Visual Studio 11

• My Favorite Features: Unit Testing Enhancements in Visual Studio 11 (Jason Zander)

• • “I’ve been writing a set of posts on some of my favorite Visual Studio 11 features that I’m using in my personal development. In my last post, I talked about JavaScript tooling enhancements. In this post, I’d like to talk about the new unit testing features. Unit testing is an important step in the development process, and is something we are doing throughout the team in Visual Studio. I’ve also been writing unit tests while working on my personal coding projects…”

Metro App Development

• Windows 8: Top 10 Reasons why I choose XAML over HTML5 (Jerry Nixon)

• • “Windows 8 introduces Metro as a new a development paradigm on the Microsoft platform. I get asked which people should choose all the time. For me, I chose C#/XAML. Here I wanted to walk through some of the key reasons I did just that…”

• When Debug isn’t enough with your Windows 8 Metro Applications (Michael Crump)

• • “Sometimes when developing Metro applications you need advanced debugging options such as suspending or resuming your application to observe the behavior of your app. Here is a quick post for those who are looking for the options to suspend, resume and suspend and shutdown your Metro application inside VS11…”

• Using async and await in Silverlight 5 and .NET 4 in Visual Studio 11 with the async targeting pack (Pete Brown)

• • “Last September, I introduced the idea of Tasks in Silverlight. One of the things I really like about .NET 4.5, and the C# compiler that comes with it, is the ability to simplify asynchronous code by using the async modifier and await operator. … The key thing to note here is that the work is done by the compiler, not the runtime. That means that if you can use the latest C# compiler, you can take advantage of this new feature. A grasp of the async pattern and these two keywords will also help prepare you for Windows Metro development…”

• Windows 8 Metro Style Apps Background Audio with XAML/C# (Keith Patton)

• • “Creating a background audio capable app in Windows 8 is very easy once you have the steps. There’s a great blog post that provides working code that gets you most of the way there. Do remember to wrap the calls within the MediaControl handlers to marshall them back to UI thread to avoid cross-thread exceptions though as follows…”

• Metro: Dynamically Switching Templates with a WinJS ListView (Stephen Walther)

• • “Imagine that you want to display a list of products using the WinJS ListView control. Imagine, furthermore, that you want to use different templates to display different products. In particular, when a product is on sale, you want to display the product using a special “On Sale” template. In this blog entry, I explain how you can switch templates dynamically when displaying items with a ListView control. In other words, you learn how to use more than one template when displaying items with a ListView control.”

Windows 8

• Designing for PCs that boot faster than ever before (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• • “While we’re hard at work making sure you never have to turn off your PC and can run in a connected standby state, we know that there will still be reboots for updating key system components. We’ve previously talked about reengineering the Windows boot experience and how we modernized and touch-enabled the core boot loader and choices. We’ve also made boot go by very fast. In fact, it is now so fast that we had to look at the design to enable the kinds of diagnostic boots required by those who do want to dig into their BIOS or load in alternative ways. In this post, Chris Clark, a program manager on our User Experience team, talks about the design of an incredibly fast boot experience.”

Metro App Development

• Windows 8: Top 10 Reasons why Metro development smokes Windows Desktop development (Jerry Nixon)

• • “Windows 7 had one application scenario – desktop apps. Windows 8 has two application scenarios – desktop and Metro. Metro is the start menu, but also a shell in which app containers execute… Metro applications are different. Metro development is different. Desktop development is still present, of course. Desktop development is still powerful, of course. However, here are my (personal) top 10 reasons why Windows Metro development smokes Windows Desktop development…”

• Under the covers of the async modifier and await operator in .NET 4.5 and C# Metro style applications (Pete Brown)

• • “IL DASM (The Intermediate Language Disassembly tool) is something I haven’t used in a while. When .NET 1.0 first came out in beta over a decade ago, a much younger me went and created a “Hello World” in IL just to see how it’s done. … Let’s start by looking at the IL generated from a vanilla synchronous method. The method sets an integer variable, calls two methods, and writes a bunch of stuff to the output window…”

• File system places accessible through WinRT API (Andrei Marukovich)

• • “In the previous posts I described the restrictions in file system access dictated by Windows 8 for WinRT apps. With user’s help and by using file and folder pickers your app can get an access to any file system object, but there is a limited number of folders accessible for the app via direct API calls. Here I want to summarize information about these folders.”

