windows_8

Had the first meeting of the year last night for the Orlando Windows Phone / Windows 8 Group and instead of going down the planned presenter lead meeting format it turned more into a "Town Hall" style with some good topics I thought I'd share. Where does everyone go to learn how to build or develop for Windows 8.1? As anyone who can use the web, you w ill find a number of popular blogs that have articles written on how to get started using this or that, including my own, but how relevant are they considering how fast Windows 8 development is moving and changing for that matter.  One attendee mentioned the LayoutAwarePage and how it was a...

In Part 1 I covered a simple implementation of the Authentication feature and portable class libraries from the Azure Mobile Services SDK.  However, as mentioned in the "Good & Bad So Far" section; there is not a whole lot of code reuse other than the Azure endpoint and secret key.  Let's refactor a bit by adding some interfaces, conditional compile statements and the MVVM Light Event Bus to help the same solution operate cleaner. The "after" code for part one is available here. Building Our Core PortableAzure.Core is our Portable Class Library that is being shared with the Windows 8 and  Windows Phone project in the attempt to reuse as much code as possible.  However,...

Azure Mobile Services is undoubtedly one of the best platforms to emerge from the Azure group over the last year. If you are a mobile developer and not taking advantage of it; I encourage you to do so.  There are many video and blog posts available to get you started at http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/ . One of the features you may not be aware of is Azure Mobile Services is a Portable Class Library (PCL) available through nuget. If you are not familiar with PCL's see my "Move Your ViewModels" series. There is a caveat however when using Azure Mobile Services in your PCL; although all of the data calls to the services are...

From February 1 through June 2013, publish a new Windows 8 or Windows Phone app and enter my sweepstakes page to win up to $1000 in cash prizes.  WHAT?!?!   Pretty cool right.  Get extra $$ for what you are already doing.  Publish you app in the store the go to http://spboyer.me/appsforcash and submit your app. 3 Winners each month! $1000 $500 $250 Follow me on twitter @spboyer and let me know when you submit it and I'll personally look at the app and give it a review and let all my friends to give it a look as well for extra exposure. See official rules here BONUS POINTS AND AWARDS FREE NOKIA PHONE If this is your FIRST...

Portable Class Libraries  Portable Class Libraries were added as a project type in the interest of creating an assembly that you could use across the .NET Framework, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, or Xbox 360 platforms without modifications.  Well, not really that easy.  There is some work to do and as you get into the development of PCLs you'll find out that there is really a sliver of what you'd hope is supported. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/gg597391(v=vs.110).aspx) MVVM Light Where I have found it for me is in Windows Store and Windows Phone (7.5 and 8) with MVVM Light. I have been using this MVVM framework exclusively for a...