• Delivering reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “As we developed the app model for Windows 8 and the new Metro style apps, a key architectural requirement has been to deliver apps to customers that can be used with confidence–confidence that apps will be well-behaved with respect to resources, that apps will not interfere with other apps, that apps use system resources with your permission, that apps can be installed and uninstalled with ease, and so on. These attributes require a robust platform and strong set of tools for developers. This is an effort that requires a fresh start and cannot be retrofitted on an existing system. Windows 8 is a fresh start in this regard. This post details some of the work we have done at the platform level to deliver reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps. This post is authored by John Hazen, a program manager on our Developer Experience team.”

Metro App Development

• Why Developers Should Care About Design, and How Metro Helps (G. Andrew Duthie)

• “I’m going to avoid casting aspersions on my fellow developers and instead simply own up to my own failings…I’ve been developing software since I was 10 years old (my first program was written in BASIC on a Commodore PET), and professionally for well over a decade, and for most of that time, I believed that design was someone else’s job, and that it didn’t matter whether I could design my way out of a paper bag. WRONG! Design is everyone’s responsibility, at least to some degree. …”

• The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World (Jeremy Likness)

• “In my last blog post, I covered how to wrap your arms around the Task class and its relationship to the new async and await keywords. I mentioned that the post was focused on the .NET Framework only because the Windows Runtime handles these operations differently. In this post, I’ll cover what those differences are. Task is a Task is a Task … First, in the Windows Runtime, a Task is a Task … is a Task. You can write your code to return a Task or Task in your Windows 8 Metro applications. If you are going to expose a Windows Runtime (WinRT) component, however, one of the rules is that you must always return a WinRT type. For asynchronous operations, there are four types allowed…”

• .NET 4.5 Improvements for Cloud and Server Applications (Somasegar)

• “I’ve had multiple meetings recently with customers and press where the topic of .NET development has come up, particularly as it relates to the cloud and server. They’ve heard about the extensive work we’ve done with Visual Studio 11 to enable the client-side development of Metro style apps for Windows 8 using C#, Visual Basic, C++, and JavaScript, and they’re curious to learn what improvements have been made for server-side development using .NET. From my perspective, .NET is already the richest and most productive way for developers to create server-side applications that run in the cloud and on premises, and to do so with symmetry across both. With .NET 4 available today on Windows Server and in Windows Azure, developers have in place the languages, libraries, frameworks, and capabilities necessary to create next-generation solutions, whether for the enterprise or for a consumer application.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• 5 Best Windows 8 Metro Apps Yet (SmashinGeeks)

• “Windows 8 is popular because of its Metro Interface, and without which it couldn’t be as successful as it is now. We have gathered 5 of the Best Windows 8 Metro Apps for those who are using Windows 8 Consumer or Developer Preview. These Apps are specially made with the architecture of Windows 8, giving you the look and feel of Metro User Interface in the Application. Here is our list of Top 5 Windows 8 Metro Apps Built till now. There are not more in even Microsoft Store. So, we have collected the ones which are top in the list and most popular.”

Books

• Reminder: Programming Windows, Sixth Edition available for preorder

• “Programming Windows, Sixth Edition” by Charles Petzold (eBook) is available for preorder at the discounted price of $10 which includes preview copies for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Release Preview in addition to the final eBook. This discounted price will only be available for two weeks.

• Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK (Visual Studio Gallery)

• “By using the Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK, you can create tool windows, menu commands, editor extensions, isolated shell projects, and other extensions for Visual Studio. The SDK also helps you test and debug your extensions in an experimental instance of Visual Studio so that your primary development environment is not changed unexpectedly. After you install the SDK, you can use the shortcuts on the Start menu to find the online documentation, samples, and other developer resources.”

Metro App Development

• Being productive when your app is offscreen (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

• “In the Managing app lifecycle post, Adam Barrus described the new app lifecycle introduced in Windows 8. The most common question we hear is “what if my app has to do something important when it is not on screen, for example, download a file or email or play music”? In this two part series, I’ll tell you about the different types of activities that an app can do when it’s in the background and show some code examples to that support these scenarios.”

• What Metro style app packages are installed? (Mike Ormond)

• “There comes a time when you’ll want to see a list of all the Metro style app packages installed on your Windows 8 machine. Occasionally you may need to do this in order to fix a registration issue – I’ve seen this happen occasionally in Consumer Preview – manually removing the app package can resolve it. In addition, there’s a limit to the number of side-loaded apps you can have installed on the Consumer Preview. If you exceed the limit you wont be able to renew your developer licence. I hit this issue at one of our events last week and seeing a complete list of all the installed app packages was very useful.”

• Learning XAudio2 (Games for Windows and the DirectX SDK)

• “With the inclusion of XAudio2 in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, there’s been renewed interest in learning how to use this API. The documentation on MSDN is of course a great place to start, and be sure to read through the entire Programmer’s Guide as there’s lots of great information throughout. You should also start by watching the BUILD 2011 presentation on audio. There are also a number of presentations from past Gamefest events that cover audio and XAudio2. While these talks are focused on the older versions, XAudio 2.8 is essentially the same design and API with a few specific differences so this information is all very relevant.”

• Get coordinates from directmath vectors in Windows 8 and C++ (Secret Microsoft Communications)

• “Vectors operations are similar to Matrix operations, but there is usually a need for faster calculations. On one of my jobs in the 1980s we had to create a digital system that could do calculations very rapidly and with the power supply had to be lighter and smaller then a similar electrical analog computer that used differential voltages. It was a struggle, literally, the differential analog based calculations were more accurate and could take a mechanical beating, especially if an electro-magnetic pulse went off near by, although I never understood why since the EMP would generate weird voltages. Eventually we were able to add more features and got a buy off of the design. But for most of the history of humans, there were no digital computers, and there a lot of natural analog computers, there are no natural digital computers.”

• Metro on Windows 8 – Illegal characters in path (Nick Berardi)

• “As I was developing my first Metro App today I came upon this weird error. … Not knowing what to do, because the error is vague and cryptic. I decided to throw a hail mary pass and remove the application I was developing from the start menu. And lo and behold this was the problem. I know this is still a beta framework and everything, but can the Windows team please throw us a bone and put in exceptions that actually mean something.”

Other

• Reminder: Programming Windows, Sixth Edition available for preorder

• Just reminding everyone that today, May 17th, is the first day that you can preorder “Programming Windows, Sixth Edition” by Charles Petzold (eBook) at the discounted price of $10 which includes preview copies for the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Release Preview in addition to the final eBook. This discounted price will only be available for two weeks.

• Windows 8 Camp in a Box download (Windows 8 CP) – C#/Js Resources, HOL’s, Samples and Presentations from the Windows 8 Dev Camps (Greg Duncan)

• “Windows Camps are free Windows 8 trainings to jumpstart your Windows 8 Metro style app development. You can find a camp near you via our registration site: http://www.devcamps.ms/windows. “Windows Camp in a box” is an off-line version of the resources we use for our camps. Using this kit, you can review the decks, do the hands-on-labs, or get additional resources. If you’ve been to a Windows 8 Dev Camp, are thinking about it, or would rather just see the stuff, here’s a download for ya…”

• The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World (Jeremy Likness)

• “In my last blog post, I covered how to wrap your arms around the Task class and its relationship to the new async and await keywords. I mentioned that the post was focused on the .NET Framework only because the Windows Runtime handles these operations differently. In this post, I’ll cover what those differences are.”

• WinRT Sample: A quick look at Semantic Zoom (Bill Wagner)

• “Yes, this is yet another of those notes about one of the Metro samples. This one discusses grouped views and semantic zoom. As was true in many of the recent samples, this one focuses on many of the features of Windows RT XAML. This one shows grouped data in grid views, and semantic zoom. I didn’t take notes on the headers part of the sample, because it’s really quite straightforward. The semantic zoom is pretty cool though. Even here, the code (and the XAML) is very straightforward. In fact, almost everything is in the XAML.”

• Tips for the Windows 8 Simulator (Anthony Baker)

• “The Windows 8 simulator is quite handy to test how your app would behave on a device. You can preview your application interacting with the operating system and other apps, reacting to some common gestures and running under different orientations, namely landscape and portrait mode. To launch the simulator for the first time, the easier way is to launch it from Visual Studio 2011 Beta. Instead of running it from the “Local Machine”, select to run your app on the simulator. Once the simulator launches, you can pin it to the taskbar.”

• Windows 8 Tricks: Uninstalling Hidden Application Packages (Anthony Baker)

• “It turns out that you can get into a situation where you can’t install an application on the current Windows 8 Consumer Preview from the Windows Store even if you can’t find that application anywhere in your Windows start screen. According to the UK MSDN Team, this can happen when an application is not uninstalled properly for some reason. What happens then is that when trying to install the app again, the OS finds records of the app being installed already so it doesn’t allows you to install it again.”

