Ways You can Leverage Share Contracts in your Windows Store Game

One of the great new features available to developers creating Windows Store games is the Share Contract. The Share Contract, or sharing, provides an easy way for you to share data from your game to other applications the user has on their system.

Why is sharing useful? Games are, by their nature, social. Perhaps you are starting to play a game of Ultimate Zombie Battles and you want to let your friends know you are playing so they can come join you. You may want to let the world know that you just achieved a personal high score on Find the Chicken. Or better yet, you just downloaded a new game and you think it is so cool, you want to let your friend and family know about it so they can play it too.

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Ways You Can Use the Search Contract in Your Windows Game

The Search contract is a way you can integrate the Windows 8 search experience into your game. Windows 8 provides a Search feature that is enabled via the Charm bar (shown at right). The Charm bar is activated by a user swiping from the right edge of the screen with a finger, or by either a mouse or keyboard action (mouse to the upper right corner of the screen or Windows+C ). From the Charm bar, the user can select the Search charm and enter the default Search experience.

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What is the difference between a company vs. individual account for the Windows Store?

When you register to develop apps for the Windows Store, you have the option to register for a company or an individual account.  What are the major differences between them?

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Standard AppBarButton Styles Revealed For Windows 8 RTM

As much for my own benefit as anyone else’s here are the icons that all exist within the “Segio UI Symbol” Font referenced in the Standard Styles XAML fragment of every new project.  (They should form the basis for any icon appearing in the Application Bar)

With thanks to Long Zheng for providing source code for easily  rendering the icons:
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How to measure rendered string dimensions in #Win8Dev

While Windows 8 WinRT supports ViewBox control (its a control that allows text to auto resize depending upon available space), with my alarm clock app, I noticed substantial jittering (and resizing) as time changes between seconds. Of course you don’t want that happening.

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Getting started with SQLite in Windows Store / WinRT apps

In this blog post I will expand the blog post by Tim Heuer  to include information on how to include and access a pre-populated SQLite database file, maybe even a file created by migrating from a SQL Server Compact database file, as I blogged about recently.

First, download the "SQLite for Windows Runtime" Extension via Tools/Extensions and Updates/Online. Restart Visual Studio.

Then add references to the SQLite and C++ extensions as described by Tim Heuer. Remember to change the Build Configuration to either x64 or x86 in Configuration Manager.

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Video Tutorial : Creating Windows 8 Metro App to work with Picture Library (WinRT, XAML and C# )

Some time back, I created a small Windows 8 Metro Application (Windows Store App) which can access the Windows Picture Library and display thumbnails of all the pictures available in it. This post should be of a little help for developers who just started exploring Metro Apps for Windows 8.

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