Windows App Developer Links - 2012-12-10

posted on 09 Dec 2012 | App Developer Links

I apologize for today's super sized post. I'm in the process of getting caught back up after not posting for 3 weeks. Tomorrow's post will be back to the regular size.

Windows 8

  • Buy an app for the whole family (Jeremy Foster)

    • "The policy for the Windows Store is that when you get an app (whether it's free or $999) you can install it on up to 5 PCs. The interesting thing is that those don't have to be your PCs. Here's the scoop..."

Windows Store App Development

  • Enabling great Play To experiences from your Windows 8 apps (and websites!) (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "The Play To feature allows you to stream music, photos and videos from apps to Xbox and other supported devices on your home network. ... Using the Play To contract, you can easily enable those scenarios for your users from your apps..."

  • Designing a simple and secure app package - APPX (Windows 8 app developer blog)

    • "When we started working on the new Windows 8 development platform one of the first questions we had was "how do you package an app into a simple yet secure format?"..."

  • 5 tips to get your apps certified quickly (Windows Store for developers)

    • "In this post, we want to highlight a few of the patterns we've noticed in app submissions, and provide you with some guidance on how to help speed your app through the submission process..."

  • Building Windows Store Apps with .NET (.NET Framework Blog)

    • "For .NET developers, this is the best time to build client apps. Never before have the Windows APIs been so easy to use from C# or Visual Basic without wrapping them with custom libraries..."

  • Asynchronous Programming for Windows Store Apps: .NET is up to the Task (.NET Framework Blog)

    • "Since the Windows Runtime uses a slightly different implementation for async programming than .NET, Greg Paperin explains how C# and Visual Basic still provide a unified development experience between the two sets of APIs..."

  • Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 Now Available! (S. Somasegar)

    • "I talked about our strong commitment to continuous value delivery and our new approach for providing updates to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals ... I'm excited to announce that the first such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 (Visual Studio 2012.1), is now available..."

  • Anatomy of a Push Notification (Jeremy Foster)

    • "What I want to talk about right now is the anatomy of a push notification message. I was intimidated by the subject when I was first introduced to it, but I've climbed on top of the general concept now and feel confident enough to post on the matter..."

  • Changing the name of a Windows 8 Store app (Andreas Hammar)

    • "The name of a Windows Store app can be changed, and it's quite easy to do. Here I'll walk you through the steps and show you how it's done..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #14: Geolocation (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we get to talk about one of my favorite features of any development platform: geolocation..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #15: The On-Screen Keyboard (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today we are going to take a look at the on-screen keyboard in Windows 8..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #16: Context Menus (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, our focus is on context menus. These are those small little popup commands that appear from time to time in your application when you right click on something..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #17: The Clipboard (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're going to focus on the Windows 8 clipboard exclusively. More specifically, we're going to look at how we can save and retrieve data from this system-wide and heavily used mechanism..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #18: File Associations & App Contracts (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we are going to look at a couple of cool features in Windows 8: File Associations and App Contracts..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #19: File Picker (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we are going to look at another invaluable tool in Windows 8 development, the File Picker..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #20: Printing (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're going to talk about printing from your Windows 8 app..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #21: Camera Capture (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're going to kick off a long line of article on the sensors that Windows 8 has access to. We are starting with capturing data from the camera. This can be both photos and video..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #22: Using Play To (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we get to talk about another really cool feature to Windows 8: Play To. At its core, this is the ability to share content from your computer to a television, another computer, or an Xbox 360..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #23: The Compass (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're going to talk about the compass..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #24: Light Sensor (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we are taking a look another one of the sensors we might find in a Windows 8 device: the Light Sensor. With the Light Sensor, we can determine the brightness of the light around the user's machine..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #25: Accelerometer (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're looking at yet another sensor available in Windows 8 devices, the Accelerometer. It measure the acceleration of the device on 3 axes, X, Y, and Z..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #26: Gyrometer (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today continues our adventure through the world of sensors, and today we are looking at the Gyrometer. The Gyrometer, or gyroscope, measures rotational velocity..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #27: Inclinometer (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we are taking a look at our final sensor, the Inclinometer. ... Ultimately, it aggregates several of our other values about the X, Y and Z axes to calculate three very important values: Pitch, Yaw, and Roll..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #28: Push Notifications (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we are talking about Push Notifications..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #29: Application Lifecycle (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today, we're going to talk about Application Lifecycle. ... ultimately we're looking at the management of the different states our application can be in on a user's device..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #30: Store (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Wow, here we are finally talking about the Store. ... For purposes of today, we are only going to talk about the public facing Microsoft Store..."

  • 31 Days of Windows 8 | Day #31: Design (Jeff Blankenburg)

    • "Today is the last day of this series, and we're going to focus on designing Windows 8 applications today..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 15: Exporting data as a text file (Iris Classon)

    • "We are currently at step 15 in our step by step guide for creating a Windows Store Application ... today we want to let the user export the data for the study activites..."

  • WinRT app guide: Step 16: Sharing content by contract in 4 easy steps (Iris Classon)

    • "People today love to share information, as a matter of fact- we expect to be able to share content. ... So I would say it is almost mandatory that an app with information content allows the user to do so..."

