News

Read original post by Derek Gebhard at Windows 8 App Developer Blog

When you start writing Metro style apps you’ll quickly come across contracts, a new and powerful concept in Windows 8. Metro style apps use contracts to declare interactions they support with other apps and with Windows. You’ve probably already heard about some of them: search, share, etc. Using contracts, apps become better by working with the system or with each other when users install more apps that implement contracts. In this post I’ll walk you through activation, one of the main concepts to think about as you add contracts to your apps.

Read original post by Ollie Riches at Awkward Coder

Last week I built a sample multilingual app in WPF using MVVM for a proof of concept. This was the first time I've built a desktop app which supported different languages at runtime. Previously I've worked on multilingual websites and desktop apps but not ones that support changing the language of the UI dynamically via a UI control like a menu item.

The app was pretty simple, a single input field representing a number where the value has to be within a fixed range (-100 to 100). If the input failed the validation an error message would be displayed.

Read original post at Beth Massi's Blog

A lot of folks have asked me for information on how to publish a LightSwitch application to IIS6. With the help of a couple team members we finally got the steps written down. This is a follow up to the detailed IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 deployment guide which you should familiarize yourself with first. There is a lot more information there on how deployment actually works:

Deployment Guide: How to Configure a Web Server to Host LightSwitch Applications

In this post I’m just going to show you the basic steps necessary to configure a Windows 2003 Server with IIS6 installed. I’ll also show you the MSDeploy commands you need to automate a deployment package created with Visual Studio LightSwitch.

Read original post by Eric Vogel at Visual Studio Magazine

Push notifications have been available on mobile devices for the past few years, but are just recently making their way to the desktop. At last year's BUILD conference, Microsoft announced its push notification strategy for Windows 8, which uses the Windows Push Notification Service (WNS).WNS is very similar to the Microsoft Push Notification Service (MPNS) used by Windows Phone 7 applications. I'll first go over the various types of push notifications available to developers in the current Windows 8 Consumer Preview, and then how to implement each of them.

Read original post at Tess Ferrandez's Blog

XNA is very different from winforms applications or Silverlight apps in that it is not eventdriven but rather uses the concept of a GameLoop where you update and redraw the whole surface for each frame. On Windows Phone by default you draw 30 frames per second, so 30 times per second you update the locations of the objects, check for user input and redraw the screen.

Read original post at Diary of a Software Mercenary

Back in December, I wrote about dynamically generating live tiles on the phone from a xaml template. I released first live tiles application Terminator which shows sunrise and sunset around the world using NASA blue marble imagery. Some of our customers asked for sunrise and sunset times, and where better than on a live tile.

However, occasionally the tile would not update correctly using code based on that I showed back in December.

The symptoms were odd. The layout was all over the place, and as I started changing things, I found that things were about to get even more peculiar.

Read original post by Den Delimarsky at Den by Default

It’s almost 4 in the morning, and as with all great ideas, this one came to me while I was working on a completely different project. I was thinking that it is a shame that I cannot attach files to an email via EmailComposeTask – and indeed, I am not the only one thinking about this [...]

Read original post at Geert van Horrik's Blog

Sometimes, you get a nasty issue when using Silverlight 4. When building your xaml files, you get a compiler error that looks like this:

public partial class ChildDialog : DataWindow { }

"Error 1 The type or namespace name 'DataWindow' could not be found (are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?)"

This issue occurs when you are using xaml namespaces in the form of an url.

Below you may find a summary of all new content we've published on SilverlightShow throughout the week March 19-25, 2012:

• New Article 'Developing for a multitude of clients: Part 4'
• First Post of the 'Creating SilverlightShow Windows Phone App' Series
• Two Upcoming Windows 8 Webinars Announced
• 3 New Books by Packt Publishing Added to SilverlightShow Bookshelf
• 50+ Fresh New Stories by Valued Bloggers and Community Sites

New Article 'Developing for a multitude of clients: Part 4'

Do you follow Kevin Dockx's article series on developing for a multitude of clients? If yes - you'll be happy to find out that we published the next part of this series:

• Part 4: Developing for a multitude of clients: strategies for code reuse and keeping costs in check.

In this part, Kevin talks about some best practices on how you can separate your app into different modules so this code can be reused. He also tackled a few issues, or rather: challenges that come with these techniques, by creating a custom loader queue, and extending the Silverlight Navigation framework in such a way that it allows navigating to View in assemblies that are loaded on demand.

First Post of the 'Creating SilverlightShow Windows Phone App' Series

Do you have the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app installed on your device? If not - you can get it for free from here (or just search for 'SilverlightShow' in the Marketplace).

