How to Write a WinJS Custom Control

Lately, I was involved in a few Windows 8 projects. One of the questions that I am being asked from time to time was how to write your own Windows Store app custom control with WinJS library. This post will try to give you a head start for your custom control library. During the post you will build an autocomplete control step by step and learn a few WinJS concepts on the way. So let get started.

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Windows 8 Apps: Change your project to run PlayReady successfully

Today I wasted a lot of time to understand why, the code I wrote to implement PlayReady in a Windows 8 App didn’t work. I have ran the code lot of times, making changes to handle obscure hypothesis, just because my application was failing to load a DRM protected stream. When I finally found the error code issued by the MediaFailed event I went on the right way:

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Windows 8: Windows Store apps - JavaScript passing data to the code containing the WebView control

Over the past few weeks, in my spare time, I've been working on building a Windows Store app that will wrap an HTML web app that I've built. To use the web app, you enter a token in a textbox on the welcome page and then click the Verify button. If the token is valid, a URI is given to the user which can then be used for the tracking of one's time using the start/stop timer view in the web app.

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DESIGNING RETRO LOOKING GAMES FOR WINDOWS 8

When people talk about “retro” games, they usually refer to most games made for the 1st to 4th generation of gaming consoles. The hallmark of these games are their pixelated visuals and approachable yet challenging game mechanics. I was a huge fan of these games growing up, so most of the ones I make today emulate the visual style and gameplay from this era in gaming history. I wanted to highlight some features of these games and talk about how to recreate them when making your own HTML5 games for Windows 8. Since canvas is perfect for rendering 2D graphics, making a retro-looking game is easy to accomplish and works well on almost any hardware. First, we need to talk about picking an art style.

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Windows 8–Search Suggestions in Charm bar

I recently started a series of postings from my tour of presentations in Europe and the UK.  Today I’d like to return to Searching (which I started to cover here), and this time take a look at what it takes to have your application offer Search suggestions as the user types into the Search box.

To examine this, we’ll create a Windows 8 application with the suggestions hard coded, but you can just as easily obtain the suggestions from a web service, or database, etc.

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Building a project skeleton, using CSS3 layout and styling WinJS controls #Win8Dev

This past week was spent turning wireframes and workflows into a moving prototype using static data. Not only does this action of sketching out the project inform architecture, but it also allows us to create the placeholders once we get the visual design.

As a bonus, a short screen cap of the prototype can be a valuable asset while the app concept is still forming in our heads.

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