wintellect-blogs|May 29, 2012

Metro XAML Nugget: App Bar AutoMagic

You may have noticed that in many places of the Windows 8 Metro UI, as well as many Metro applications where list content can be selected, that making a selection automatically/magically (“automagically”) brings up one or more app bars.  This is consistent with the “Guidelines and checklist for app bars” published in the Metro Style…
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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 30, 2012

Using NuGet PowerShell to Replace Missing Macros in Dev 11

When I first heard that macros were being dropped from Dev 11 I was gobsmacked. (I just love that world!) While the macro story up to Visual Studio 2010 wasn’t great because we couldn’t write macros in our .NET language of choice, I expected the situation would start getting better and was saddened when the…
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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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wintellect-blogs|Mar 22, 2012

Jounce MVVM WCF RIA Printing and More Example

I finally managed to update and upload my To-Do List Reference Application. This is a Silverlight 5 application based on my Jounce framework that demonstrates a number of different features. I built it as part of my book, Designing Silverlight Business Applications. There are several chapters devoted specifically to the construction of this example application.…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 16, 2012

Get Your Next Job Here!!

We are growing like crazy at Wintellect and want you to work for us! We’d prefer full time employment, but would be happy to also work with some of you excellent independent contractors. At this time we need candidates to be based in North America. What we are looking for are excellent project managers and…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 14, 2012

Understanding the Portable Library by Chasing ICommand (3 of 3)

Part 1: Creating the Portable Library (this post)Part 2: Portability in Silverlight and WPF: a Tale of Type ForwardersPart 3: Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair (this post) Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair In this series we’ve covered the portable library and reviewed how it allows you to…
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