• Metro Answers: Can I use the Serial Port? (Jerry Nixon)

• “The Question – Using a WinRT Metro style application, is it possible to access custom devices that connect using a serial port? The Short Answer – The short answer is no. With this exception: the device is on USB (with a dongle) with a modern driver exposing IOCTLS device information – this gives Metro applications device access. The Long Answer…”

• Keeping your family safer with Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “One of the intrinsic capabilities of Windows 8 is the ability to use multiple accounts on any PC. This makes it much easier for parents to use tools that can help protect their children from content on the Internet as they see fit. It is also a great way for each family member to maintain their own unique online identity while still sharing a single PC. Microsoft has been a leader in creating tools to help maintain a safe computing environment for all users as well as for parents in particular. With Windows 8 we have substantially improved the family safety features and services available. Phil Sohn, the senior program manager lead for Family Safety, describes how Family Safety features will work in Windows 8. “

• Sharing Links from IE10 on Windows 8 (IEBlog)

• “Sharing a link to a Web page is a common activity on the PC, and it gets better with IE10 on Windows 8. One of the new features on Windows 8 is the Share charm, which allows you to seamlessly send content between apps on your PC. Previously, if you wanted to share an interesting article with your friend, or post a funny picture on your blog, you’d copy the link from the address bar, switch to a different site or app, and then paste it. Now, with the Windows 8 Share charm, you can share directly from the browser without ever leaving your current page.”

Metro App Development

• From Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 Metro, one app’s journey (Coding4Fun Blog)

• “Last week we highlighted Den Delimarsky’s Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone 7 app. On this Metro Monday, seems fitting to pair that post up with this one. With Windows 8 and Metro a common question is, “How hard is it to re-use, re-purpose or port a Windows Phone 7 app to a Windows 8 Metro Style app?” Den’s stepped up and answered that very question…”

• Windows 8 – Ux Case Studies (Ubelly)

• “Some of the UX aspects of Metro style applications introduce new navigational concepts. These may take people who have been working with the web and other platforms a little while to get used to. However, to speed up your understanding there’s 2 great case studies in the Windows Dev Centre that are worth taking a look at. These can help you to use the existing content and ideas that you have in place and translate them into Metro style applications.”

• Windows 8 HTML5 Metro Style App: How to create a small RSS reader in 30min (part 2/2) (David Rousset)

• “We’re now going to see how to display the details of each article. We will use for that a transition animation, we will play with the simulator and we will continue to discover Blend to use CSS3 Multi-columns for instance. Like in the previous article, you’ll find a video as well as the source code to download at the end of the article. This article is the second part of this one: Windows 8 HTML5 Metro Style App: How to create a small RSS reader in 30min (part 1/2)”

• Integrating With Windows 8 Share Charm – Long Running Shares – Multiple data providers (Going Metro Blog)

• “In the previous blog post http://blogs.msdn.com/b/going_metro/archive/2012/05/12/integrating-with-windows-8-share-charm-long-running-shares.aspx we have seen how to handle long running shares. I wanted to share one more thing that I have observed. In the previous example, we have used the “SetDataProvider” method to specify the callback method which provides the Bitmap data . What if I have set other type of data like Text or Html which also require some asynchronous processing.”

• Working with Streams: Creating RandomAccessStreamReference from Image downloaded from Web. (Going Metro Blog)

• “I am currently writing my first windows 8 applications. One of the user scenario’s was, to be download images from a website and to be able to share it with other apps using share contract. I had to spend quite a bit of time to figure out how to do this. I decided to put together a blog post with various samples on how to work with streams.”

• TWC9: VS11 RC UI Updates, Portable Library v2 Beta, Hilo for Win 8 and more (Channel 9)

• “This week on Channel 9, Dan and Clint discuss the week’s top developer news, including: [0:28] Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC (Monty Hammontree), [2:05] Announcing Portable Library Tools 2 Beta for Visual, Studio 2010 [Mircea] (BCL Team), [3:57] Check out Hilo for Windows 8! (Thomas Petchel), http://hilo.codeplex.com, [4:56] Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Looking back-what would we do differently (12 of 12) (Andreas, Hammar, Håkan Reis and Peter von Lochow), [6:09] .NET 4.5 Baby Steps: Series Index (Robert MacLean), [7:13] Visual Studio 2010: Version and update information tool, VersionInfo (Terje Sandstrom), [8:07] Scott Guthrie on Cloud-Powered Revolutions (Jonathan Rozenblit and Scott Guthrie)”

• Can’t make it to a Windows 8 Dev Camp? (Jim Blizzard)

• “. . . But wish you could? You’re in luck! Microsoft is going to be delivering the content via webcasts, beginning TODAY (May 14) at 11:30 AM Eastern. Too late for today’s session. Here is the session list via Jamie. Good lunchtime feasting! (for Eastern Time Zone anyway) And here it is, for your convenience. . .”

• Customizing Code Coverage in Visual Studio 11 (Sudhakar’s WebLog)

• “The Visual Studio 11 Code Coverage tool by default analyzes all solution binaries (exe / dll) that get loaded during unit tests. We suggest you retain this default; this works most of the times. However, there may be cases where you want to customize this behavior. One common case is to include / exclude specific binaries from code coverage. When this is done, there is a possibility you might lose track of new assemblies introduced into the project, and not measure code coverage for them. Still, if it needs to be done, it can be achieved by customizing code coverage settings. The other common case is to specify symbol search path for binaries that don’t have symbols installed locally. This blog talks about customizing code coverage for scenarios like these.”

Metro App Development

• MSDN Webcast series on building Metro style apps (Jaime Rodriguez )

• “A few colleague evangelists are doing a series on MSDN Webcasts on building Windows 8 Metro style apps. Catch the whole series and get a very concise, yet comprehensive introduction to building Metro style apps. See below for abstracts and presenter for each session, click on the title for each session to visit the registration page for that session. Each session is one hour.”

• Windows 8 HTML5 Metro Style App: How to create a small RSS reader in 30min (part 1/2) (David Rousset)

• “Starting from scratch, we’re going to learn through these 2 tutorials how to build a small RSS reader with HTML5, CSS3 and WinJS, the Microsoft JavaScript framework for Windows 8 Metro Style Apps. We’ll try also to follow the Metro design guidelines by using Expression Blend 5. If everything goes fine, you should be able to follow these 2 articles in 30 minutes. This first article will help you to create the welcome screen that will use a WinJS ListView control. This control will display all the blog posts recently published via nice thumbnails. The 2nd one will work on the detail view displayed when you’ll click on one of the items. At last, you’ll find a video at the end of this article playing in real-time the following steps as well as the final solution to download. See them as useful complementary resources if you need to clarify some parts of this article.”

• Integrating With Windows 8 Share Charm – Long Running Shares (Going Metro Blog)

• “In the previous posts, I have explained about the Sharing and Receiving data. In this post, I will discuss the concept of Long Running Shares, using a sample App called “Bing Images”. The Bing Images app can be used to search for images. In the previous posts I wrote code to share the Uri of the image. I am going to implement functionality to be able to share the image along with the Url.”

• Diagnosing JavaScript Errors Faster with Error.stack (IEBlog)

• “IE10 in Windows 8 Consumer Preview includes support for Error.stack, which enables Web developers to diagnose and correct bugs faster, especially those that are difficult to reproduce. Developers can build amazing apps with the capabilities of Web platforms that power today’s modern browsers. In Windows 8, we expose that power through both Internet Explorer 10 and Metro style apps in JavaScript. The increasing power and complexity of these apps means developers need better tools like Error.stack for handling errors and diagnosing bugs.”

• Create and access global variables in Windows 8 C# Metro app (Zubair Ahmed)

• “If you would like to use a global variable in your WinRT C# app, one of the ways to do that is below. Declare a global public variable and a static context of your current app in App.xaml.cs, in the C# code below from Metro RSS Reader I have declared the ARGB color that I want to use across all Frames in the app.”

• My Favorite Features: Improved Tooling in Visual Studio 11 for JavaScript Developers (Jason Zander)

• “I’ve been working on some coding projects lately, and spending a lot of time in Visual Studio 11. I wanted to start a series to share some of my favorite features that I’ve enjoyed using in the product. One feature that I ended up using a lot, while working with jquery and jquerymobile, is the new JavaScript tooling support.”

Metro App Development

• How to get your app into the Windows Store (Matt Harrington)

• “Windows 8 is coming in the near future. You can download, use it, and develop apps for it today. As of May 2012, the Windows Store is not open for everyone to deploy. However, we are looking for the first wave of great applications which highlight the power of Metro and Windows 8, especially from developers who want to get to market first and build their brand. In order to submit your application today you need a token. This is something I can help you get.”

• Trending forum topics: Answering your questions (Windows 8 app developer blog)

• “When learning a new development platform I always find some hurdles getting my app working just the way I want it to. Like me, many of you have used our forums to get answers to the issues you run into. For this post we selected some of the most popular forum topics to highlight and provide more resources to help keep you coding. App settings and data, applying consistent colors and styles, designing for multiple languages and cultures, and Animating Metro style controls were all highly posted, viewed and replied topics. For each topic I selected resources and put them in a table. Each table is organized with quickstarts on top, SDK samples next, and in-depth documentation last. Quickstarts are a great place to start because they contain explanations and code snippets that provide the background that helps you understand the API design. SDK samples provide a deeper dive, and are a great place to start if you know what you need to do, but you just need to see an example to get started. Docs are there if you need the deepest dive; use these when you want to understand the full capability of some feature you’re already familiar with.”

