Visual Studio 11

• Automatically Check for Updates to Visual Studio 11 (Zain Naboulsi)

• • “If you haven’t been playing with Visual Studio 11 yet, I strongly encourage you to get it today. … When you DO have it one of the first things you should do is turn on automatic checking for updates to extensions found at Tools | Options | Environment | Extension Manager … Not only will this make sure you are notified about the latest and greatest version of your favorite extensions but it will also enable notification of updates to Visual Studio! We are now pushing updates to the IDE as extension-like elements.”

• Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 now available for .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 (Alex Turner)

• • “If you’ve held off on trying Visual Studio 11 Beta because your .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 app uses the Async CTP, your wait is over! Today we’ve published the Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11, a NuGet package that lets your Visual Studio 11 projects target .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 while taking advantage of C#’s new await keyword. While Visual Studio 11 provides built-in support for await in projects that target .NET 4.5 or .NET for Metro style apps, this targeting pack provides the API support to expand the set of target platforms to include .NET 4 and Silverlight 5 as well.”

Expression Blend

• Designing App Bars for Html Metro Style Apps Using Blend and the Winjs Appbar Control (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

• • “When you are designing new HTML-based Metro style applications, you’ll likely want to add one or more WinJS AppBar controls to your app. In this short tutorial, we’ll cover how to use the HTML authoring tools in Blend to create, interact with, and customize WinJS AppBar controls.”

Metro App Development

• Deploying Metro Style Apps to Businesses (Windows Store for Developers Blog)

• • “In previous posts, we’ve walked through making your apps available directly to customers using the Windows Store. In this post, Arik Cohen, Lead Program Manager for our Commerce and Licensing team, describes how to build, deploy and manage Metro style apps for business customers.”

• WP to W8: Application Framework (Jared Bienz)

• • “In this article I’ll talk about the differences in application runtimes between Windows Phone and Windows 8. Windows Phone developers are already comfortable building Silverlight applications and luckily those skills apply equally well to Windows 8. But there’s a powerful new framework called the Windows Runtime (WinRT) that you need to know about, and we also need to understand and write asynchronous code.”

• Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Localization of your application (9 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

• • “In this post we’ll explain how we used resource files when implementing the Windows Phone application, and how we changed it for Windows 8.”

• Develop your app for everyone-localize your UI (Tim Heuer)

• • “As I do some app development for Windows 8 I wanted to share my thoughts around localization and what it really means to me to provide a ‘world-ready’ application. The three areas of focus are 1) how the platforms support a localized app, 2) what technical tools you have to automate localization 3) getting culture-correct localization and 4) testing your localized app.”

• Metro Theme Resources and Templates (Nigel Sampson)

• • “One thing that always helps when building xaml applications is to have easy access to reference the Theme resources and control Templates. Thankfully for building Windows 8 Metro style applications you can find the appropriate files at C:\Program Files\Windows Kits\8.0\Include\winrt\xaml\design.”

• Obtaining screen resolution scale details in Windows 8 Metro Style App (nmarun)

• • “If you want to know the current screen resolution and the pixels per inch (PPI) scale that your app is having to deal with on any device, use ResolutionScale. … This is an enum with the following values…”

• Developing Windows 8 Metro Style Applications That Consume OData (Phani Raju)

• • “We’re releasing a preview version of the client libraries for Windows 8 Metro-Style applications to give our users the ability to create applications that work on Windows 8. This client library will work with servers that comply with the OData v1-v3 protocols. In the blog post below we will describe a sample application we built and is available for download using this client library.”

• Playing Music and Sound Effects in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using HTML and JavaScript (Dave Isbitski)

• • “I have recently been coding a Windows 8 Metro Style App using the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview bits and Visual Studio 11 Express. The app is going to be a retro shooter that takes advantage of HTML5 Canvas for the main game engine and then several Windows 8 Metro Style App Features. What game would rock without Music and Sound Effects! So how do we add that functionality to a Metro Style App? For my game I decided to take two routes. “

• GridView Control in Windows 8 (Jesse Liberty)

• • “While ListBox and ComboBox continue to work in Windows 8, their use is discouraged. They are not designed well for touch input and there are new and more powerful controls in WinRT that you can use instead; specifically the ListView and the GridView.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• More news from MS Open Tech: announcing the open source Metro style theme for jQuery Mobile (Abu Obeida)

• • “Starting today, the Metro style theme for JQuery Mobile, the popular open source mobile user interface framework, is available for download on GitHub and can be used as a NuGet package in Visual Studio. The theme enables HTML5 pages to adapt automatically to the Metro design style when rendered on Windows Phone 7.5. The Metro style theme is open source and available for download here. This new Metro style theme’s development was sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. working closely with Sergei Grebnov, an Apache Cordova committer and jQuery Mobile developer.”