Free ebook via Microsoft Press: Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (First Preview)

Hello! To help celebrate the Windows 8 Release Preview and the Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate, we’re happy to release a preview edition of Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, by Kraig Brockschmidt (who, some of you might remember, many years ago worked with us on a couple editions of Inside OLE).

Download a PDF of the ebook here (4.34 MB).
Download the ebook’s sample code here (27.5 MB).

This first preview contains the first four chapters of what we think will be an 18-chapter final ebook:

    Chapter 1   The Life Story of a Metro Style App: Platform Characteristics of Windows 8
    Chapter 2   Quickstart
    Chapter 3   App Anatomy and Page Navigation
    Chapter 4   Controls, Control Styling, and Basic Data Binding
    Chapter 5   Collections and Collection Controls
    Chapter 6   Layout
    Chapter 7   Metro Style Commanding UI
    Chapter 8   State, Settings, Files, and Documents
    Chapter 9   Input and Sensors
    Chapter 10   Media
    Chapter 11   Purposeful Animations
    Chapter 12   Contracts
    Chapter 13   Tiles, Notifications, the Lock Screen, and Background Tasks
    Chapter 14   Networking
    Chapter 15   Devices and Printing
    Chapter 16   Extensions
    Chapter 17   Apps for Everyone: Localization, Accessibility, and the Windows Store
    Chapter 18   Services

In the summer we’ll release a Second Preview version, which will contain 8–12 chapters. And then, in the fall, we’ll release the final version.

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White Paper : Windows 8 - What It Means for Development Decisions Today and in the Future

This white paper offers the defining features of Windows 8 and how it will affect your development now and in the future. Details include:

• Windows 8 essentials
• Use your current skill set for developing apps in winRT
• Learn how .NET fits with Windows 8

 

 

Get it from here

Building Windows 8 Metro Style Apps Sessions Digest

Building Windows 8 Metro style casual games using HTML 5

The intent of this session is to help HTML5/JavaScript developers with writing their first Metro Style App in a fun, immersive way. We will cover the basics of HTML5 Canvas gaming and how we can easily bring it to Windows 8. We will then add additional game functionality as we introduce the following topics:

HTML5 Audio, CSS3 Styling and Web Fonts, Implementing a Game Loop with JavaScript, Third Party Frameworks, Touch, Camera Access, Accelerometer, WinJS Controls

The session ends with HTML5/JavaScript developers having a baseline knowledge to build their own Windows 8 apps and sell them in the new Windows Store.

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What Windows 8 Developers Should Know About The Cloud

Successful Application = Windows 8 + Cloud

 

 

1. Client-side developers do need to embrace the cloud. The increasing popularity of connected devices like tablet computers and smartphones is having a direct effect on the adoption rate of personal cloud services. You can expect both connected devices and cloud services to grow together.
2. This trend has been accelerating over the past couple of years. Mobile and portable devices have limited internal storage and rely heavily on cloud services.
3. Windows 8 apps are generally Connected apps.
4. You can pull data to them or you can receive push notifications

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The old new Hello World... Building a simple RSS reader for Windows 8 Metro with HTML and JavaScript

Writing a RSS reader used to be the new Hello World app (now I think it's writing a Twitter app, but anyway...) so when saw this great walk-through for creating a Metro Style App that consumes an RSS feed I thought it would make for a perfect Metro Monday post. Then when I saw the author was using the Channel 9 feed...!

Starting from scratch, we’re going to learn through these 2 tutorials how to build a small RSS reader with HTML5, CSS3 and WinJS, the Microsoft JavaScript framework for Windows 8 Metro Style Apps. We’ll try also to follow the Metro design guidelines by using Expression Blend 5. If everything goes fine, you should be able to follow these 2 articles in 30 minutes.
This first article will help you to create the welcome screen that will use a WinJS ListView control. This control will display all the blog posts recently published via nice thumbnails. The 2nd one will work on the detail view displayed when you’ll click on one of the items. At last, you’ll find a video at the end of this article playing in real-time the following steps as well as the final solution to download. See them as useful complementary resources if you need to clarify some parts of this article.

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Getting started with Telerik RadControls for Metro – diving into the Examples Application

We are proud to announce the first publicly available BETA release of the world’s first commercial toolkit for Windows 8 Metro applications – our RadControls for Metro suite. We have worked hard during the past few months in order to prepare first-class components, designed and built from the ground-up for the Microsoft’s new platform for building immersive applications – the Windows Runtime. As with every Telerik product line, we have also prepared a complete application (QSF – Quick Start Framework) that demos various aspects of our controls and may be used as an entry point for getting familiar with the controls. In this post I will show you different aspects of the application and how to get the maximum out of it. Besides demoing the components themselves, the application also implements various Windows 8 specific features like Search contracts, Share contracts, different layout views, etc. which adds additional know-how value and will hopefully help you build your applications faster.



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Metro Paint : A XAML/C# App For Drawing & Hand Writing Recognition

This Metro style application is for drawing basic shapes like line, rectangle, circle, ellipse, free hand shapes, eraser, and clear screen. It also provides a feature to choose stroke thickness, border colour, ,fill color and handwriting recognition. It allows to save the recognized text as text file and only ink strokes can be saved as image. It is in the initial version so there are some limitations like saving whole drawing as image, resizing and moving of the drawn components etc.

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Telerik RadControls for Windows 8 Metro Beta is now Available

During TechEd 2012 Telerik announced their first control library set for Windows 8 Metro application. I blogged about it few days ago and if you didn’t read it yet, you can find it here “First Look to Telerik RadControls for Win8 Metro”.

 Earlier this control library set was for few developers through invitation only as it was in Early Adopter Mode. Telerik now released the first beta set of this controls for public download. You can now use these controls to develop your Windows 8 Metro applications. As it is in beta stage, the library is available for free download and once they release the final binaries, we will come to know about the pricing. Till then, try out the controls and read the complete post to find out the downloadable link and other resources.

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