Data Presentation In HTML5/WinJS Metro App

Inevitably, you’re going to have to make a choice about what control underlies this presentation of data, and eventually you’re going to have to implement it.

In this post, I’d like to do a little bit of a study into what control to choose when and why. As usual, I’ll be coming from an HTML/JS perspective, so if you’re wondering what your options are in XAML, Bing is your friend.

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Creating an inline AppBar Button Style for your Win8 apps

As you have probably read, the Metro Windows Store projects in Visual Studio now comes preloaded with a ton of styles for your AppBar. I love this style of button. You get the nice icon and text to indicate what the icon is supposed to mean (sometimes the icon can be confusing). Having both the icon and the text removes the need for users to hover over an icon to see what it’s suppose to be.

As awesome as the style is for buttons on the AppBar, they do have some limitations. They are big, and the text is on the bottom. This design makes it hard to put this style of icon in other parts of your app. Take a look at the Games app. Go all the way to the left and you’ll see your avatar along with ways to do more with your Xbox account. You accomplish these actions with buttons that look a lot like the AppBar buttons.

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Authenticating an ASMX Web Service in SharePoint from a WinRT app

Where’s the CookieContainer?

Yes mate, I’ve had that question too.

We are creating a new application for Windows 8 and we need it to connect to our web services. Connecting to the anonymous methods was easy, but when it comes to authenticating the user the situation changes.

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MetroLog - A lightweight logging system designed specifically for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 apps

MetroLog is a lightweight logging framework designed for Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 apps. Although the API is based on NLog and log4net, the intention is that it's a very basic logging system.

The need for it to be basic comes from the fact that the Windows Store apps API surface area intentionally limited for very specific applications. This project came out of the fact that porting NLog to Windows Store apps is difficult because of it's incredibly rich feature set, most of which is not workable in Windows Store apps.

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