Metro: Creating an IndexedDbDataSource for WinJS

The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can create custom data sources which you can use with the controls in the WinJS library. In particular, I explain how you can create an IndexedDbDataSource which you can use to store and retrieve data from an IndexedDB database.
If you want to skip ahead, and ignore all of the fascinating content in-between, I’ve included the complete code for the IndexedDbDataSource at the very bottom of this blog entry.

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Windows 8 RTM JavaScript–Change Lock Screen Image

In the past couple of months I’ve worked a lot with Windows 8 JavaScript and C#, I’ve also wrote plenty of posts on that subject and there is much more stuff to talk about.

In this post I’ll show two things:

• Using File Picker using JavaScript
• Change Windows 8 Lock Screen Image Programmatically

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Using IndexedDB in your Windows 8 Game

As I was pulling together my previous post on notifications in an HTML 5 game on Windows 8, I couldn’t help but think there must be a better way to handle the storage of the local leaderboard. If you’re not familiar with that sample, it’s a simple game where you see how many times you can touch a bouncing ball before it hits the boundaries of the display ten times.

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Windows 8–Connecting to SkyDrive

I wrote my first Windows 8 code which connected to SkyDrive the other day so I thought I’d share in case it helps anyone who’s doing a similar thing. The main documentation set for Live is on the web so drop that into your favourites if you’re going to be working with this API set. Simple example – let’s say that I want to grab some pictures from my local machine and upload them to a particular folder on my SkyDrive. I’ll start with a blank project.

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Location Awareness in about 2 minutes with Windows 8–HTML

I was working on a mapping application for Windows 8 – HTML using the Bing SDK and needed to pass the latitude and longitude into it. I began searching for a straightforward way to get the location and had to read through pages of documentation before finally finding it. Here it is in case you want to use it in your own apps.

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Useful Value Converters For WinRT Development

Value converters are a really useful part of the xaml binding infrastructure, they work in Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and WPF. As we work on more and more projects in this space we build up a library of useful value converters. I'd like to illustrate some of the ones I use here.

• Bitmap Image Converter
• Boolean To Visibility Converter
• Colour To Brush Converter
• Simple Type Converter
• String Format Converter

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Windows Store: Two-thousand, seventy-nine

Milestones. Every one counts. Sure, the iOS app store has considerably more apps than the Windows Store today – that’s not news.

But developers are adding to the Windows Store every day – and though some apps are removed from the store periodically, the number that grows every day. Today, the Windows Store broke the 2000 app mark and arrived at 2,079 apps available internationally.

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