• Making customer-focused decisions with Adoption reports (Windows Store for developers)

• “With Windows 8, we provide you powerful tools in Visual Studio, and a rich API set to help you build great Metro style apps. But we know that you don’t want to build just a great app—you want to build successful apps. We understand we have a responsibility to provide you with substantive data about your apps—data that gives you the ability to make customer-focused, data-driven decisions. In this post, Deepak Mukunthu, a Program Manager on the Developer Analytics team, describes some of the app reports we provide. This post is the first in a series that will cover the app and Store data we make available to developers to help developers succeed with their current and future apps.”

• Designing a Windows 8 Metro style app starting from an existing Windows Phone app – Design Case Study Part 1 (Telerik Blogs)

• “A lot of the Windows Phone developers out there are already considering porting their Windows Phone apps to Windows 8. May be you are thinking: from Metro to Metro – it has to be pretty easy and straightforward, doesn’t it? Let’s see if this is true. This case study gives insights into porting the design of an existing Windows Phone app to a Windows 8 Metro app. It discusses the main similarities and differences between the design “

• GDI+ in a Windows 8 C# Metro Application – Experimenting for Fun (Telerik Blogs)

• “It’s been about two months since Windows 8 Consumer Preview is out and we, at Telerik, have been enjoying the new framework and all the features it offers. One of the aspects we’ve been exploring is the immediate mode rendering and what options the new runtime offers. XAML is in the core of WinRT (Windows Runtime) and it offers rich presentation capabilities but sometimes, especially on devices with limited hardware resources, we need to achieve even better performance to get up to the “fast and fluid” Metro applications’ standard. As I explained in this blog post, Direct2D is undoubtedly the best choice when it comes to presenting heavy visual scenes that are frequently updated. Another immediate-mode rendering option is the WriteableBitmap class where you can directly update pixels on the screen. One of the things that is surprisingly missing in WinRT is the ability to render a XAML UIElement on a WriteableBitmap instance. So, in case you need to use the WriteableBitmap class in your application, the only solution would be to have your own rendering engine that manipulates the pixels of the bitmap. Fortunately, the WriteableBitmapEx solution, by Rene Schulte, has already been ported to WinRT and it can serve your needs.”

• Five things to know before you start developing Windows 8 Metro apps (Lee Whitney)

• “The only way to build a mobile tablet app for all versions of Windows 8 will be to use the new Metro application framework, and it’s much different than previous Microsoft platforms. Developing Metro apps for Windows 8 is a combination of leveraging your existing skill sets and learning concepts that are new to the platform. Following are five things that make developing Metro apps new and different. Food for thought as you dive into new waters and create the next great app that will earn you fame and fortune.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• LINQ to Twitter (Joe Mayo)

• “LINQ to Twitter is a 3rd party LINQ Provider for the Twitter micro-blogging service. It uses standard LINQ syntax for queries and includes method calls for changes via the Twitter API. This is an early beta version of LINQ to Twitter for Windows 8.”

Other

• dotPeek 1.0 is Released (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)

• “Free .NET decompiler and assembly browser from JetBrains is now officially live! Please download dotPeek 1.0 and enjoy high-standard decompilation with ReSharper-inspired navigation and search!”

• Redesigning chkdsk and the new NTFS health model (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “We’ve written about tons of improvements in the OS kernel, networking, and file system. While for most client PCs, the tried and true chkdsk utility is one we rarely use anymore except in very rare circumstances, we are using Window 8 as an opportunity to improve this utility. We wanted to focus on rethinking how the utility works to increase availability and reduce downtime due to chkdsk operations. In looking at the real world usage of chkdsk, we note that corruptions are exceedingly rare though running chkdsk is not. While we’ve worked hard to reduce the manual invocation of disk tools (like defrag) we know many prefer to run them manually “just in case” and so we worked to improve the overall throughput of chkdsk, since running it reduces availability of the machine. With disk capacities becoming extremely large and multi-disk systems more common, we wanted to improve the utility. Kiran Bangalore, a program manager on our core system team, authored this post.”

Metro App Development

• Windows 8 demo-Toast notifications (David Burela)

• “I have had requests to share the Windows 8 demos that I gave at the Windows 8 Developer camp. The source code for this blog post is available on Github at https://github.com/DavidBurela/Win8Demo-Notifications. Toast notifications allow your application to prompt your users when something has happened in your application that may not be currently viewable on the screen. An example being an auction application. The user flags to watch an item. The user than navigates away and looks at other items. Later the application can show a toast notification warning the user that there is only 5 minutes of bidding remaining.”

• Running Unit Tests for Windows Metro style apps from Command Line (Vikram Agrawal)

• “Visual Studio 11 Beta was announced sometime back along with Win 8 consumer preview in which Unit testing has been redefined and support for testing Windows Metro style apps is added. Tests for Metro style apps can be run from Visual Studio, Command Line and Team Build. Steps to create and run unit test from Visual Studio and Team Build are described in Walkthrough: Creating and Running Unit Tests for Metro style Applications and Running Windows 8 Metro style tests in TeamBuild respectively. This post explains how to run Unit Test for Metro style apps from Command Line tool (vstest.console.exe)”

• Implement a NavigationService for MVVM in Metro Applications (Andrea Boschin)

• “When you write a Metro-style app using the MVVM pattern, you are requested to abstract navigation for the pattern purposes. The problem comes from having navigation methods (Navigate, GoBack, etc…) available only in the View via the Frame control and navigate from the ViewModel may be an hard task. During the development of my last metro app for my user group, I found a stylish way of creating a NavigationService to be injected in ViewModels. The trick is to create a NavigationService class and let it create and initialize the RootFrame and inject it into the Window.Current.Content.”

• Creating app bar buttons in WinRT (Richard Garside)

• “If you start a new blank Windows 8 App in Visual Studio you get loads of app bar button styles to choose from in StandardStyles.xaml including … If that list doesn’t quite cover you then it’s really easy to create a metro button style that will. The easiest way is to create a style based on AppBarButton and to use an icon from the font Segoe UI Symbol. The advantage of using a font is that it is automatically scaleable. Segoe UI Symbol has a lot of symbols for you to choose from and is the font used by AppBarButtonStyle, which we are basing our style on. You can use Character Map to find a good one, or I’ve included some of my favourites at the end of this post. Here is my style for a crop button. Include this style in a resource dictionary that will be accessible to all the xaml files that need it…”

• Top 10 Windows 8 Features #7: Client-side Hyper-V (ReadWriteWeb)

• “Server-side virtualization is a modern-day fact of life. Today’s data centers pool their processing, storage and even network resources to create macrocosmic virtual-machine entities that transcend the boundaries of hardware. We call that “the cloud.” With Windows 8, Microsoft extends its server-class hypervisor platform to the desktop. And no, it’s not just a play for enthusiasts and testers: There’s a solid reason for Hyper-V to become the backbone of future Windows versions.”

• Windows 8 Feature Focus: Charms (Paul Thurrott)

• “While befuddled new Windows 8 users certainly have a lot on their plate when it comes to using this operating system version, I have a few tips about getting up to speed quickly. Key among these is learning the new user interfaces that are available system-wide, from the Start screen, the desktop, and in all Metro-style apps. And the most important of these interfaces, by far, is the Charms.”

Visual Studio 11

• Visual Studio 11 User Interface Updates Coming in RC (The Visual Studio Blog)

• “With the release of Visual Studio 11 Beta back in February of this year, we introduced changes to the user experience based on two core design principles, the first being to give you more space for your content and the second being to draw more focus to that content. Since the debut of these changes there’s been significant community response and feedback. We’ve taken this feedback and based on what we heard have made a number of changes planned for Visual Studio 11 RC. I want to thank you for your continued feedback through this blog, and also through the various other community channels – please keep it coming. The purpose of this post is to provide you with an update on the changes we’ve made since beta. I’ve also included a brief summary of the beta feedback that we’ve leveraged in making these updates.”

Metro App Development

• Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Looking back-what would we do differently (12 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

• “We started with a Windows Phone application and converted it to a Windows 8 equivalent. The end result was far from a clone, neither visually nor in function, but that was never the goal. The goal was to take a real application through the trembling steps of converting into a fully functional prototype on Windows 8. The idea of this last post in the series is to look back and discuss what we had done differently building the Windows Phone app, knowing what we know now.”

• Adding Touch support to 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. I wanted to add Touch Support to the game enabling players to use their fingers to destroy the on screen ships. This meant supporting multiple fingers on screen at the same time as well still supporting mouse for players who did not own a touch device. Thankfully this is super easy to do via the MSPointer API’s!”

Other

• New Git Homepage (Scott Chacon)

• “For the last few months a few of us here at GitHub have been working on a new homepage for the Git project. I designed the original site years ago as a simple refresh of the content that Petr Baudis had put up at git.or.cz – the first Git project homepage – and have been maintaining it ever since. Since then I’ve gotten tons of feedback on how the page could be better and what people want out of it. When kernel.org went down several months ago, taking all of the hosted Git documentation and wiki with it, I decided this would be a good time to make a new and improved homepage for Git. Today I’m proud to announce the new git-scm.com!”

• Visual Studio 11 beta – Tooling for SQL Server Compact (ErikEJ)

• “Visual Studio 11 beta includes SQL Server Compact 4.0 SP1 CTP1, as I blogged about here. In this post, I will describe in greater detail the tooling support included with Visual Studio 11 beta. Notice the Visual Studio 11 is in beta, and things can change before release.”

