Windows App Developer Links - 2012-11-05

Windows Store App Development

• MDown: My First Win8 App (Jesse Freeman)

  • "MDown is a Markdown editor written entirely in HTML/JavaScript for Windows 8. ... I thought I would do a walkthrough of the app and point out some cool things I was able to do with JS by taking advantage of the WinJS Library..."

• Windows 8 metro: make your app alive with background tasks (Andrea Boschin)

  • "The background tasks strongly permeate a number of activities you can do, with the primary scope of making your application alive also if it has not been started by the user..."

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #2: Orientation & Snap (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today we are going to talk about screen sizes, and why they are important to Windows 8 development..."

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #3: The Splash Screen (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today, we are going to talk about a small, but very important part of the application lifecycle: the splash screen..."

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #4: New Controls (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today we are going back to basics, and we're going to look at some of the new layout controls that we have available in XAML applications..."

• Windows 8 Print Contract - Create Your Own Print Document Source (Gil Fink)

  • "In this post you will learn how to register for print contract and you will create your own print document source..."

• Example Windows Store App & Portable Class Library: How to access and use PCL resources (Iris Classon)

  • "I'm currently working on a crossplatform app targeting Windows Store Apps and WP8. For this project I'm using a Portable Class Library so I can share the code..."

• WinRT app guide: Step 14: Adding layout awereness and snapped view, disabling portrait view (Iris Classon)

  • "One of the requirements is that the app should support different view modes, such as the snapped view, filled view,- and you can choose if you want your app to work in both the landscape view and the portrait view..."

• DirectX and XAML in Windows (Phone) 8 - part 1 of N - Simple 2D surface (Toni Petrina)

  • "If you want to add a simple DirectX drawn surface to your existing XAML application, use SurfaceImageSource. This is a XAML type which allows you to continue using XAML composition and it also gives you the full control to the DirectX surface for rendering..."

Windows Phone App Development

• First Look at WP8 - Project Template and Manifest File (Kunal Chowdhury)

  • "Today in this post we will have a quick look into the new WP8 SDK template, the project structure and improved manifest file..."

• Windows Phone 8 Iconic Tile Image Size Comparison (Mikael Koskinen)

  • "Based on the discussion on StackOverflow, I decided to test out the different IconicTileTemplate sizes. The idea was to try to find out: 1. What are the correct dimensions for images used in the IconicTileTemplate, 2. What image is used when the iconic tile is in wide mode..."

• Windows Phone 8 SDK: Accessing Content from an SD Card (Nick's .NET Travels)

  • "Before you get all excited and worked up about the fact that you can use an SD card with the new Windows Phone SDK there are a couple of limitations that you need to be aware of..."

• Develop for Windows Phone and Windows using Portable Class Library (Nick's .NET Travels)

  • "In the past I wasn't a big fan of the Portable Class Library as I felt it imposed more restrictions than necessary and would constrain/frustrate developers more than it would actually solve a problem. However, in recent times a couple of things have happened that have made this whole experience a lot better..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

• Text-To-Speech with Microsoft Translator Service (CodePlex)

  • "With this library, you can easily add Text-To-Speech capabilities to your .NET applications. It uses the Microsoft Translator Service to obtain streams of file speaking text in the desired language..."

• Okra App Framework v0.9.5 Released (Andrew Wilkinson)

  • "The latest update to the Okra App Framework has just been released and is available from the Okra CodePlex site and via NuGet..."