Windows 8 App Development

• Using the MVVM Pattern in Windows 8 (Laurent Bugnion)

• • “This article demonstrates how to use the MVVM pattern together with the MVVM Light Toolkit, an open source toolkit that facilitates common operations in XAML-based applications…”

• Scenario Space: Covering Every Angle of Usability Within Your App (Paul Laberge)

• • “This post is Part 2 of a larger series that dives into the concept of Consistency of Experience. Through this series I will explain what Consistency of Experience is defined as, building great app experiences on the Windows platform ecosystem (including Windows 8, Windows Phone and the web) and how to drive these apps to successful adoption by your users…”

• Windows 8 Notifications: Push Notifications (Jim O’Neil)

• • “It’s been a while since my last post on the topic of notifications in Windows 8, so I’m going to pick things back up and cover the two remaining notification options: push notifications and raw notifications…”

• Walkthrough: Monetize Windows 8 with the Microsoft Advertising SDK (Jerry Nixon)

• • “An interstitial advertisement is traditionally recognized as a full-page ad appearing between two pages. Interstitial, which means “gap” perceives a gap between to parts of the UI (especially pages on a web site) and fills it with an advertisement…”

• [Windows 8] Windows Azure Mobile Services: a backend for your Windows Store (Thomas LEBRUN)

• • “Microsoft has released recently Windows Azure Mobile Services, a set of tools allowing developers to get backend, authentication and notification for the Windows Store (and Windows Phone) applications…”

• WINMD Files Under the Hood (Girish Jain)

• • “I have recently installed Windows 8 on my laptop and am having a go with new Windows 8 operating system and the newly introduced Windows Runtime (WinRT) layer. As part of this blog post, I am going to dig deep into WINMD files, which are at the heart of this new WinRT layer…”

• Windows App Splash Screen – Beginners Tutorial (Shweta Lodha)

• • “Continuing to my previous article title, here we will see about splash screens, how to set the splash screen image and how to change the background color…”

• Windows Store app Development Snack: Changing the application theme from dark to light (Robert MacLean)

• • “ou may have seen in Visual Studio & Blend the option to change the Windows Theme from dark (the default) to light. The problem is that is a runtime it seems to make zero difference and there is no way in Windows 8 to change it (like we had with Windows Phone). The solution to this is to change it in the App.xaml file…”

• Creating your own file format to import .FBX, .OBJ and .X in your Windows 8 modern UI game (or 3D engine) (David Catuhe)

• • “There is a lot of different file format when it comes to 3D objects. One of the most used is the FBX from Autodesk. This file format can be exported by all major DCC but the key point is that it can be complex for a game or 3D developer to open such file format…”

• Converting TimeZones in Store/WinRT apps (Oren Novotny)

• • “For anyone who’s tried to convert a DateTime/DateTimeOffset to another time zone in a Windows Store style app, I’ve put together a helper class that uses some of the Win32 APIs that are allowed in Store apps…”

• Localizing the displayname of your app in windows 8 (Michiel Post)

• • “When creating your Windows 8 app, you might want to give it a different name in each language. This little tutorial shows you how to do it…”

• Windows Store apps: the case of missing StringFormat or Binding on the Run (Andrej Tozon)

• • “If your previous developer experience include developing for other XAML technologies … you’ve already noticed that a lot of things you were used to in other techs, are missing from your Windows Store app development experience. One example being there’s no more StringFormat property available in your Binding markup construct…”

• WinRT, Navigation, .NET and Sharing Files == AccessDenied (Mike Taulty)

• • “I managed to get myself into a bit of a pickle with some code that I was writing and so I thought I’d share – there’s nothing here that’s particularly complex or earth-shattering but it is something that I spent a good 10 minutes trying to fix before my ‘aha’ moment so maybe it’ll save someone some time in the future…”

• Caching images in WinRT (Bart Wullems)

• • “WinRT will out-of-the-box cache all the images you download for your app. The cache will automatically be used when you set the image source to a URL…”

• Implementing INotifyDataErrorInfo validation in Windows 8 WinRT XAML applications (Byteflux)

• • “To my big surprise the Microsoft team behind the WinRT XAML framework has decided not to include the built-in support for validation that exists in the WPF and Silverlight frameworks. Anyway, for anyone that needs an alternative, I have created a set of helper classes to make things easier…”