Windows App Developer Links - 2012-05-07

posted on 06 May 2012 | App Developer Links

Windows 8

  • FAQ - DVD playback and Windows Media Center in Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

    • "We thought we would follow up the previous post with an FAQ which is based on the comments and discussions, so Bernardo put this together so things are in one place. Some of these might be introductory for some but since the comments covered a lot of topics, it seemed reasonable to start at the beginning."

Visual Studio 11

  • Visual Studio 11 - live webcast series in May and June (Jim Blizzard)

    • "Looking for a little Visual Studio 11 action? If so, you're going to be in heaven for the next two months. Check out this list of live webcasts during May and June."

  • Updated NUnit Plugin for VS11 Released (Peter Provost)

    • "Good news!! Last night I got an email from Charlie Poole, the maintainer of NUnit pointing me to a blog post he'd just made ... This is great news because if you've tried to use NUnit with VS11 Beta before now, you probably noticed that you couldn't actually run or debug a selected test or tests. When you tried, you ended up either getting a failed run or having all tests run. Clearly not good. The fix was pretty simple, and I want to thank our team for helping find the issue and also of course thank Charlie for getting it out to customers to get them unblocked while using NUnit."

  • Quick Tip - Multi Project Solution in VS11 (Noel Arlante)

    • "I'm using Visual Studio 11 since it was released as Beta. What can I say, I really get the new design and layout (monochrome and gylphs) which not every developer appreciates. But beyond design and layout I really like the new search feature and the navigation features added in the Solutions Explorer section. Going to the quick tip, if you have created a project in Visual Studio 11 Beta and would want to add another project under the same solution you would get this ..."

  • Unit Test a project having external dependency(WCF Proxy) using Fakes & Visual Studio 11 Beta (Atul Verma)

    • "In this post I'll explain the steps to generate unit tests for a project which calls a WCF service using Fakes. Microsoft Fakes is an isolation framework for creating delegate-based test stubs and shims in .NET Framework applications. The Fakes framework can be used to shim any .NET method, including non-virtual and static methods in sealed types. The Fakes framework helps developers create, maintain, and inject dummy implementations in their unit tests. The Fakes framework generates and maintains stub types and shim types for a system under test."

Metro App Development

  • Porting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Background agents (11 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

    • "The Mango (7.1) update for Windows Phone brought us a lot of goodies including the Scheduled Task Agent. It allowed us to create a feeling of push notifications without actually doing any server push implementation. In the Reseguiden app we use the background agents to do new searches for trips and displaying the top result in the app tile. Sort of a budget-push. So, the question is, does the same functionality exist in Windows 8? The answer is yes; same same but different."

  • Using FX effects in your managed metro apps (Jose Fajardo)

    • "In the WPF and Silverlight "desktop" worlds we have the luxury of being able to use shader effects (fx) in our apps, this infrastructure is not available in the "Windows Phone" or "WinRT XAML/C#" worlds. However thanks to SharpDx and the improved hlsl graphics features in VS11 we can now easily use these same fx effects. Let me show you how I consume fx files in my XAML/C# WinRT apps..."

  • [Windows 8] Some helpers to use in your developments (Thomas LEBRUN)

    • "Some people ask me if there are some helpers available to perform various tasks such manipulating settings, local storage, etc. There are no built-in helpers but for the current Windows 8 application I'm working, I've developed some of them and I wanted to share them with the community (note that this helpers are available in Javascript but it should not be hard to translate them in C#):"

  • Running Windows App Certification Kit (WACK) tool from Command Prompt (nmarun)

    • "In order to understand this blog, I recommend you read the Microsoft's whitepaper first. I have run the WACK tool quite a few times from the UI (remember to run it in Admin mode, if not Windows8 will pretty much stop responding midway between the test). Turns out you can also run it through command prompt. Here are the complete details for the command..."