Working with OData and WinJS ListView in HTML5/JS Metro Style Application

In this post we will see how to consume Netflix OData feed in HTML based Metro Application. Movies information will be displayed as following. At the end of this post, we should have output as below,

Netflix exposed all movies information as OData and that is publicly available to use. Netflix OData feed of movies are available at following location

http://odata.netflix.com/Catalog/

Essentially we will pull movies information from Netflix and bind it to ListView Control of WinJS. We will start with creating a blank application.

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Working with GridView Control in WinRT C#/XAML Metro Style App

As I am continuing to learn WinRT and its component, I spent sometime learning new native controls that are available for use in Metro style applications designed for Windows 8.  One of those controls is GridView.  This control can be easily visualized by looking at Windows 8 start screen.  You see groups of tiles, scrollable horizontally.  This is what this control is all about: presenting a list of items in a horizontally scrollable container, which can be further grouped.  In the case of grouping, the control essentially just deals with list of lists.

In the example below I will be using data that comes from WCF SOAP based service.  It exposes a list of contacts, where each contract has just a handful of properties:

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You can download the entire demo here

Replicating TargetNullValue in WinRT Metro Style Apps

There are times in this world when using binding statements, that you want to specify a default value for a property if the result provided is null. In a post found here by Jesse Liberty, he details how developers can utilize the TargetNullValue option within the xaml binding statement to provide this option.
Recently I’ve been porting my SaintsFC WP7 app over to Windows 8 metro app & I’ve found that this option is no longer available. It’s been confirmed that this will likely not be in the RTM version of Windows 8 either so here’s a workaround using a converter as a substitute. It’s a little more convoluted than a simple property within the binding but it will also be able to provide you with a more extensive feature set as a result.

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Download source code from here

8FilesInABox : Access Dropbox in Metro Style

Description

8 files in a box is an app created by Infinite Square. With it, you can access your dropbox account from a Metro app. You can share link to a file/folder, set files as favorite to keep them available offline. The app can also be used from other app to pick a file.

Features

• Access your dropbox files
• Save files for offline access

Download from here

Free Homemade Chart and DatePicker Control for Metro Apps

Here is how the charts turned out (I’m not ready to share this code yet, but I will once I clean it up a little!) – The barchart is by be, and the Piechart by another developer, I just did the legends. I’ll ask him if he is fine with sharing, and I’ll post the code here.

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Best practices when adding single sign-on to your app with the Live SDK

A few months ago I wrote about how to bring single sign-on and SkyDrive to your Windows 8 apps with the Live SDK. Since then we made the Windows 8 Release Preview publicly available and we’ve begun to see some inconsistency in the design patterns forming in how apps expose entry points for users to sign in, connect accounts or sign-out of their experience.

To help you with these design patterns, we put together some guidelines for apps that want to use a user’s Microsoft account. In this post I share those guidelines with you and show you some code for how to get started.

 
There are three primary scenarios where your app might need to integrate authentication with Microsoft accounts:

1. Your app requires the user to be signed in to work.
2. Your app can work if the user isn’t signed in but provides a personalized experience for users that signed in.
3. Your app has specific tasks that require Microsoft account sign-in such as integrating with SkyDrive or Hotmail.

Now let’s dive into the details of each of these.

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