How I Built an “Awesome Chat” application for Windows 8 with Windows Azure Mobile Service

In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how I built a Windows 8 application using Windows Azure Mobile Service. Windows Azure Mobile Service is the newest Windows Azure Services that you can use to provide backend services for your mobile applications (currently Windows 8, more coming soon). You can learn more and sign up for a preview of this service here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/mobile-services/. More information about this service can be found on Scott Guthrie’s blog post here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2012/08/28/announcing-windows-azure-mobile-services.aspx. The service looked really promising and I thought I should give it a try and trust me, you’re not going to be disappointed. All-in-all it took me about 4 hours to build the application (and that included installing Windows 8, VS 2012, signing up for a marketplace account etc.). Since I’m quite excited about this service and the work I was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, I’m going to dramatize this blog post a bit! I am big fan of TV series 24 so I will use that for dramatization  . Without further ado, let me start!

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Getting rid of advertisements in your Windows 8 app in 5 minutes

As I posted before, app assemblies, non-compiled XAML and html pages are easily accessible for users. Windows 8 RTM doesn’t bring anything new for apps protection. Neither special knowledge nor tools are required to open app’s package in WindowsApps folder, find .xaml page with advertisements and remove AdControl elements. Your grandma can do it between baking a cake and knitting socks given good instruction.

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Snap to Your Tiles In HTML5/JS Windows 8 App

Let’s say you have a bunch of tiles in your Windows 8 app and the user grabs this list with their finger and pans some distance to the right. There’s a chance the list will end up landing in a position like this… Notice that the tiles at left are cutoff. The list has panned some arbitrary distance and stopped where fate stopped it. I know it’s all scientific, but it’s fun to say that fate landed it here.

But what if you don’t want to put your app in fate’s fickle hands and would rather stop every time at a tile’s edge. That flick from my last example, then, should find you here……with the edge of tiles 9, 10, and 11 neatly lined up on your left margin.

Is that possible? Of course it is.

Is it easy? Yep. That too.

Once again, the custom CSS properties in Windows 8 come to the rescue. I’m going to talk about a couple of properties in the -ms-scroll* area. If you want a good list of the available properties, just type -ms-scroll in a CSS sheet and let IntelliSense be your guide.

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Creating a Simple Windows 8 Game with JavaScript: Part 1 – Windows 8 App Basics

This is the first in a series of posts that will show you to create a (very) simple Windows 8 game. We’ll be using HTML5, JavaScript, WinJS, and some helpful libraries from CreateJS along the way.

The game is based on the XNA sample game "Catapult Wars Lab". We’ll reuse the assets from that game as we develop a new version for Windows 8 that’s based on web technologies. This game focuses on simplicity, so there are a number of intermediate techniques that aren’t used in this sample.

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