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