• Help! Visual Studio 11 Beta Dark Theme incorrectly using White Background (Dave Isbitski)

• “I ran across an issue with Visual Studio 2011 Ultimate Beta this morning and figured I would share the solution here with everyone. It may exist in Visual Studio 2011 Express Beta as well I just haven’t seen it yet myself. The issue began when I installed Visual Studio 2011 Ultimate Beta and selected a Web Developer layout. I later went in and reset my settings to be the C# default layout. When I selected the Dark Theme (which I’ve now become quite used to) the UI itself switched fine but the code window still had the Light theme colors! Here is a screenshot to illustrate what I mean…”

Metro App Development

• Windows 8 Metro: Layout, view states and navigation (Andrea Boschin)

• “The target devices where it is expected Windows 8 to runs are something of really amazing, since it should run from tablet devices of the most various sizes to the the widest monitor. Dealing with various display sizes and with mobile devices requires new capabilities that go beyond the ones required to run on a simple smartphone. First of all you need to adapt the size of your app to the screen, probably reducing or increasing the amount of content you show to the user. Connected with the use of fingers instead of mouse, it is required you are able to use all available space on the screen, expecially with low resolutions. Finally you have to deal with orientation. It is easy and natural to rotate the screen to best fit the content you are using, as an example using a vertical orientation while reading a page.”

• Windows 8 application Theming (Michiel Post)

• “As a Windows Phone developer I wondered if Windows 8 had the same theming model. With a Dark or a Light theme and an accent color which the user can choose. When you want to do full custom branding for your application, supporting both the Dark and Light theme can be a lot of work with Windows Phone. In Windows 8, you wont have this problem. The user can not choose between a dark or a light theme. You, as a developer, can choose a Dark or a Light theme as starting point for your app. You can do this by setting RequestedTheme=”Light” at the top of your App.xaml. The Dark theme is the default. This modifies all the default system styles.”

• CLR 4.5: .Net Framework Kernel Improvements (Ahmed Elmalt)

• “In this post I’ll go through some of the enhancements and improvements done by the CLR team as part of the performance improvements in .Net 4.5. In most cases developers will not have to do anything different to take advantage of the new stuff, it will just works whenever the new framework libraries are used.”

• [Windows 8] How to rescale an image in a Background task ? (Thomas LEBRUN)

• “In one of his blog post (here or here, for the French version), the Windows 8 Development Master David Catuhe explained how to generate and to rescale a new picture for a tile (secondary or not). This is very useful if you’re not able to modify the service delivering the images to rescale them automatically. Its technique need you to use an Image HTML element and, unfortunately, you’re not allowed to use graphical components in a Windows 8 background task. So here is the version I propose, which is quite different…”

• Animated gifs in XAML/C# (Jose Fajardo)

• “Someone the other day tweeted a link to some very cool animated gifs. I love animated gifs!! I have always wanted animated gifs in Silverlight/WPF BUT for reasons unknown they never came. They would have been perfect for A LOT of scenarios where creating storyboard animations would have been overkill. Well turns out WinRT XAML, firmly rooted in Silverlight XAML, also doesn’t have GIF support nor will it probably ever get it. BUT it does have WinRT support and it has access to DirectX & WIC via SharpDx!!”

• Improve Mobile User Experience With an HTML5 Metro UI Tiles (Chris Love)

• “If you know me you know over the past few years I have been a big fan of Metro UI and the tiles. I have been hacking at doing the Metro UI in web applications for a while now, so there are a lot of things I have learned, and some I have not quite mastered yet. Doing tiles is a big part of Metro and this is a relatively easy trick to pull off using common CSS techniques. I created what I refer to as the FourSquare prototype last summer for my team to build the Moesion home screen.”

• Episode 79 – Adding Push Notifications to Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps using Windows Azure (Channel 9)

• “In this episode, our very own Nick Harris —Technical Evangelist for Windows Azure and all round good guy — builds on the foundational knowledge presented in Cloud Cover Episode 73 and takes us on a deeper dive into how add Push Notifications to both Windows 8 and Windows Phone applications using MPNS, WNS, Windows Azure and a number of re-usable NuGet packages. The session is code heavy so enjoy!”

Apps & Code to Look At

• One Bitmap to Rule Them All – WriteableBitmapEx for WinRT Metro Style (Rene Schulte)

• “A couple of weeks ago we added official WPF support to WriteableBitmapEx. Today I’m happy to announce that WriteableBitmapEx now also officially supports Windows 8 Metro Stlye WinRT .NET XAML. With that WriteableBitmapEx is now available for 4 platforms: WPF, Silverlight, Silverlight for Windows Phone and Metro Style WinRT.NET. Although Direct2D is the best solution for fast 2D graphics with Windows 8 Metro Style, I think there are scenarios where the WriteableBitmapEx could be helpful, esp. when using C# with XAML. I also know that some devs were waiting for this to port their Windows Phone apps to Windows 8 Metro Style.”

• Updated Better Grid Application template (Brent Schooley)

• “When I posted the “Better Grid Application” template for Metro style app development in XAML, I posted the wrong file. It was an older version of the template. Sorry about that. I have updated the file in the original post but here is the link again:”

• FAQ – DVD playback and Windows Media Center in Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “We thought we would follow up the previous post with an FAQ which is based on the comments and discussions, so Bernardo put this together so things are in one place. Some of these might be introductory for some but since the comments covered a lot of topics, it seemed reasonable to start at the beginning.”

Visual Studio 11

• Visual Studio 11 – live webcast series in May and June (Jim Blizzard)

• “Looking for a little Visual Studio 11 action? If so, you’re going to be in heaven for the next two months. Check out this list of live webcasts during May and June.”

• Updated NUnit Plugin for VS11 Released (Peter Provost)

• “Good news!! Last night I got an email from Charlie Poole, the maintainer of NUnit pointing me to a blog post he’d just made … This is great news because if you’ve tried to use NUnit with VS11 Beta before now, you probably noticed that you couldn’t actually run or debug a selected test or tests. When you tried, you ended up either getting a failed run or having all tests run. Clearly not good. The fix was pretty simple, and I want to thank our team for helping find the issue and also of course thank Charlie for getting it out to customers to get them unblocked while using NUnit.”

• Quick Tip – Multi Project Solution in VS11 (Noel Arlante)

• “I’m using Visual Studio 11 since it was released as Beta. What can I say, I really get the new design and layout (monochrome and gylphs) which not every developer appreciates. But beyond design and layout I really like the new search feature and the navigation features added in the Solutions Explorer section. Going to the quick tip, if you have created a project in Visual Studio 11 Beta and would want to add another project under the same solution you would get this …”

• Unit Test a project having external dependency(WCF Proxy) using Fakes & Visual Studio 11 Beta (Atul Verma)

• “In this post I’ll explain the steps to generate unit tests for a project which calls a WCF service using Fakes. Microsoft Fakes is an isolation framework for creating delegate-based test stubs and shims in .NET Framework applications. The Fakes framework can be used to shim any .NET method, including non-virtual and static methods in sealed types. The Fakes framework helps developers create, maintain, and inject dummy implementations in their unit tests. The Fakes framework generates and maintains stub types and shim types for a system under test.”

Metro App Development

• Porting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Background agents (11 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

• “The Mango (7.1) update for Windows Phone brought us a lot of goodies including the Scheduled Task Agent. It allowed us to create a feeling of push notifications without actually doing any server push implementation. In the Reseguiden app we use the background agents to do new searches for trips and displaying the top result in the app tile. Sort of a budget-push. So, the question is, does the same functionality exist in Windows 8? The answer is yes; same same but different.”

• Using FX effects in your managed metro apps (Jose Fajardo)

• “In the WPF and Silverlight “desktop” worlds we have the luxury of being able to use shader effects (fx) in our apps, this infrastructure is not available in the “Windows Phone” or “WinRT XAML/C#” worlds. However thanks to SharpDx and the improved hlsl graphics features in VS11 we can now easily use these same fx effects. Let me show you how I consume fx files in my XAML/C# WinRT apps…”

• [Windows 8] Some helpers to use in your developments (Thomas LEBRUN)

• “Some people ask me if there are some helpers available to perform various tasks such manipulating settings, local storage, etc. There are no built-in helpers but for the current Windows 8 application I’m working, I’ve developed some of them and I wanted to share them with the community (note that this helpers are available in Javascript but it should not be hard to translate them in C#):”

• Running Windows App Certification Kit (WACK) tool from Command Prompt (nmarun)

• “In order to understand this blog, I recommend you read the Microsoft’s whitepaper first. I have run the WACK tool quite a few times from the UI (remember to run it in Admin mode, if not Windows8 will pretty much stop responding midway between the test). Turns out you can also run it through command prompt. Here are the complete details for the command…”

• Making Windows Media Center available in Windows 8 (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “In this post we wanted to update you on Media Center and Windows 8, specifically how we will make sure Windows 8 fully supports the capabilities of Media Center as it is in Windows 7. We took the feedback about maintaining the functionality very seriously, and we clearly understood what we’ve heard many of you saying around the value of Media Center for movies, Internet TV, broadcast TV, optical media, music, photos, and all the other scenarios it covers today. Many said in comments and email to us, that so long as the feature is available somehow it is fine.”