  • Implementing Ads on any page in your Windows 8 XAML app-part 1 (Arun Mahendrakar)

    • "Let's look at how you can implements ads on any page in your win 8 app. Before you get to your application, you need to create Ad Units in the MS Pubcenter site..."

  • Implementing Ads on any page in your Windows 8 XAML app-part 2 (Arun Mahendrakar)

    • "In this article, we'll see how we can add something called ‘interstitial ads' - ads that appear as part of the content in your app..."

  • Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData - Part 1 (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "In this post, I'm going to walk through the steps needed to create a data store and services for our game leaderboard using OData, and based on the underlying technologies of SQL Azure (for the database), Entity Framework, and WCF Data Services..."

  • Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: OData - Part 2 (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "In this second part, I'll show you: 1. How I deploy the OData service to Windows Azure, 2. How I wire up my Windows 8 JavaScript games, Space Cadet and Catapult Wars, to the leaderboard service..."

  • Binding GridView.SelectedItems property (Janne Rautiola)

    • "I tried to find a way to bind GridView's SelectedItems property to a ViewModel's property. As we know, the property is read only so there is no DependencyProperty for it. Finding a workaround which made it possible to bind to it turned out to be a quite difficult task..."

  • Walkthrough: Building a Sweet Dial in XAML for Windows 8 (Jerry Nixon)

    • "Custom XAML controls are a breeze. But, honestly, if you aren't familiar with building them, there's a learning curve. Let's break this barrier and build a custom user control together..."

  • Building Custom Controls for Windows 8 Store apps (Diederik Krols)

    • "This article explains how to build custom controls for Windows Store apps, using XAML and C#. Custom controls are the most powerful controls in the XAML department. Once you know how to design and build these, you'll have no problems with their alternatives: user controls, derived controls, and extended controls..."

  • Windows 8 and Geolocation (Jesse Liberty)

    • "In this posting, we'll look at how to track location coordinates in Windows 8..."

  • From the MVPs: Shared code for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (Jeremy Likness)

    • "Consumers learned about the availability of Windows 8 just days before the details about Windows Phone 8 and the developer SDK were revealed. It is now possible to build code for both platforms. With an amazing feature known as the Portable Class Library (PCL) it is also possible to share a significant amount of code between platforms. In this blog post, I'll show you how with an example that uses the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern to fetch the contents of a web page and present it as both a Windows Store app and a Windows Phone 8 app without any code-behind..."

Windows Phone App Development

  • Networking in Windows Phone 8 (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "A couple of weeks ago at //BUILD I did an overview of the API surface and features offered for networking in Windows Phone 8. Over the next few months, I'll be writing drill-down posts focused on the individual sections I showed in the networking session..."

  • Windows Phone Toolkit overview (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "The Toolkit team is proud to announce the release of the Windows Phone 8 version of the Windows Phone Toolkit. Here's what's new..."

  • Increase your app reach with Windows Phone 7.8 (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "As today's consumer blog post notes, Windows Phone 7.8 will begin to ship preinstalled on new phones in the coming weeks. This release also presents an important opportunity to increase the reach of your Windows Phone 7 apps and games, since we're working to expand the number of consumer markets..."

  • Updating your Windows Phone Location code to use WinRT (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "In this post I describe how you can optionally modify your Windows Phone 7 geolocation code to use the new Windows Runtime (WinRT) Geolocation APIs in Windows Phone 8. Modifying your code to use the new Geolocation APIs in Windows Phone 8 is optional, but offers some solid advantages..."

  • Acquiring a single Geoposition in Windows Phone 8 (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "With the new set of Geolocation APIs in Windows Phone 8, your app can request a single position at any time, which means more flexibility as you develop your app. This post describes the new API for single position acquisition, with examples to show you how you can use the APIs to declare your needs to the Geolocator object..."

  • Windows Phone Store market expansion and new game ratings (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "Today we are beginning to roll out the latest in the series of regular updates to the Windows Phone Dev Center and the Windows Phone Store. These updates are designed to address issues that you have identified, as well as to add small feature enhancements and reflect new country-specific policies..."

  • Get Started with Windows Phone 8 Lenses (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "One of the ways we're expanding on this approach in Windows Phone 8 is with the new Lenses feature. Lenses enable developers to do something that can't be done on any other platform: extend the native camera viewfinder of the phone. The camera application space is currently a hotbed of innovation; our Lenses feature makes Windows Phone a compelling place to build these types of apps..."

  • Windows Phone 8 SDK - Deploying Multiple Enterprise Applications (Nick's .NET Travels)

    • "In this post we're going to look at how you can start to manage and deploy multiple enterprise applications. ... For this you can use some of the new APIs in Windows Phone 8 to enumerate installed applications and prompt for installation of applications..."

Free Training Materials

  • Free 2-day Training: Windows Store app dev for iOS developers (G. Andrew Duthie)

    • "Join the Big Nerd Ranch and Microsoft for this free, two-day training designed to jumpstart your Windows Store app development. You will learn the ins-and-outs of the Windows platform from iOS developers who are now building Windows apps..."

  • Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training is here (Windows Phone Developer Blog)

    • "Last week we hosted the Windows Phone 8 Jump Start training, a fast-paced and demo-packed learning ‘experience' tailored to show developers how to build responsive, appealing, and effective applications quickly. If you missed this outstanding event, you're in luck. All 20 modules are now available online for your on-demand viewing, (or download) on Channel 9..."