (Mike Taulty)

    • "A few months ago, I wrote the beginnings of a Windows 8 Metro style application that hosted the Bing Maps AJAX control and put a little functionality around it. At a recent event, an attendee was asking me about this kind of technique and so I thought I'd dust off that sample (albeit unfinished) and publish it here for people to play with if it helps them out in any way."

  • #mvvmlight V4RC available on #nuget (Laurent Bugnion)

    • "I just published the MVVM Light V4 RC packages to Nuget. Note that this is still technically a preview, so the main package is still V3. "

Books

  • 2-4-6-8-10 (Charles Petzold)

    • "If you've been following my blog, you know that for the past few months I've been working on the 6th edition of Programming Windows, which focuses on writing Metro style applications for Windows 8 using C# and XAML. ... For two weeks — from May 17th through May 31st — you will have the opportunity to purchase the Programming Windows 6th edition ebook for just $10."