Metro App Development

• Integrating With Windows 8 Share Charm – Part 2: Receiving Data (Going Metro Blog)

• “In the previous blog post Integrating with Windows 8 Share Charm – Sharing Data I have discussed how to Share data from an App. In this blog post I will discuss on how to create the target app capable of receiving the shared data.”

• Custom events in WinJS (Jayway Team Blog)

• “In this post, we’ll perform a refactoring that moves some code that controls the AppBar in a Metro application written in HTML5. The code is currently placed in each page in the application and each page searches the DOM for an element with an id ‘appbar’ and then hides or shows a button in the AppBar, depending on if a “full view” button should be visible or not. But even if we have data in the DOM available as global state, it doesn’t mean that we should use it – writing Metro applications in WinJS doesn’t change the fact that encapsulation is still an important property of the design of your application!”

• Windows 8 Metro Style Apps: How to build a great app (Channel 9)

• “You have looked into building Windows 8 Metro Style Applications. But now comes the step of building a great app that integrates with Windows 8 experiences and that has great user interaction. How do you make your app preferred by users? How do you give confidence to users? In this session we look at the Metro style guidelines, how to adopt the Metro Design Principles and some examples of going from ‘meh’ to great! This session focuses on the User Interaction and Experience, so expect little code but lots of input on how to make your app great, whether you are a designer or a developer.”

• Metro style apps and the Win32 API (virtualdub)

• “There’s been a bit of discussion about the difference between “desktop apps” and “Metro style apps” on Windows 8, particularly as it pertains to Windows RT (previously Windows on ARM), which currently isn’t going to allow third party development of desktop apps. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that you can use native C++ code in a Metro style app. Native C++ doesn’t mean you can just recompile an existing C++ app written on top of Win32, though, and there are lots of misconceptions about what this means for converting existing apps to Metro. … Looking at the documentation and the requirements, I’m of the opinion that most C++ apps will require a major rework to conform to Metro app requirements. This is based on the restrictions to Win32 API usage that will require invasive changes to either the C++ code itself or the frameworks that the C++ code is based on. Nevertheless, it’s useful to actually look at the API lists and get an idea of where the trouble spots are, which is what I’m going to do here. Think of this as a what-if exercise, kind of what would happen if someone at work just asked you for a wild guess at what would need to change to retarget Metro.”

• Win32 and Metro-CreateFile(2) (Pavel Yosifovich)

• “When a new Windows version comes out, I’m always curious about the new Windows API (Win32) functions that are added to the release. With Windows 8, things get a little more complicated, as there are desktop apps and there are metro apps. Now, for every Windows API function the documentation states whether this API is valid for desktop apps only or for desktop apps and metro apps. One classic function is CreateFile. This is one of the oldest functions – exists since the very first Windows NT version. In Windows 8, it’s marked for desktop apps only. This may be understandable, as the Windows Runtime has other ways to use files, such as the StorageFile class. However, Windows 8 has a new function called CreateFile2. This one, in contrast to CreateFile, can be used in desktop and metro apps.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• Cocoon (Andy Wilkinson)

• “Cocoon is a framework to support the development of .Net Windows 8 Metro-style applications, in particular those that link to web services. It simplifies accessing, displaying and editing data using standard Metro controls, and allows easy application of the MVVM pattern. For more details, and news on the latest releases visit http://andyonwpf.blogspot.com”

• Cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone: Windows Live, reimagined (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “We have talked quite a bit about SkyDrive and using your Microsoft account for the sign-in and roaming capabilities of Windows 8. These are just two aspects of a broad service infrastructure that you can tap into when using Windows 8 (and Windows Phone, Xbox LIVE, and a host of other services and apps). We want to talk more about the capabilities and features of cloud services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone. To get started, Chris Jones, the VP of our Windows Live group responsible for the development and operations of all of the services and apps, authored this post to introduce the reimagined role of cloud services in Windows 8.”

Metro App Development

• Metro Style Applications – Designing for the User (Lazar Nikolov)

• “It has been months since Windows 8 is available for developers and the need for new applications is growing in a fast pace. And nothing is more exacting than a computer user in 21st century. It’s quite difficult to build the right application, moreover – it’s even more difficult to stay on top and not to be, metaphorically, stepped over by the big players. They always know what exactly the user wants and have the resources to provide it to him. But that’s not always what has to happen after all. You have the power to build what the user wants and even build it so that s/he would feel it so natural to use your Metro application. That is to design the application in a way that using the fingers on the display seems to be a pleasure, but not a challenge.”

• Creating My First Windows Metro-style App (Noel Arlante)

• “I’ve blogged last month on how to get started on building metro-style applications. Since then, I’ve been trying out the sample projects made by the Windows team to help developers be up to speed with Metro-style application development. The official Sample Pack is 306.4MB in size as of this writing. You can even vote a sample request that you would like the Windows team to add in the samples pack – Metro style apps Requests for Samples. The latest completed request is a sample USB Barcode Scanner, nice! After checking on the samples and creating sample projects, I decided to create a basic application with Metro-style. I do not need to look far since one of the article is on how to create a basic Blog Reader. That will be a great app to start with especially if there is a step-by-step guide available.”

• Integrating With Windows 8 Share Charm – Part 1: Sharing Data (Going Metro Blog)

• “This blog post describes the process of implementing sharing in Windows 8. Windows 8 share charms lets the users share content from within the app with other people or apps, and receive shared content. Below is a snapshot of the Images App that I will be using to demonstrate. The app uses “Bing Image Search” API to search for images based on the keyword provided by the user.”

• Simple Camera Capture in Window 8 Metro Style Application (Jim Blizzard)

• “During one of my sessions from the Windows 8 Developer Camp I talked about how easy it is for current .NET developers to write Windows 8 Metro style apps. One slide in particular showed how easy it is to interact with devices, etc., through the Windows Runtime in Windows 8 as compared to how difficult it can be when talking to the Win32 API in a traditional desktop application.”

• Connecting to WCF RIA Services in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using Upshot.js and Knockout.js (Dave Isbitski)

• “After messing around with KnockoutJS inside of Metro Style Apps I decided to dive a little deeper and see what Single Page Applications (particularly Upshot.js) could offer. I’ve gotten asked by more than a few developers how best to connect to their existing WCF RIA Services inside of Metro Style Apps. The approach I took here is one possible solution to help get your started. For those not familiar with Upshot it is a JavaScript Library that allows you to connect to WCF RIA Services. It is by the same great wizards who wrote ASP.NET MVC4 Single Page Applications. and included already in Single Page App templates!”

• Creating a Windows Metro style application in C++ (Filip Ekberg)

• “I am going to step out of my comfort zone a bit and write a post that touches the surface of C++ in Windows 8. Let us start off by looking at an image of what the new WinRT(Windows Runtime) look like… As you can see, there are a lot of powerful ways to create both metro style and desktop applications. Notice that in Metro style applications, XAML is connected to both C++ and C#/VB. During my years of .NET development, the reason for using C# or VB has been; RAD(Rapid Application Development). In a world filled with consultants where the customers only see the end result, it can often be hard to convince that putting down 200% more time using C++ is a great idea.”

• Unblock Files in Windows 8 using PowerShell and Registry (Michael Crump)

• “In case you haven’t noticed, the following “Unblock” button is missing from Windows 8 file properties. This can be a tad annoying when downloading zip files from the internet and answering security prompt after prompt to get the file loaded. So, what did I do? I fixed it by using PowerShell and a quick registry entry.”

Metro App Development

• Fast and Fluid Animations in Your Metro Style App (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

• “In Windows 8, animations are a key component of the Metro style personality and you can bring this personality to your own apps! Here is what’s in this blog post: A brief overview of the animation engine, How to get started using, the Animation Library, Custom animations and how to take advantage of the animation engine improvements, Tips ‘n tricks for incorporating animations in your Metro style apps.”

• Windows 8 and the Future of Xaml Part 6: Tiles, Toasts and Badges (Gill Cleeren)

• “Welcome to part 6 already in this Windows 8 series. Since the goal of this articles is bringing you in touch with all the important aspects of Windows 8 development, we need to dive into tiles. Tiles are therefore the main topic of this very article. If you’re coming from a Windows Phone 7 background, the concept of tiles is probably already familiar to you. However, Windows 8 brings quite a few new things to the table, including the concept of badges. Toasts are also covered here; conceptually, these already existed in Windows Phone 7 development as well but have been adapted for use in a Windows 8 environment.”

• Knowing your Metro Style App package details (nmarun)

• “This article is written on a pre-release version. Things mentioned below are bound to change in future releases. The package details of your application can be read through the Windows.ApplicationModel.Package namespace. So I create a JavaScript blank app with the below code and I see a guid instead of the app name. It turns out VS2011 adds this a guid as the package name when a project is created. You can change it in the package.manifest file to something more sensible…”

• Getting Started with Metro – A Twitter Trend Reader (p1) (Jason Farrell)

• “Its not only because I went to the Windows 8 Developer Event yesterday, I have honestly been meaning to dive into the new features in Windows 8 and take a crack at designing apps with Metro in mind. With that I elected to spend the majority of today working with Windows 8 and attempting to create a simple app I came up with. Twitter tracks trends and the trends are tracked for a few select cities around the world. I wanted to create an application that would allow users to see the full list of countries with cities in which a particular trend is being tracked. Group these “trends” by the country and allow users to dive further in and see the relevant tweets for the particular trend. Very simple.”

