Windows App Developer Links - 2012-05-02

posted on 01 May 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • Unblock Files in Windows 8 using PowerShell and Registry (Michael Crump)

    • "In case you haven't noticed, the following "Unblock" button is missing from Windows 8 file properties. This can be a tad annoying when downloading zip files from the internet and answering security prompt after prompt to get the file loaded. So, what did I do? I fixed it by using PowerShell and a quick registry entry."

Metro App Development

  • Fast and Fluid Animations in Your Metro Style App (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

    • "In Windows 8, animations are a key component of the Metro style personality and you can bring this personality to your own apps! Here is what's in this blog post: A brief overview of the animation engine, How to get started using, the Animation Library, Custom animations and how to take advantage of the animation engine improvements, Tips ‘n tricks for incorporating animations in your Metro style apps."

  • Windows 8 and the Future of Xaml Part 6: Tiles, Toasts and Badges (Gill Cleeren)

    • "Welcome to part 6 already in this Windows 8 series. Since the goal of this articles is bringing you in touch with all the important aspects of Windows 8 development, we need to dive into tiles. Tiles are therefore the main topic of this very article. If you're coming from a Windows Phone 7 background, the concept of tiles is probably already familiar to you. However, Windows 8 brings quite a few new things to the table, including the concept of badges. Toasts are also covered here; conceptually, these already existed in Windows Phone 7 development as well but have been adapted for use in a Windows 8 environment."

  • Knowing your Metro Style App package details (nmarun)

    • "This article is written on a pre-release version. Things mentioned below are bound to change in future releases. The package details of your application can be read through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Package namespace. So I create a JavaScript blank app with the below code and I see a guid instead of the app name. It turns out VS2011 adds this a guid as the package name when a project is created. You can change it in the package.manifest file to something more sensible..."

  • Getting Started with Metro - A Twitter Trend Reader (p1) (Jason Farrell)

    • "Its not only because I went to the Windows 8 Developer Event yesterday, I have honestly been meaning to dive into the new features in Windows 8 and take a crack at designing apps with Metro in mind. With that I elected to spend the majority of today working with Windows 8 and attempting to create a simple app I came up with. Twitter tracks trends and the trends are tracked for a few select cities around the world. I wanted to create an application that would allow users to see the full list of countries with cities in which a particular trend is being tracked. Group these "trends" by the country and allow users to dive further in and see the relevant tweets for the particular trend. Very simple."

  • Patch Support in HttpClient (Nigel Sampson)

    • "Lately I've been working with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient originally from the WebAPI and part of what's available to build Metro style apps in Windows 8. I really like the way the client has been designed and especially the async /await support. One thing I noticed while working with the GitHub API was that while HttpClient supports the PATCH method there's no nice helper methods like GetAsync or PostAsync, thankfully it's very easy to put together so here's some extension methods to add PatchAsync to HttpClient."

  • WinRT Step-by-Step Tutorial: MVVM + GridView + SemanticZoom (Mikael Koskinen)

    • "In this WinRT tutorial we will build a single page application using the following building blocks: XAML & C#, MVVM, Data binding, GridView, SemanticZoom -control. We will start from the scratch, using the "Blank application" template. Then we continue by creating the view model. After the view model is ready we will create the view by adding a page using the "Grouped Items Page" template. At last step we're going to modify the page to support the SemanticZoom -control."