Windows App Developer Links - 2012-04-26

posted on 25 Apr 2012 | App Developer Links

Visual Studio 11

  • Visual Studio Fakes Part 2 - Shims (Peter Provost)

    • "Let me start by saying Shims are evil. But they are evil by design. They let you do things you otherwise couldn't do, which is very powerful. They let you do things you might not want to do, and might know you shouldn't do, but because of the real world of software, you have to do."

  • Visual Studio Toolbox: Designing XAML-based Metro style apps with Visual Studio and Blend (Channel 9)

    • "Previously on Visual Studio Toolbox, Robert showed how to use Visual Studio 11 and XAML to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. In this episode, Joanna Mason shows us how to use Visual Studio's XAML Designer and Blend to make these apps better looking. She demonstrates how powerful Blend is as a design tool and why it is an indispensable tool you should master as you are building XAML-based apps."

Metro App Development

  • Are you a Windows Phone dev who is interested in Windows 8 development? (Jennifer Marsman)

    • "First, one of the many things on my TODO list is to take a Windows Phone app that was written in Silverlight and convert it to a Windows 8 app in XAML, to see what some of the major differences and gotchas are. But looking at my calendar, I know that I won't get to this until June at the earliest. If anyone is doing this right now, I'd be curious to hear what your experiences are. However, many of those "gotchas" and major differences are already documented on MSDN! Check out these MSDN articles to help get you started with porting your Windows Phone app to Windows 8."

  • ICommand issue in Windows 8: Correction! (Laurent Bugnion)

    • "I recently published a blog post stating that you need to declare a command as ICommand (instead of RelayCommand) if you want it to work in Windows 8. I even went as far as to modify the MVVM Light code snippets that are used to create commands. In fact, scratch that post... I was wrong! I got a few people writing to me and letting me know that RelayCommand works just fine for them. And now, after I tested again, I cannot reproduce the issue! So I need to be clear, my first post was wrong, and I stand corrected."

  • Illegal characters in path when deploying a Metro Style App (Dave Isbitski)

    • "If you are getting an error similar to the one below when deploying your Metro Style App in Visual Studio 11 Beta it's not you. The following unexpected error occurred during deployment: Illegal characters in path."

  • Using KnockoutJS in Windows 8 Metro Style Apps (Dave Isbitski)

    • "What is it? If you have been messing around with JavaScript lately and come from a .Net Background you might have already heard of KnockoutJS. If you haven't, KnockoutJS is a lightweight, free, JavaScript Library from Steve Sanderson that brings the MVVM pattern to the web world. It's also filled with #awesome sauce. It wasn't too long ago that Windows app development and Web app development were two entirely different views of the world. Thanks to the magic of WinRT language projection with Metro Style App development we no longer have to give up all the great libraries we are used from the web when moving onto the desktop."

  • Windows 8 Metro Style- Bits of Binding (Mike Taulty)

    • "Data binding is a useful tool in putting an application together and I've spent quite a long time with various frameworks that support different aspects of binding. In the last few years, that has mainly revolved around the binding support that you find in XAML based applications for WPF, Silverlight and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7. Recently I put together that simple example of a music application and I thought I'd revisit that with a view to taking a look at how that might be data-bound for both a XAML based app and a HTML based app. I don't claim that this is complete or definitive or even correct - I'm just some guy on the internet."

  • Toying with the idea of a Metro "Ribbon" (part 1) (Jose Fajardo)

    • "I've seen a couple of interesting comps of metro apps that have a ribbon, they actually look decent especially if your building a business productivity app. I wanted to prototype a metro app with a ribbon to see what it would feel like. First is to create a simple ribbon, in future posts I'll embellish this ribbon with rich touch/sensor driven experiences."

  • Custom Effects - Ripple Effect (Pixel Shader) (Jose Fajardo)

    • "DirectX11.1 introduced a bunch of built in effects into Direct2D that span the following categories ... In my previous posts I showed how you could use SharpDx to call and render some of these effects inside your XAML Managed Metro apps. However in the case where you want to do something that these effects don't cover, or if you want to create a more optimal effect than custom effects is what you want!"

  • The Future of Creating Line of Business and Metro Applications in Windows 8 (Allen Conway)

    • "So with Windows 8 right around the corner and a software community racing hard to adopt and create new Metro style applications, I thought it would be a good time to focus on Line of Business applications in the future. My posts on Windows 8 evolve with my increased exposure to the new OS, and it is fun to see how my opinions evolve as well."

Apps & Code to Look At

  • There's an Ogre in my Metro... (Greg Duncan)

    • "I could/should have saved this project for a Metro Monday post, but, well, I couldn't wait on this any longer. This project had me at "... includes binaries of Ogre, FreeImage, Hydrax and SkyX for x64, x86 and ARM in both Debug and Release flavors and is configured to automatically link the right versions of those libraries"..."