News

Read original post by Michaël Van Wesemael at U2U Blog

I you remember my blogpost from a very long time ago, I wrote about using SQL CE with Windows Phone (you can find it here). SQL CE can be queried with LINQ to SQL, making it interesting for storing relational data. Recently I came in contact with the Sterling-database (check it here), an Object-database which can be used in .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone ! You can add “SterlingPhone” to your project by using NuGet. Just like SQL CE I can use Sterling for storing data in Isolated Storage.

Read original post by Arun Mahendrakar at IBloggable - implemented

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.

Read original post at Tim Heuer's Blog

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.

Read original post at Jose Fajardo's Blog

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.

Read original post by Morten Nielsen at SharpGIS

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#).

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Thursday, April 26th, 2012:

• Getting Windows Phone apps back into the Zune Desktop Client
• Page Navigation with Windows Phone and Windows 8
• Accessing the Accelerometer in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using HTML and JavaScript
• Windows 8 Metro Style– Bits of Binding
• How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week – Day 2
• Deploying Metro style apps to businesses
• Dynamic Search with LINQ, the Entity Framework and Silverlight
• Why VisualStudio is taking a huge time to Load Components while debugging
• Cause for Concern - Piracy on Windows Phone 7

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Read original post by Den Delimarsky at Den by Default

The Windows Phone team recently announced that it will remove the Windows Phone apps section from the Zune Desktop client due to the fact that users mostly access those through the web interface or the mobile client directly on the device. Despite the fact that I do support this change, I know there are also users who might want to keep using the Zune software on their PC to download apps for their Windows Phone.

Read original post by Nick Randolph at Visual Studio Magazine

In my previous column, "Converting Windows Phone to Windows 8" I created a simple Windows Phone application that consumed an XML feed from Flickr and displayed a list of images. Then I showed you how to port that application, with a relatively high level of reuse, to Windows 8. This time, I'll look at extending the Windows Phone application to multiple pages, and focus on code compatibility and the navigation model. As a disclaimer, this is a discussion of code reuse rather than a demonstration of good UI design.

Read original post by Dave Isbitski at DaveDev

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. Rather then wait for the game to be completely finished I figured I would start sharing some of my development experiences here on my blog.

One of the first ideas I had was for a “Gravity Pulse” power that would be granted upon earning a predefined a amount of points (1,500 pts being the default). Every time the user gains these amount of points a custom sound file will be played and then the screen will display a message to shake the device. If the user shakes the device within a predefined amount of time all ships on the screen will blow up.