Using HTML controls to create great Metro style apps

With Windows 8, you can use HTML to build Metro style apps. What you might not realize is that by using HTML controls directly, you automatically get the new Windows 8 experience. We have done work in HTML so that you can build industrial strength apps that have touch capability while still maintaining the great flexibility of using HTML. We want you to quickly and efficiently build apps that shine.

In particular, we want you to continue to take advantage of common HTML controls like <button> so that you can create great Windows 8 experiences with your existing expertise. Windows 8 enables this with new implementations of the standard HTML controls that have Windows 8 experiences built into them. By default, all these standard controls have the new look and feel of Windows 8, a great touch experience, and strong localization and globalization support. By using these standard HTML controls, you can build great Metro style apps your customers will love, while still maintaining the flexibility you want from HTML.

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Transforming SVG graphics to XAML Metro Icons

This short article shows how to pimp your Windows 8 Metro apps with native XAML icons that are created from W3C Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG graphics are XML documents, and hence should be easily translatable into an other XML schema, such as XPS (the technology formerly known as ... Metro). Just like Metro XAML, XPS is a subset of XAML. Unfortunately its full object model is not implemented in Silverlight or Metro. In Windows, since the-OS-that-should-not-be-named, XPS is also used as print spooler format. This means that you don't even have to write an XSLT transformation to translate SVG to XAML: let the printer driver do the heavy lifting.

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Drawing / Inking API in WinRT (C#)

If you are planning to develop an application that is going to have the drawing capability, one of the first namespaces to resort to in WinRT is the Inking namespace. Using the InkManager in Windows 8 (Metro) applications, you can:

• Draw ink strokes
• Capture ink strokes
• Render Strokes on a Canvas using different geometries
• Select Strokes
• Delete Strokes
• Save and Load Strokes
• Convert strokes to text through handwriting recognition
• Copy/Paste strokes from the clipboard
• Hit Test the pen input

In  this article, we will be talking about different methodologies for rendering the pen input on the Canvas element on Metro applications.

You can get the complete solution that will be used as the example from TechNet : Windows 8 Input: Ink sample in C#/Xaml

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