Getting Started with Windows 8, MVVM Light and EventToCommand

Now that Windows 8 and Visual Studio are in RTM I wanted to put together a quick entry for those Windows Phone developers making the transition to Windows 8 development with their MVVM Light skills.

Laurent Bugnion, is the creator of the MVVM Light toolkit and I, as well as many others, have been using this for Windows Phone development for a while now.  I am porting on of my applications to Windows 8 and wanted to take the knowledge of this toolkit to the new platform hoping that there were either some new enhancements and/or not many changes so that I could just go.  Well that was the deal.


The latest installer for the toolkit, "MVVM Light Toolkit V4 RTM", is available from CodePlex
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Why start learning to build for Windows 8

If you have done any reading about Windows 8, one thing all the press is focusing on is Windows 8 offers and unprecedented opportunity to monetize your developer skills.

Combining the broad reach of Windows which already exists, a new developer platform in the form of Windows Store Apps, best-in-class developer tools Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server, a reimagined user experiencewith Windows Store, Metro Style Apps, support for new chipsets Intel and RTM, and a built-in Store with industry-leading business terms, with initial revenue share of 70% revenue for you 30 % for Microsoft and 100% in app purchase revenue to you.
Windows 8 is the largest developer opportunity, ever!

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Telerik Loves Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 RTMs!

Yesterday’s release of Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 marks the beginning of a new era. In some ways, VS2012 and Blend are incremental releases, adding even better support for building enterprise and consumer apps and services for the desktop and the web. However, in one very important way, the release of VS2012 and Blend, together with the release of Windows 8 earlier this month, signals a whole new focus for the platform - that of touch-centric tablets - and with it, a whole new way to package and distribute apps for the Windows operating system - the Windows Store.

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How To Change Windows 8 RTM Product Key After Install

After I've installed Windows 8 RTM, I tried to activate it as good folks at Microsoft are telling you too. When I clicked on Activate button, Windows activation failed, which of course made sense because I have not entered a product key yet. But, for some reason, there was no place to enter a product key under System properties. Or, at least I did not see it. Luckily, the good old Command Prompt and slmgr.vbs tools came to rescue. Just follow these steps to add/change product key using Command Prompt and slmgr.vbs:

• Launch Command Prompt as an Administrator.
• At the command prompt, type in "slmgr.vbs -ipk <insert your product key here>" and click Enter
• To activate windows, type in "slmgr.vbs -ato" and click Enter.

That's all

Source

Discovering data formats supported by Windows 8 share contract target apps

Windows 8 apps run in sandboxed environment where all direct communications between apps are prohibited. Instead, Windows 8 provides several mechanisms to facilitate indirect communications – protocols, file type associations and share contracts.
All these mechanisms allow transferring data between independent apps – in most of the cases developers don’t care about data source or destination. However, occasionally there is a need to support communications with a particular app. In this case all protocols, associations and contracts supported by target app need to be identified.

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You can download compiled executable or build it by yourself from source code (.NET 4.5/WPF).

Free ‘book’ : User Experience Guidelines for Metro/Windows 8 style apps (WinRT apps)

You can download the book User Experience Guidelines for Metro/Windows 8 style apps (WinRT apps) here