Peter Kuhn is the man who stands behind the development of this app and he is now starting a series of articles in which the whole application design and infrastructure, plus the problems (and their solutions of course), will be discussed and described in detail. The first part is now available here:

• Creating the SilverlightShow Windows Phone App: part 1

In this introductory article, Peter deals with the development process of the app, so prepare for some more text and less code (read: no code) than usual.

Two Upcoming Windows 8 Webinars Announced

A while ago Gill Cleeren presented one of the most attended SilverlightShow webinars - Metro and WinRT for the Silverlight/WPF Developer (watch recording of Part 1 and Part 2 of this sessions). And now he is going to dive further into the world of Windows 8 with his next two webinars:

• Contracts and Charms in Windows 8 | April 24th, 10 am PST (your local time) | Sign up
• Live Tiles and Notifications in Windows 8 | May 17th, 10 am PST (your local time) | Sign up

We'll be happy to join us at these live sessions!

3 New Books by Packt Publishing Added to SilverlightShow Bookshelf

Packt Publishing

• MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF: RAW
• Windows Phone 7 XNA Cookbook
• Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook

Packt Publishing will be giving away some free copies of their ebooks in our next webinars. Entering the draw is easy and requires only a tweet. More information to be found at the pages of our webinars:

• 10 Best Practices for Windows Phone Developers | April 4, 10 am PDT | Presenter: Samidip Basu | Sign up
• Advanced MVVM for Windows Phone Developers | April 18, 10 am PDT | Presenter: Peter Kuhn | Sign up

50+ Fresh New Stories by Valued Bloggers and Community Sites

Top 5:

• The 25 best Windows Phone apps
  
• The future of XNA, the underwritten truths
  
• Microsoft shows off Windows 8 business app concepts
  
• Metro: Introduction to CSS 3 Grid Layout
  
• Five reasons to consider Windows 8 development
  

All other news we published:

Monday (March 19th, 2012)

• Insider's view: Authoring XAML-based Metro style apps in Blend Beta
• Microsoft Data and Synchronization Technologies for Windows Phone 7
• Part 71 - Windows Phone - App in Share. Option of Picture Viewer
• Securing Windows Phone Apps–Tips to make your app lock-solid
• TCP-based sockets on Windows Phone with support for large amounts of data
• PhoneFlipMenu Control for Windows Phone
• Media Element in Silverlight and WPF
• WP7: How to use the PhotoChooserTask to Launch the Media Library?

Tuesday (March 20th, 2012)

• SilverlightCream Top 5 News for Week March 12-18
• Introducing Expression Blend for Visual Studio Part 1
• Working with Telerik RadMessageBox Controls for Windows Phone 7
• Metro background audio c# (consumer preview)
• Using a ToggleButton in your XAML Metro style AppBar
• Technology and Friends Interview with Michael Crump on Silverlight 5

Wednesday (March 21st, 2012)

• OData Apps In LightSwitch, Part 1
• Windows 8 Metro Application AppBar trick
• Windows Phone arrives in China. First phone on sale today.
• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): Part 2, More about Search
• Keeping apps fast and fluid with asynchrony in the Windows Runtime
• Windows Phone 7: Tweetsharp and AgFx
• Creating HTML-based Metro Style Apps Using Blend Beta
• Hacking Silverlight 5 PivotViewer: Zoom
• Metro Nuggets: Async is your friend
• Microsoft Allegedly to Release Windows 8 This Fall
• Does anyone actually care about WinRT?

Thursday (March 22nd, 2012)

• Announcing RadControls for Windows Phone Q1 2012 SP1
• How to master the new Task Manager in Windows 8
• The HackReady.Phone WebCast Series
• A StringFormat converter for Windows 8 Metro
• ListView Binding with Grouping and Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 JavaScript Metro Application
• Scaling to different screens with Windows 8
• Windows 8 to support Retina-like displays and range of resolutions
• Calling LightSwitch 2011 OData Using Server Side Code
• VS11, Silverlight and Ria Services Command line build issue (MSB4006)
• New Smoked by Windows Phone ads on the way
• How to Launch the WP7 Media Library using the PhotoChooserTask?

Friday (March 23rd, 2012)

• Handling Authenticated Zip files in Windows Phone
• New Hub Tile Control for Your Windows Phone Apps
• How to disable Windows 8 toaster notification
• Jounce MVVM WCF RIA Printing and More Example
• Working with Encrypting Data for Security in Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Performance Part 4 of many– The Power of the GPU
• Creating a Reusable Base for WP7 Apps - Part 1
• An easy way to create awesome looking Windows Phone7 icons using expression Design
• Knockout.js for Silverlight Developers
• App Hub now open for new markets

Enjoy your weekend and return at SilverlightShow on Monday for a whole new week full of exciting news and content!