Information about the Developer License for Windows 8 Metro style apps

Writing Metro Style Apps for Windows 8 requires that you have a valid Developer License for Windows 8. The Developer License is free, regardless of the edition of Visual Studio you are using. The license works with Windows 8 Metro style apps only, you do not need it to write ASP.NET sites or WinForms programs. A developer license is not the same as a Windows Store account. A Windows Store account is what you use to sell and manage your Metro style apps.

Microsoft Windows Phone developers are accustomed to the notion of a developer license; however, other developers like ASP.NET or native Windows devs might not.

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Exploring Win8 Metro: The RichEditBox & FilePickers

Win8 provides a number of controls in the XAML toolkit that are easy to use and that provide a great deal of flexibility and power.  I’ll be writing about some of these controls now and then, starting with some simple and easy to use controls that do a lot of work for you.

The RichEdit box allows the user to open and view and edit a Rich Text document. Rich Text refers to all the text attributes you associate with a word processor but not with a text editor (e.g., bold, color, etc.). The RichEditBox control handles all the work of understanding and presenting the rich text.

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What icon sizes are important for your WinRT app?

The are quite a couple of icons that you can set, though not all of them are absolutely required.  For the tile we have the following logo sizes. I also created the example of an app I’m working on. The main tile requires a logo of 150x150 pixels.



Then we have a wide logo that’s only required when you want your app to be visible with a wide logo on the Start screen. When you use it, the size has 310x150 pixels. That’s two tile logo’s + a 10 pixel margin.

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