• How to design a Windows 8 Metro style app starting from an existing Windows Phone app – Part 2 (Telerik Blogs)

• • “Welcome to the second blog where we talk about the main similarities and differences between the design guidelines of the Windows 8 and the Windows Phone platforms and what this means to designers and developers. In the first blog post we covered: Design process, Layout and navigation. In this part we will take a deeper look at: Commands and actions, Touch, Orientation and views, Notifications and live tiles, Telerik upcoming Windows 8 suite…”

• Windows 8 C# – Capture Media (Shai Raiten)

• • “I left JavaScript and started to work on Windows 8 Metro using C# and XAML, in this post I’ll demonstrate how to use WinRT for Camera, File Picker and Audio Recording.”

• Get started with Windows 8 Metro style app development using JavaScript and HTML5 (Rachel Appel)

• • “Metro style Apps are enticing to all types of software developers. Web, Desktop, and Phone/Device developers share common tools in Visual Studio, and common components and libraries within the Windows Runtime (WinRT). If you are just getting started with Windows 8 Metro style app development, but are an experienced web developer, your skills are highly portable, and the learning curve is more akin to a small bump. While you won’t be able to click a button and magically port an ASP.NET application over to a Metro style app (that simply doesn’t happen), you still use the vast majority of your current web development skills, as well as adding new skills.”

Apps & Code to Look At

• Gestating your Metro Style App with Cocoon (Coding4Fun Blog)

• • “Today’s Metro Monday project is a framework that will help you in your creation of Windows 8 Metro Style applications, helping take a little of the grunt work out, while helping build applications with some separation of concerns. Plus I dig how it uses MEF to compose a navigable application. Cocoon…”

Windows 8

• Enhancing Windows 8 for multiple monitors (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• • “This post goes into the details around the multi-monitor experience for Windows 8. From the very first public release and demonstrations of Windows 8 we have shown improvements over Windows 7 for multi-monitor scenarios and have shown how we support new Metro style apps within a multi-monitor environment. We have continued to develop and refine features for multiple monitors and have significantly enhanced the experience as we move to our next milestone, the Release Preview. This post provides a bit of a preview of work that was not yet complete at the Consumer Preview, and serves as a reminder that the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview were works in progress. Mark Yalovsky, a lead program manager on our User Experience team, authored this post. (Note: This post is unchanged from last week when it was inadvertently posted as noted on @buildwindows8.)”

Metro App Development

• Creating a fast and fluid app launch experience (Windows 8 app developer blog)

• • “App launch is a principal part of the fast and fluid Windows 8 experience, so it’s important that you prioritize your app’s launch UX. A highly-polished launch flow is sure to improve the initial reception of any app. In this post, I’ll discuss how to craft a well-designed, responsive app launch experience and explain why app launch is a critical time to make a positive impression on users. I’ll introduce four app launch design patterns that can be applied to your apps and point out some key things to keep in mind as you continue building Metro style apps.”

• Windows 8 Metro: Something about application life-cycle (Andrea Boschin)

• • “If currently you are probably running Windows 8 on a virtual machine or luckily on a computer, there is not any doubt that this new operating system and especially the metro-style interface is dedicated to touch enabled devices like tablets. The plans of Microsoft infact include the new WOA keywork where the acronym stands for Windows On ARM that is the aim of making available this interface on a wide set of mobile devices that currently embrace this successful processor architecture. Running on a tablet does not only imply a different input interface like the touch screen, but also it requires a careful use of system resources that are not always large on this kind of device. This is the reason why metro-style applications have an application lifecycle that is mostly similar to the Windows Phone than of classical desktop apps.”

• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week – Day 4 (David Catuhe)

• • “This is the final part of our series. Actually, I will post a last article when the Release Preview will be available to give you the updated version but you can consider this version as feature full. And as usual the complete solution is available here: http://www.catuhe.com/msdn/urza/day4.zip During this article you will discover how you can use Skydrive (via the Live SDK: Download the Live SDK) to save the collection’s state of your user. The entire collection list is downloaded on a site as a json file (cf. Day 0). The collection’s state will be saved in another json file so the cards list can evolve without impacting the collection’s state. This json file will be saved to the user’s SkyDrive.”

• Porting a simple Silverlight game loop to Windows 8 Metro style (Jim Blizzard)

• • “The other evening I went on the hunt for a XAML/C#-based example of a game loop. I ran into a couple of OLD blog posts by Mike Snow. Naturally it caught my eye, simply because of his last name. In his posts he described game loop based on Silverlight 2. OK. Silverlight uses XAML, and the code was C#. XAML/C# are first-class citizens in the Windows 8 Metro style app world, so I figured, why not see what it takes to make this work on Windows 8?”

• Hacking for fun: porting a Silverlight Windows Phone app to WinRT in 9hours (Jeremy Alles)

• • “Today I woke up and took a look outside: the weather was so awful I decided to so something cool, at home. Today, I ported a Silverlight Windows Phone 7 game to WinRT in 9 hours. In this post, I share the “journal” I wrote will porting the app so that you can follow this process with many detail. I hope you will learn interesting stuff. Warning: the post is much longer than usual…”

• Metro: Creating a Master/Detail View with a WinJS ListView Control (Stephen Walther)

• • “The goal of this blog entry is to explain how you can create a simple master/detail view by using the WinJS ListView and Template controls. In particular, I explain how you can use a ListView control to display a list of movies and how you can use a Template control to display the details of the selected movie.”

• [Windows 8] How to load a file marked as Content ? (Thomas LEBRUN)

• • “Most of the sample/blog posts that you can found on Internet show you how to load a file that is contained in local storage. But what do you need to do if you want to access a file that is marked as “Content” in Visual Studio? The trick is to access to the files/folder are installed with your application. And to do this, you need to use Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.Current.InstalledLocation…”

Other

• Introducing GitHub For Windows (Phil Haack)

• • “For the past several months I’ve been working on a project with my amazing cohorts, Paul, Tim, and Adam, and Cameron at GitHub. I’ve had the joy of learning new technologies and digging deep into the inner workings of Git while lovingly crafting code. But today, is a good day. We’ve called the shipit squirrel into action once again! We all know that the stork delivers babies and the squirrel delivers software. In our case, we are shipping GitHub For Windows! Check out the official announcement on the GitHub Blog. GitHub for Windows is the easiest and best way to get Git on your Windows box.”

• GitHub for Windows (Tim Clem)

• • “Ever wish there was an easy way to get up and running with Git and GitHub on your Windows computer? Turned off by command line utilities and setting up SSH keys? Want to join the incredible world of open and closed source collaboration that happens on GitHub.com every day? Today we are releasing GitHub for Windows which is available immediately as a free download.”

Windows 8

• Creating the Windows 8 user experience (Building Windows 8 Blog)

• • “This blog often focuses on the bits and features and less on the “philosophy” or “context” of the product. Given the level of brand new innovations in Windows 8, however, we think it is worth putting Windows 8 in the context in which we approached the design. As with any significant change to a broadly used product, Windows 8 has generated quite a bit of discussion. With millions of people using the Consumer Preview for their daily work, we’ve seen just as many points of view expressed. … There are as many opinions as there are folks who have tried out the Consumer Preview. Designing a new release of a product already used by a billion people in a billion different ways is, as we say, like ordering pizza for a billion people. Doing so out in the open encourages this dialog, and we embrace and value it. Jensen Harris, Director of Program Management for our User Experience team, authored this post.”