• Patch Support in HttpClient (Nigel Sampson)

• “Lately I’ve been working with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient originally from the WebAPI and part of what’s available to build Metro style apps in Windows 8. I really like the way the client has been designed and especially the async /await support. One thing I noticed while working with the GitHub API was that while HttpClient supports the PATCH method there’s no nice helper methods like GetAsync or PostAsync, thankfully it’s very easy to put together so here’s some extension methods to add PatchAsync to HttpClient.”

• WinRT Step-by-Step Tutorial: MVVM + GridView + SemanticZoom (Mikael Koskinen)

• “In this WinRT tutorial we will build a single page application using the following building blocks: XAML & C#, MVVM, Data binding, GridView, SemanticZoom -control. We will start from the scratch, using the “Blank application” template. Then we continue by creating the view model. After the view model is ready we will create the view by adding a page using the “Grouped Items Page” template. At last step we’re going to modify the page to support the SemanticZoom -control.”

• Video Demo: Overview of Xaml Authoring Features in Blend and Visual Studio (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

• “Now that many of you have had the opportunity to check out Kirupa’s Visual Studio Toolbox episode on Channel 9 for visually building HTML apps using Blend you are probably wondering where is the video for XAML authoring? Look no further! I met with Robert Green last week and we walked through building out a simple Metro app starting with the Grid app project template. You can view the recording below (or download a high-quality MP4)…”

• Using Shims in Visual Studio 11 to test untestable code (Ricci Gian Maria)

• “I always strive myself to write testable code, but it is not always easy, especially if you do not follow TDD red-green-refactor mantra. Code written without Unit Testing in mind is usually not so easy to test and when is time to modify code written by other, if you want to create a safety net of Unit Tests to avoid breaking code it is usually an hard task. The main problem is hardcode dependency from static functions because you cannot test a single function or method in isolation, forcing you to use pattern like Back door manipulation that makes test difficult to read, write and maintain. Lets take this code as example…”

• Getting feedback on your Visual Studio 11 Storyboards (Microsoft Visual Studio UK Team)

• “I really love the PowerPoint Storyboarding and the Stakeholder Feedback Client that are part of Visual Studio 11 and using the tools together is a great way of getting feedback on your proposed design. However, just hitting F5 in PowerPoint to launch your presentation will leave the feedback client on top and obscure part of your storyboard.”

• Open Tabs to the Right in Visual Studio 2011 Beta (Anthony Grace)

• “I’ve previously shown how to set this in VS 2010. In the new VS 2011 beta, it’s a little harder to find. In order to change this behavior so that the tabs open to the right of any currently open tabs, go to the Tools drop down menu in Visual Studio and configure as follows:”

Metro App Development

• Filling in the UX Gaps in Metro style Apps – TechBash Edition (Brent Schooley)

• “On Saturday, I gave a presentation at TechBash about Windows 8 application design anddevelopment. The talk introduces the Metro Design principles and shows how to apply these principles to convert a desktop application into a Metro style app. Also as part of this presentation, I prepared a Visual Studio template for Grid Applications that improves on the user and developer experience that Microsoft delivered in their Grid application template. I will have a series of blog posts that goes through the concepts in this presentation in detail at a later date.”

• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week – Day 3 (David Catuhe)

• “Today the menu is about integrating your application into Windows 8 Metro. The first part of the integration was done with the snapped views and settings but it is now time to finish the job with: Search contract, Share contract, File picking contract, Live tile, Secondary tiles. These five subjects are really important for the symbiosis between Windows 8 Metro and your application.”

• Metro design inspiration (Laurent Bugnion)

• “With Windows 8, Microsoft is going to potentially install their new design language called Metro on a massive amount of computers of all shapes, from thin low-powered slates to full scale PCs. However Metro was not born overnight and in fact a lot of research was put into it. In this article we will discuss the origins of the Metro design language, the inspiration that was the source of it all.”

• Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Live tiles (10 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

• “Live tiles was introduced with Windows Phone. Compared to an icon, which only used to start an application, a live tile is more like a window into your application. A window where you can present up to date information even if your application is not running. Live tiles in one of the strengths of Windows Phone and it has, of course, been transferred to Windows 8. But there are differences between live tiles in Windows Phone and Windows 8. With a Windows Phone you had greater limitations in display size and performance. In this post we’ll start with a short overview how live tiles work and then continue with an introduction to live tiles in Windows 8.”

• Windows 8 and ASP.NET Web API – Part 1 – Getting Started (Jon Galloway)

• “Many of the key Windows 8 Metro Style application features either require or can greatly benefit from a connection to online services. ASP.NET Web API is a great fit for these services, as it’s tightly focused around providing HTTP services to applications. I’m starting a series that will look at how to leverage ASP.NET Web API services from Windows 8 applications. In this first post in the series, we’ll begin with a simple C# Windows 8 Metro Style application that displays data from the ASP.NET Web API Contact Manager sample. Once we’ve got the basics locked down, we’ll move on to some more complex topics. I’m thinking Live Tiles and Notifications, but I’m interested in your ideas of where to go next, so please let me know in the comments.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• Metro RSS Reader: Free and open source Metro Application for Windows 8 (Zubair Ahmed)

• “Those that follow me on twitter know that for couple of weeks I am working on a RSS/Atom news feed reader application framework, it is based on the Metro User interface format for Windows 8. It is a completely free and open source application available from Codeplex.com”

• Visual Studio 11 Beta: Test Controller Goes 64 Bit!! (Rubel’s Blog)

• “Visual Studio 2010 supported 64 bit Test Agent which used to allow us to do 64bit test runs as explained here. But Test Controller was capable of running in 32 bit mode only. As a 32 bit process, it was limited to 2GB of memory. This causes scale issues sometimes as QTController process starts throwing “Out of Memory” exceptions as it approaches 2GB limit. This eventually causes abort of Load Test run. Good news is that Visual Studio 11 Beta supports 64 bit Test Controller.”

Metro App Development

• ‘XamlUIPresenter’ , what are you ? (Jose Fajardo)

• “There is an interesting API in the WinRT XAML namespace that sounds damn interesting BUT no public examples of how to use it. Even the MS folks are quiet about it … What does “XamlUIPresenter” do?”

• Creating a DirectX XAML control using C++/CX (Morten Nielsen)

• “With Windows 8 Metro style apps, you can now also build XAML controls not only with C# and VB.NET but also with C++. If you are a .NET developer you will probably wonder why you would do that – and granted there might be several reasons you wouldn’t. However there is a few nice things about C++ that .NET libraries doesn’t give you: 1. You can use existing C++ libraries and link them directly in. This will allow you to re-use an enormous amount of code already out there. 2. DirectX is a first-class citizen in C++ 11, and officially the only way to use DirectX in XAML (although there are ways to access this from C#).”

• Windows 8 development Links (Martin Beeby)

• “I am just on my way home from a great Windows 8 event in Manchester. We had a full house (sorry that the room was a little packed) and loads of talks. During my two presentations I promised to share some links and example code that I showed during the talk… So here they are…”

Apps & Code to Look At

• WinRT XAML Toolkit (xyzzer)

• “Project Description: A set of controls, extensions and helper classes for Windows Runtime XAML applications”

• Callisto (Tim Heuer)

• “Callisto is a library for use in Windows 8 XAML applications (aka Metro style apps). The XAML framework in Windows.UI.Xaml is great, but has some functionality that isn’t provided in-the-box in a few controls and APIs. Callisto serves to provided added functionality on top of the XAML UI framework for Windows.”

• 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.”

• Visual Studio Fakes Part 2 – Shims (Peter Provost)

• “Let me start by saying Shims are evil. But they are evil by design. They let you do things you otherwise couldn’t do, which is very powerful. They let you do things you might not want to do, and might know you shouldn’t do, but because of the real world of software, you have to do.”

• Visual Studio Toolbox: Designing XAML-based Metro style apps with Visual Studio and Blend (Channel 9)

• “Previously on Visual Studio Toolbox, Robert showed how to use Visual Studio 11 and XAML to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. In this episode, Joanna Mason shows us how to use Visual Studio’s XAML Designer and Blend to make these apps better looking. She demonstrates how powerful Blend is as a design tool and why it is an indispensable tool you should master as you are building XAML-based apps.”

Metro App Development

• Are you a Windows Phone dev who is interested in Windows 8 development? (Jennifer Marsman)

• “First, one of the many things on my TODO list is to take a Windows Phone app that was written in Silverlight and convert it to a Windows 8 app in XAML, to see what some of the major differences and gotchas are. But looking at my calendar, I know that I won’t get to this until June at the earliest. If anyone is doing this right now, I’d be curious to hear what your experiences are. However, many of those “gotchas” and major differences are already documented on MSDN! Check out these MSDN articles to help get you started with porting your Windows Phone app to Windows 8.”

• ICommand issue in Windows 8: Correction! (Laurent Bugnion)

• “I recently published a blog post stating that you need to declare a command as ICommand (instead of RelayCommand) if you want it to work in Windows 8. I even went as far as to modify the MVVM Light code snippets that are used to create commands. In fact, scratch that post… I was wrong! I got a few people writing to me and letting me know that RelayCommand works just fine for them. And now, after I tested again, I cannot reproduce the issue! So I need to be clear, my first post was wrong, and I stand corrected.”

