A Microsoft Technology blog about Windows 8 Store (WinRT), Windows Phone, Silverlight, LightSwitch, WPF, XAML, CSharp, Visual Studio and .Net.
XAML namespace is an extension of XML namespace and conventionally written as “xmlns” in XAML pages. We use it on all XAML pages in Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows 8, WPF related technologies to better reference assemblies and namespaces.
In this post we will learn more about this XMLNS namespace and the way to customize it for a cleaner XAML page. Interested to know it? Continue reading and share your feedback about the post.
Today Tami Reller, Chief Marketing Officer for the Microsoft Windows business confirms the general availability and pricing of Windows 8.1 (Blue) at the JP Morgan Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in Boston.
The first public preview of next version of Windows 8 will be available during BUILD Conference going to happen at the end of June 2013.
Last year we discussed “How to Capture a Screenshot as File in Windows 8?” which you will find useful in your desktop PC or laptop. You will also find that post useful in a Surface if you have a keyboard attached to it, because “Win + Print Screen” key combination is needed to capture the screen.
What about Microsoft Surface which does not have a keyboard attach to it? In that case, a touch keyboard will be require to press the keys but that will fill half of the screen.
If you are a Win8Dev and building a Windows 8/WinRT application, you might want to download a file asynchronously from a web location. The job is very easy in Silverlight and in this case too but you just need to know the way, the APIs and the configuration settings.
Many developers already faced the difficulty to download a file in their WinRT apps and hence I thought to share the code with the API details in this post.
Are you a Windows 8 Application Developer? Are you building an app like audio/video player or game which needs to keep the display active when user is inactive in the system? Then you came to a right place where we will discuss how to keep the display on while idle.
This post details about the Windows 8/Windows RT API usage and code snippet to request the system to keep the display on. Continue reading to know more about it.
Are you a Windows 8 or Windows RT user? Are you looking for a code to change your Windows 8 lock screen programmatically? Then this post will be definitely helpful for you. Just follow the simple steps to write an application by which you can change it easily.
Windows 8 already exposes settings panel to change the lock screen of the Windows, but this post will help you to programmatically access that using the exposed APIs.
Microsoft is again back with their webcast series and this time they planned for both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 sessions on the same day but in a different time slot. The webcast series will happen for five continuous days, 1.5hrs daily for each technology.
In this post, find the session details, time table and the link to register for the free webcast event. Take part of it and enhance your Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 skills.
As a Silverlight, WPF or WPDev you might be aware of the MessageBox class present in the SDK to show a message to the user and ask the user to interact with the application on some special cases. As a Win8Dev, you will find it missing in WinRT.
What to do? There is a class named MessageDialog which does the same thing but asynchronously in Windows 8 applications. If you are new to Win8Dev, you will find it useful.
As a Windows 8 Store application developer, we need to store and retrieve data to and from XML file stored in the application directory. There are various ways to store data in XML but this post will cover a simplest way to do that.
Here we will use a 3rd party extension in our application as assembly reference and use their XmlDeSerializer class to handle it easily. Keep reading to know more about it.
The Windows 8 Software Development Kit (SDK) contains header libraries and a set of tools which you can use to develop Windows Store apps using technologies like Visual C#, Visual Basic, Visual C++ and/or JavaScript.
Recently a new version of the SDK has been published which you can grab from here. Also it has a new version of the WACK to validate your Windows 8 Store application branding.
The “Clipboard” is a user driven set of functions that enables an application to transfer data between applications or within an application. Windows 8 Store SDK defines a set of APIs to handle the OS clipboard in your application.
In this continued series of Windows 8 Store application development tutorial, we will learn more about the API and the way to integrate the Clipboard in your WinRT application.
This is the continuing series of the Windows 8 Store application development tutorial and in this chapter, we will learn about creating and updating the live tiles of your WinRT application. There are 46 different types of tile templates available which we will go to learn today.
A live tile is one of the best way to provide a good experience to your application which you will find in your Windows 8 Start screen. Continue for further reading.
If you are a Windows 8 Store application and/or game developer, you may want to provide feature to share text, graphics, links or game score cards to Facebook, Twitter or Email. Windows 8 SDK provides those APIs to implement the feature in your application.
Today in this chapter of the Windows Store Tutorial series, we will discuss more about the API methods and how to integrate it in your application. Continue reading.
Many time we need to access files and folders from our applications. The Windows Store apps SDK provides us Asynchronous APIs to use for this service to query files and folders. You have to be familiar with async await calls in order to get started with this.
This post is part of the Windows Store Application Development Tutorial series. Today we will learn how to handle files and folders in your Windows 8 metro applications.
Second Level Address Translation a.k.a. SLAT is a technology introduced in Intel and AMD processors. Recently released Windows Phone 8 SDK needs it to run the emulator 8 in your Windows 8 system.
So, what is this SLAT and how to check whether your CPU really supports it? In this post, we will discuss this with you.
If you are familiar with Windows Phone applications, you might be already aware of Application Bar. Application Bar is used to provide users with quick access to an application’s most common tasks, which are basically hidden when they are not needed.
Today in this chapter we will learn more about Application Bar in Windows Store apps along with integration and design guidelines.
In earlier Windows versions, we were missing this great feature of CD/DVD mounting. To achieve this, we had to install 3rd party software tools and was always demanded as in-built feature in Windows.
Windows 8 now has this feature and you can now easily mount any ISO image to create a virtual CD/DVD ROM in your PC. Continue reading it to know how to do this.
Many of us need to integrate settings page in our applications. All we generally do is by creating a separate page in our project. But Windows 8 provide us a separate settings panel in Charm bar which you can use for your settings page.
In this post we will learn more about it from scratch and integrate it to our demo application. Also, we will learn how to invoke the charm bar to show the settings panel.
In last chapter “Navigate between Pages” we discussed the basics of page navigation, where we navigated from one page to another page using the Frame.Navigate(type, obj). We also discussed how to pass an object as query string parameter.
Today in this chapter we will discuss more advanced page navigation using the LayoutAwarePage which comes with the Grid and Split application template by default.
Let’s begin with our fourth chapter of building Windows Store application development using Visual Studio 2012. In the previous chapters of this tutorial series, we got familiar with this project template and built a basic “Hello World” application.
Today in this chapter we will learn how to navigate from one page to another page in Windows 8 Store applications. So, continue reading.
