Windows 8

• Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 Available Wednesday (Redmond Developer)

• • “Microsoft is slated to release Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5 on Wednesday, providing developers with the final tools for building Windows 8 applications. The tooling comes roughly two months prior to October 26, the general availability date of the Windows 8 operating system, according to Microsoft. The company is altering its standard procedure of first dibs for MSDN subscribers and instead, making the Visual Studio 2012 tooling available to all developers on August 15. MSDN subscribers will, however, gain access to the Windows 8 RTM on Wednesday…”

Windows 8 App Development

• Windows 8 and the future of XAML Part 7: The application lifecycle of Windows 8 applications (Gill Cleeren)

• • “In this article, we’ll take a look at the options we have to manage how our application behaves in combination with the new application lifecycle management. We’ll take a look at executing code in the background as well…”

• Windows 8 and HTML Part 4: First Taste of WinJS (Jeff Brand)

• • “Continuing with Part 4 of building WinRT applications with HTML and JavaScript. … Let’s switch back to a WinJS application and take a look at what happens when a page is loaded. Open package.appxmanifest and switch the Start Page back to default.html…”

• Using dependency properties to create reusable Windows 8 app components (Andreas Hammar)

• • “This article will show you how we turned our progress spinner, that we use on all pages in the Reseguiden Sista-minuten app, into an even nicer reusable component than what it was before. The spinner looks like this…”

• WinRT: GroupedGridView first item other template (Nico Vermeir)

• • “I’m currently building a comic application for Windows 8, yesterday I was building the page where users can see the details about a certain comic issue. The idea I had for this page was that on the left was the cover of the issue, followed by a list of characters appearing in the issue. A grouped GridView would be perfect for this scenario but it only accepts one template, so all groups usually look the same. Here’s the way that I’ve fixed it…”

Apps & Code to Look At

• Pie Chart Source Code (Mahmoud Medhat Moussa)

• • “Based on the amount of Requests I got for the PieChart Source Code I included my Project for download based on your Requests…”

Free Training Materials

• Learn Windows 8 Development in Your Underwear (Jeremy Foster)

• • “If you’re interested in learning how to write apps for Windows 8 but don’t want to leave your desk to do it, then I have just the thing for you. They’re called HOLOs. That’s a Hands-On Lab Online. It goes like this…”

Internet Explorer 10

• Microsoft SmartScreen & Extended Validation (EV) Code Signing Certificates (IEBlog)

• • “Today two Certificate Authorities (CAs), Symantec and DigiCert, announced the introduction of EV code signing certificates. Their announcement is a positive development for users and businesses because it helps both sides reduce fraud and increase trust. We want to provide some more details about what this means for Microsoft’s SmartScreen and the Windows 8 application ecosystem in general…”

Office 2013

• Apps for the new Office and SharePoint IT admin guide (Office Next)

• • “Brian Jones and Cyrielle Simeone rejoin Office Next for a final post on the apps and extensibility in the new Office. You can learn more by visiting the Apps for SharePoint and Office blog…”

Other

• TFS gets GIT with git-tf (Greg Duncan)

• • “Git-TF is a set of cross-platform, command line tools that facilitate sharing of changes between TFS and Git. These tools allow a developer to use a local Git repository, and configure it to share changes with a TFS server. Using the tools, changes made in TFS can be pulled into a local Git repository, and changes made in the Git repository can be checked in to TFS. These tools can be used by individuals or teams collaborating using Git…”