• Illegal characters in path when deploying a Metro Style App (Dave Isbitski)

• “If you are getting an error similar to the one below when deploying your Metro Style App in Visual Studio 11 Beta it’s not you. The following unexpected error occurred during deployment: Illegal characters in path.”

• Using KnockoutJS in Windows 8 Metro Style Apps (Dave Isbitski)

• “What is it? If you have been messing around with JavaScript lately and come from a .Net Background you might have already heard of KnockoutJS. If you haven’t, KnockoutJS is a lightweight, free, JavaScript Library from Steve Sanderson that brings the MVVM pattern to the web world. It’s also filled with #awesome sauce. It wasn’t too long ago that Windows app development and Web app development were two entirely different views of the world. Thanks to the magic of WinRT language projection with Metro Style App development we no longer have to give up all the great libraries we are used from the web when moving onto the desktop.”

• Windows 8 Metro Style- Bits of Binding (Mike Taulty)

• “Data binding is a useful tool in putting an application together and I’ve spent quite a long time with various frameworks that support different aspects of binding. In the last few years, that has mainly revolved around the binding support that you find in XAML based applications for WPF, Silverlight and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7. Recently I put together that simple example of a music application and I thought I’d revisit that with a view to taking a look at how that might be data-bound for both a XAML based app and a HTML based app. I don’t claim that this is complete or definitive or even correct – I’m just some guy on the internet.”

• Toying with the idea of a Metro “Ribbon” (part 1) (Jose Fajardo)

• “I’ve seen a couple of interesting comps of metro apps that have a ribbon, they actually look decent especially if your building a business productivity app. I wanted to prototype a metro app with a ribbon to see what it would feel like. First is to create a simple ribbon, in future posts I’ll embellish this ribbon with rich touch/sensor driven experiences.”

• Custom Effects – Ripple Effect (Pixel Shader) (Jose Fajardo)

• “DirectX11.1 introduced a bunch of built in effects into Direct2D that span the following categories … In my previous posts I showed how you could use SharpDx to call and render some of these effects inside your XAML Managed Metro apps. However in the case where you want to do something that these effects don’t cover, or if you want to create a more optimal effect than custom effects is what you want!”

• The Future of Creating Line of Business and Metro Applications in Windows 8 (Allen Conway)

• “So with Windows 8 right around the corner and a software community racing hard to adopt and create new Metro style applications, I thought it would be a good time to focus on Line of Business applications in the future. My posts on Windows 8 evolve with my increased exposure to the new OS, and it is fun to see how my opinions evolve as well.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• There’s an Ogre in my Metro… (Greg Duncan)

• “I could/should have saved this project for a Metro Monday post, but, well, I couldn’t wait on this any longer. This project had me at “… includes binaries of Ogre, FreeImage, Hydrax and SkyX for x64, x86 and ARM in both Debug and Release flavors and is configured to automatically link the right versions of those libraries”…”

• Windows 8 Release Preview Coming June 2012 (Doug Holland)

• “Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows and Windows Live Division, announced today from Japan’s Windows 8 Dev Days that the Windows 8 Release Preview will be available during the first week of June. /via @BuildWindows8″

Visual Studio 11

• Auto-Vectorizer in Visual Studio 11 – How it Works (Jim Hogg)

• “I assume you have read previous posts in this blog about auto-vectorization, starting with auto-vectorization-overview. In this post, we will look at how the auto-vectorizer works.”

Expression Blend

• Video Demo: Overview of the Html Authoring Features in Blend (Microsoft Expression Blend Team Blog)

• “Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Robert Green about the HTML authoring features you can find in Blend. You can view the recording of this Visual Studio Toolbox episode below (or download a high-quality MP4)”

Metro App Development

• We Want YOUR Windows 8 Metro style Apps! (G. Andrew Duthie)

• “With the Release Preview of Windows 8 coming in June, it’s time to get cracking on your apps. If you haven’t already, you should download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and the Visual Studio 11 Beta and start working on an app. If you’re already working on an app, you may have heard that at present, you need a token to get access to submit your app to the Windows Store. So how do you get a token?”

• Diving deep with WinRT and await (Windows 8 App Developer Blog)

• “The recent blog post Keeping apps fast and fluid with asynchrony in the Windows Runtime includes examples of how the await keyword in C# and Visual Basic enables developers to use WinRT asynchronous operations while still maintaining and reasoning about good control flow. In this follow-on post, I dive much deeper into exactly how await works with WinRT. This knowledge will make it easier for you to reason about code that uses await, and as a result, will enable you to write better Metro style apps.”

• Developing Windows Azure, Cloud-Based Applications With Windows 8-What you need and how to get there (Bruno Terkaly)

• Bruno walks us through getting setup for Windows Azure development on the Windows 8 Customer Preview.

• Accessing the Accelerometer 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 language I chose to use was HTML and JavaScript but this example could just have easily been done in C++/XAML or C#/XAML. The code needed to access the accelerometer was very small and I was impressed just how easy it was to add to my game. “

• Accessing the Camera 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. … I thought it would be neat to let players take a picture of themselves for their Avatar by accessing the webcam. Fortunately for us WinRT makes this super easy to use. We can even pull up prebuilt camera capture UI by using the built-in Windows.Media.Capture API’s. If you are an existing Windows Phone Developer this may remind you a lot of Windows Phone Development Tasks – something I absolutely loved. “

• Converting Windows Phone to Windows 8 (Nick Randolph)

• “Migrating a photo-sharing Windows Phone application to run under Windows 8.”

• Page Navigation with Windows Phone and Windows 8 (Nick Randolph)

• “Nick Randolph continues to look at building applications across both Windows Phone and Windows 8, this time focusing on the navigation model.”

• Windows 8: Virtual Earth API and Foursquare in 15 minutes (Quentin Sallat)

• “The latest update to Visual Studio 11 has seen the addition of templates to control applications using Virtual Earth for Windows 8. Control already existed, but its use is now greatly simplified. I propose you to see how we can use this control, along with the Foursquare API. Thus, we will locate the user on a map, and then offer him a list of interesting places around.”

• Making personal cloud storage for Windows available anywhere, with the new SkyDrive (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• “In February, we told you about our goals for connecting your apps, files, PCs, and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8. Since then, we have provided the App Preview of a Windows 8 app to access SkyDrive, and we’ve updated the SkyDrive web experience. Today, we are delivering new capabilities for SkyDrive across the Windows platform.”

• Windows 8: Prevent Users from Uninstalling Metro Apps (Tech-Recipes)

• “In Windows 8 the process of uninstalling metro apps is rather easy. Therefore, when you have established the metro apps in Windows 8 the way you want, you may wish to prevent other users on the computer from uninstalling them. This tutorial will show you all the necessary steps to disable the uninstall metro apps feature.”

• Add a Guest Operating System (Linux, etc.) to Windows 8 (Don Burnett)

• “You can use the hardware virtualization built into many CPUs to run a guest operating system directly inside Windows 8.. So you can run Windows 7, Windows XP, Linux, etc. Right inside of Windows 8..”

Metro App Development

• WP to W8: View States using Visual State Manager (Jared Bienz)

• “In my last blog post I talked about using the Visual State Manager to deal with different screen resolutions and the new Snapped view. I thought it would be helpful to share an example of how to do it.”

• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week – Day 2 (David Catuhe)

• “Today, the chief proposes you to delight yourself with the following dishes: Internationalization, Managing the activation of the offline mode, Adding a flipView to the cards page, Handling snapped views, Supporting different form factors, Supporting different cards sizes”

• Converting to Windows 8 from Windows Phone | Navigation (8 of 12) (Jayway Team Blog)

• “Navigation in Windows Phone has a clear legacy from Silverlight, you get around using Uris and query strings. What might have been the best solution for the web is clumsy and cumbersome in a native environment. This has often led to custom wrappers around the navigation APIs. All this has changed in Window 8, navigation feels more modern and easy to use. In this article we’ll take a closer look at the old and new way of navigating.”

• [Windows 8] CSharp targets not found in Blend 5 after Windows Phone SDK (Jayway Team Blog)

• “I had a little accident last week and needed a computer fast. The only thing I could get was a computer with Windows 8 Consumer Preview already installed. That was actually no problem as I’m currently working on a Windows 8 project. Problem is that I also work on a number of Windows Phone projects. Apart from the XNA installation problem, the WP SDK was no problem to install and all seemed fine, until I opened up the Windows 8 project in Blend… or actually tried to open it up.”

• Getting Started with Windows 8 Application Development (Ubelly)

• “There are a lot of amazing new capabilities in Windows 8 such as a completely revamped Start screen with customizable Live Tiles, roaming profiles and preferences. Also included are a set of great new apps including: mail, calendar, people, SkyDrive, Bing Maps, video, photos, and more. With Windows 8 and Contracts, apps can communicate with one another making it easier than ever to access, search and share your apps content with the rest of the Internet. If you want to experience Windows 8 for yourself and get to know the development tools you’ll need to create compelling Metro style apps for Windows 8, follow these simple steps.”

• Metro – Design Inspiration (UBelly)

• “I thought I’d post some links for inspiration when working on Metro applications. I’ve split this where I can into the areas I refer to when talking about Metro as a design language for Windows Phone, but I’ve also added to this list so that it’s also relevant for Metro Style Apps on Windows 8. Please, let me know in the comments if there are any other sites that you feel should be added to any of these categories and I’ll update the page.”