Visual Studio 11

• A look ahead at the Visual Studio 11 product lineup and platform support (The Visual Studio Blog)

• • “Today, we want to share the final product lineup and specifications you can expect to see for the next release of Visual Studio. This also includes system requirements and platform you can develop for with Visual Studio 11.”

Metro App Development

• Using SQLite in a Metro style app (Tim Heuer)

• • “At the “Developing Windows 8 Metro style apps with C++” event that happened on 18-May-2012, we saw and heard some very interesting things. If you were watching live then hopefully you didn’t see how I tried to work through my presentation while my disk was suspiciously guzzling every last byte until it eventually ran out of space! But I digress… During the keynote presentation by Herb Sutter, we brought up several customers that are well-known in the native code world to talk about their experiences with Metro style apps and C++/Cx. In particular hopefully this one caught your eye… That’s right, the team for SQLite was there to discuss how they were able to take their existing Win32 codebase and ensure that it worked well on Windows 8 as well as for Metro style apps.”

• How to Debug a Windows 8 Metro Secondary Tile (Jeremy Likness)

• • “I’ve been working on Chapter 7 of my upcoming book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. This chapter focuses on tiles and toast notifications. In the Windows 8 runtime, it is incredibly easy to prompt the user to pin a secondary tile. This is a tile that has a deep link for content. For example, my reference application contains blogs and blog posts from several Wintellect employees. You can pin a specific blog or even a specific item within a blog.”

• Metro: Implement a parallactic scrolling for your GridView (Andrea Boschin)

• • “A customer of mine asked me about how to create a “parallactic scrolling” for the background of a GridView. For people that do not know what it is, parallactic scrolling is when you have a background image scrolling slower than the foreground content. This tecnique is mostly used in games to give the impression of depth of field with the overlapping of a number of elements that moves slower when they apper to be far from the observer. … Coming to Windows 8, there are some application installed by default that shows a similar effect. Weather and Finacial apps shows a partial parallactic effect when transitionig between the start screen and the right content. GridView, ScrollViewer and other controls does not automatically apply this effect (almost not in windows 8 CP), but a simple trick let you easily show the effect in your apps.”

• Radial gradients + Mini-path geometry sprites + infinite-scrolling inertial canvas = (Jose Fajardo)

• • “I’m slowly building up some very cool controls and general learning’s around XAML & SharpDx and I want to share 3 of them with you today… Radial Gradients in XAML … Mini-Path-Language sprites on Direct2D … Infinitely scrolling inertial layer…”

• Metro: Introduction to the WinJS ListView Control (Stephen Walther)

• • “The goal of this blog entry is to provide a quick introduction to the ListView control – just the bare minimum that you need to know to start using the control. When building Metro style applications using JavaScript, the ListView control is the primary control that you use for displaying lists of items. For example, if you are building a product catalog app, then you can use the ListView control to display the list of products.”

• Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control (Stephen Walther)

• • “The purpose of this blog entry is to explain how you can group list items when displaying the items in a WinJS ListView control. In particular, you learn how to group a list of products by product category.”

• .NET 4.5 to Support Zip File Manipulation Out of the Box (Tugberk Ugurlu)

• • “One of the missing feature of .NET framework was a support for Zip file manipulation such as reading the zip archive, adding files, extracting files, etc. and we were using some third party libraries such as excellent the DotNetZip. In .NET 4.5, we have an extensive support for manipulating .zip files.”

• [Windows 8] How to read the content of a ZIP file ? (Thomas LEBRUN)

• • “Here is a simple code sample that show you how you can read the content of a ZIP file…”

• XAML – How to know when a VisualState Transition is completed in a CustomControl (John Thiriet)

• • “I’ve been developing for WinRT for quiet some time now in XAML and C#. I’ve faced an issue where I needed to wait that an animation was completed before starting a piece of work in a view model. The problem was that this animation was a VisualState transition inside one of my custom controls.”

Windows 8

• 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.