wintellect-blogs|Jul 3, 2012

Talking about Windows 8

This month has been a busy and productive one for me with Windows 8. In addition to the recorded webinar, The Top 10 Features Windows 8 Metro Developers will Love, I also participated in two interviews about Windows 8. The first interview was with Jesse Liberty. I’ve known him for several years now. We’ve met…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 20, 2012

Video: The Top 10, er, 11 Features Developers will Love about Windows 8

I downloaded the Developer Preview for Windows 8 within minutes of it being announced during the major //BUILD conference in September 2011. Since then, I’ve been working with Windows 8 on both a laptop and a slate and have come to love several features. I wrote about the top 10 features I think developers will…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 18, 2012

Introducing the Microsoft Surface Tablet with Windows 8

Today Steve Ballmer stepped up on stage and stated that while we’ve seen great change with things like cloud computing, Windows is the “heart and soul” of Microsoft. There are over 1 billion PCs including embedded machines and workstations. Windows 8 was designed “for the world we know, in which most computers are mobile.” He…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 8, 2012

Compressing Data in Windows 8 Metro Applications

The following post is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my upcoming book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. Keep reading to learn how you can receive a free copy of the full chapter. Storing large amounts of data can take up a large amount of disk space. Data compression encodes information…
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Blogs|May 19, 2012

How to Debug a Windows 8 Metro Secondary Tile

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…
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Blogs|May 14, 2012

The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World

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.…
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wintellect-blogs|May 11, 2012

The Task: Events, Asynchronous Calls, Async and Await

Almost any software application today will likely contain a long-running process. “Long-running” may be a relative term but in the Windows Runtime it is specifically anything that could take longer than 50ms to execute. That’s a fairly small window, and it means those operations will need to run concurrently to the main application thread. Concurrency…
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Blogs|Apr 15, 2012

Sample Applications from Designing Silverlight Business Applications

I’ve received a few emails regarding the book that the code files are not available from the publisher website. I’ve spoken with the publisher about this and they are working to correct it, but I wanted to provide a link for those of you who have been patiently waiting. As a backup to the main…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 5, 2012

Designing Silverlight Business Applications Officially Released

  In June of 2011 I started the journey of writing a Silverlight book. The Silverlight team was about to release version 5 with an incredible set of new features that would revolutionize how it can be used in the enterprise. I knew there were already a number of books available to use a reference…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 3, 2012

The Top 10 Features Windows 8 Metro Developers Will Love

Windows 8 Metro is a new platform for developing applications that are tailored to the devices on which they run. These devices may include traditional desktops and laptops as well as the new tablet and slate form factors. In this article I cover the top ten features developers will love about the new development environment.…
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Blogs|Mar 29, 2012

.NET and Metro: The Windows Runtime and the CLR on Windows 8

Many developers tend to look at Windows 8 as a completely new platform and even question whether it heralded the imminent demise of managed code. After spending many months digging into the Windows Runtime (WinRT), Metro style or “tailored” applications, and exploring how they related to the .NET Framework, I’ve come to the conclusion that…
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