Windows App Developer Links - 2012-11-13

Windows Store App Development

• 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #12: Background Tasks (Jeff Blankenburg)

  • "Today, we are talking about Background Tasks. The short way to describe Background Tasks is this: A Background Task is the code that runs when your app doesn't..."

• Building quality Windows 8 apps: Important pre-submission checks for your Windows Store apps (Pete Brown)

  • "WACK (Windows App Certification Kit) ... doesn't catch everything you'll want to do to finalize your app. In this post, I have a number of suggestions ranging from the most simple to some more interesting system integration ideas..."

• Controlling The DataTemplate (David Davis)

  • "The other day I was trying to do something I have done before. I wanted to change the DataTemplate of an item in an items control based upon an item being selected in an item control..."

• A CoverFlow Control for Windows 8 and Your Surface RT (Jeff Prosise)

  • "I needed a CoverFlow control again, this time for a Windows Store app that I'm building. ... So I pulled up the source code I downloaded from CodePlex many years ago, dropped it into a Windows Store class library project, and began porting it over to the new environment..."

• Building Location-Aware Apps for Your Surface RT (Jeff Prosise)

  • "Microsoft's Surface RT lacks a GPS receiver (bummer!), but you can still use WinRT's location API to build location-aware apps for it. As long as you have a WiFi connection, the location API can determine where you are with a reasonable degree of accuracy..."

• Creating a custom async dialog for your Win8 apps Part 2: CustomDialog (Shawn Kendrot)

  • "In this blog, I'll explain how to turn that dialog into an async dialog that allows for custom content and works more like the MessageDialog..."

• A Skeleton for Custom Controls with WinJS (GotDibbs)

  • "If you've worked on or are starting to work on a Windows 8 app with relative complexity, you've probably encountered a scenario where you thought: hey, instead of all this repeated markup, this might be better as a control..."

• Installing an application on Windows RT for testing is simple pimple (Eric Nelson)

  • "There appears to be a small myth that getting a Windows 8 store app on a Windows RT device during development is complicated..."

• Windows 8 UI Mistakes - Khan Academy (David Iffland)

  • "As big name Windows 8 apps start to roll out, I notice that some developers are making some mistakes with the established UX guidelines..."

Tools, Services, Frameworks, & Libraries

• ResW File Code Generator (CodePlex)

  • "A Visual Studio 2012 Custom Tool for generating a strongly typed helper class for accessing localized resources from a .ResW file..."