• The MetroPad Project: Designing and Building for Win 8 (Don Burnett)

• “When I saw the Windows 8 Metro interface for the first time I started doing some free association about what I thought of it as a design language. What it meant for touch and the first time I wanted to touch a computer’s screen. I got that same feeling again when I started looking at “METRO” apps on a Windows 8 Tablet.”

• Background Downloads in a Windows 8 Metro style app (Mike Taulty)

• “It’s common for an application to want to download (or upload) content from the internet possibly with a view to caching that content so that a user doesn’t have to wait to access it in the future. … WinRT has explicit support for background downloads and uploads via the BackgroundDownloader and BackgroundUploader classes that live in Windows.Networking.BackgroundTransfer.”

• Metro WebView Source and HTML workarounds (Brent Schooley)

• “In the process of writing my first Windows 8 Metro style app using C# and XAML, I came across some limitations of the current WebView control’s implementation.”

• Windows 8: make a toast notification (Quentin Sallat)

• “You’ve probably noticed, in the. NET framework 4.5, the famous MessageBox class, as we know, has disappeared. But how to post messages to our users? First, be aware that a modal dialog (which blocks the rest of the application) is generally discouraged. Indeed, it disrupts the user in his use of the application. So the best is simply to notify the user of something without the block. This is the principle of the Windows Notification Toast 8.”

• Declaring an ICommand in Windows 8 Consumer Preview (Laurent Bugnion)

• “I stumbled upon an interesting issue in Windows 8 Consumer Preview: When you declare a command and try to bind to it, the command will only be invoked if the property is declared as ICommand. If you declare it with the class that implements ICommand (for example RelayCommand for MVVM Light), the command will never be executed. This is not discoverable at all, because the command execution fails silently, without any hint of what happened.”

• Video: Teach Your Apps to Live and Die with the Windows 8 Metro App Lifecycle (the pluralsight blog)

• “Windows 8 Metro Apps are designed to optimize battery life, which in turn requires developers to build their applications based on a new execution lifecycle. In this video excerpt from Ian Griffiths course Building Windows 8 Metro Apps with C# and XAML you’ll see the new events that you can use to adapt your application to that new lifecycle as well as how to debug your application during new events such as Suspension and restarting after termination. In the full course Ian covers other important topics for Windows 8 Metro development including the new Metro layouts, how to use controls, and databinding.”

• Deep Dive into WinRT: MSDN Session (Sasha Goldshtein)

• “In this session we talked about the following: Refreshment of how COM objects work, WinRT object layout and relationship to COM, The WinRT type system and threading model, Asynchronous operations in WinRT, Windows metadata, files and projecting WinRT APIs to C#, C++/CX and JavaScript, Designing and developing WinRT components, Performance interoperability tips for WinRT, Profiling WinRT applications with Visual Studio Profiler”

• Building Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML – Slides & Demos (Joe McBride)

• “Thank you to everyone at the Utah .NET User Group who attended my presentation on Building Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. Here is a link to download my slides and demos. Thanks again to John Papa who let me utilize some of his slides and demos.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• Simple Windows 8 Metro style ‘Maps App’ (Mike Taulty)

• “A few months ago, I wrote the beginnings of a Windows 8 Metro style application that hosted the Bing Maps AJAX control and put a little functionality around it. At a recent event, an attendee was asking me about this kind of technique and so I thought I’d dust off that sample (albeit unfinished) and publish it here for people to play with if it helps them out in any way.”

• #mvvmlight V4RC available on #nuget (Laurent Bugnion)

• “I just published the MVVM Light V4 RC packages to Nuget. Note that this is still technically a preview, so the main package is still V3. “

Books

• 2-4-6-8-10 (Charles Petzold)

• “If you’ve been following my blog, you know that for the past few months I’ve been working on the 6th edition of Programming Windows, which focuses on writing Metro style applications for Windows 8 using C# and XAML. … For two weeks — from May 17th through May 31st — you will have the opportunity to purchase the Programming Windows 6th edition ebook for just $10.”

• Working with SQL Server LocalDB in LightSwitch Projects in Visual Studio 11 (Beth Massi)

• “In Visual Studio LightSwitch, when you design your data model through the Data Designer you are either creating new tables or attaching to external data sources. When you create new tables, LightSwitch automatically creates them in the internal database, also known as the Intrinsic database or ApplicationData. In the first version of LightSwitch in Visual Studio 2010 we used SQL 2008 Express for the internal database development. Now with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 we are using SQL Server LocalDB.”

• SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Part I: What’s New in SharePoint Developer Tools for Visual Studio 11 Beta (SharePoint Developer Team Blog)

• “Visual Studio 11 Beta introduces a new set of features and enhances existing features in the SharePoint Developer Tools for SharePoint 2010, helping you increase your SharePoint development productivity. … As the first post of this series, we’ll briefly go through all of the key features delivered in the Beta release…”

• SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Part II: Feature Enhancements to Support SharePoint Online Development (SharePoint Developer Team Blog)

• “Part 1 of this series on SharePoint developer tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta summarized all of the new features. This article focuses more on the features that support building remote SharePoint Online solutions and provides an overview of the new tool enhancements in this area.”

• SharePoint Developer Tools in Visual Studio 11 Beta – Part III: Tips and Tricks in SharePoint List Designer (SharePoint Developer Team Blog)

• “In the Part I of this series, we were pleased to announce the SharePoint List Designer as one of the new features introduced in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Using the List Designer, you can quickly and visually build a SharePoint list within Visual Studio without having to create a list first in SharePoint Designer and then import it into Visual Studio.”

Metro App Development

• Wanted!! Great Windows 8 Metro style apps (Jaime Rodriguez )

• “Tuesday, the Windows Store blog announced that in the next significant Windows 8 preview release they will be expanding their global coverage with 33 additional app submission locales for developers. As Antoine Leblond alluded to in the post, our store services are ramping up as planned–and of course the plan includes ramping up developer registrations to enable app submissions to the Windows store. Today, you need an invite “token” to register. This begs the question – How can YOU get a token?”

• Windows8 Development :SDK’s, starter kits and Resources (Academic Relations Team Microsoft BeLux)

• “Today, April 20 we are holding our first major Windows 8 Developer Day for Academic Users. Is it a start point of an interesting journey as Windows 8 Developer. To get you settled for success, I would like to share with you some key sources of information.”

• Navigation in a MVVM based world (byproduct of the return)

• “While writing my latest metro styled app (I really hate that phrase), I found myself needing to do Navigation in a way which preserved the separation of concerns in your run-of-the-mill MVVM setup. I’ve seen plenty of different techniques for doing Navigation across the internet but none have had this “purity” that I’ve been searching for.”

• Create your first Metro style app using DirectX (Windows Dev Center)

• “This section provides basic tutorials and procedures for getting started with DirectX app development. A Metro style app with DirectX is an app developed using native C++ and DirectX APIs that have been made available to the Windows Runtime.This model is more complex than the usual Metro style app, but it provides greater flexibility and greater access to system resources, especially graphics devices. So, it is a good model for the experienced developer.”

• Direct3D in Windows 8, extremely seriously simple code (Surf4Fun)

• “See my blog at: List of 6 things that can get you started with Game Design to get some ideas on how to get started with the DirectX 11 changes in Windows 8. … Let’s take a look at an extremely simple piece of code, which if you look at the templates included with the Visual Studio 11 versions, you might be confused on how to get started. So let’s get started with the most simple and boring code possible. In the following code I show two things: The use of the console windows (thanks to Frank Luna) and some lightly modified code from his book (please order it if you are going to get rich with Windows 8).”

• List of 5 seemingly Secret MetroRT/DirectX information in VS11 and 1 secret in VS 2010 (Surf4Fun)

• “Is it me, or does it seem like the DirectX 11 tutorials are somewhat lacking? Of course it is me. My aluminum foil hat slipped down over my eyes. Now that the Windows 8 Customer Review and VS 11 Beta versions get more in sync, there is more material, but generally it is in a number of locations. … I found a cache of C++ information yesterday that was a head blower upper…”

• C++ and Metro: basic application (Toni Petrina)

• “Visual Studio 11 Consumer Preview enables creating Metro styled applications using C++ which is a great news for any native developer. Let’s create a simple Metro application.”

• C++ and Metro: event handling and MessageBox (Toni Petrina)

• “In the previous post we have created simple Metro application using C++ as the language of choice. Now we are going to add some interactivity into it.”

• Preparing to Develop Metro style Device Apps for Mobile Broadband (Microsoft Download Center)

• “This paper provides information about how to get started developing a Metro style app for mobile broadband. It provides an overview to help mobile operators get started with Metro style app development. It assumes that the reader is familiar with mobile broadband on Windows 8.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• XNA on Windows 8 Metro (Miguel de Icaza)

• “The MonoGame Team has been working on adding Windows 8 Metro support to MonoGame. This will be of interest to all XNA developers that wanted to target the Metro AppStore, since Microsoft does not plan on supporting XNA on Metro, only on the regular desktop.”

• RestSharp and Windows Metro (Joel Ivory Johnson)

• “I’ve got RestSharp (partially) working on Windows Metro. I’ve been able to make a simple Metro application and make a few rest calls. Though right now some encryption and signature related functionality isn’t yet working.”