windows__store__apps

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...

In the first part I covered how to get the initial project setup and share the ViewModels and ViewModelLocator between a Windows Phone 8 project and a Windows Store Application.  In this post, I'll add a DataService and a Model class that will be used to get the most recent posts from the Windows Phone Blog and display the results. Adding DataService and Async to Portable Class Library The purpose of the DataService in the context of this project is to retrieve the RSS feed from the Windows Phone Blog (http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/rss.aspx) using the async methods available in the 4.5 Framework, return a collection of our Headline class object for...

Developer Workshops Joe Healy (@devfish) and I have been hosting workshops at the Microsoft Store in Orlando at the Florida Mall over the past few Thursdays. The current series has been focusing on Windows Store Apps, including game application development.  Joe presented this past week on MonoGame for Windows 8 and another Florida Developer, Bill Reiss (@billreiss) is doing a blog series on that same topic here, and the turn out was great! Here are the next few topics on deck. XAML and C# for Windows 8 Store App https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032532761 Presented by: Shayne Boyer (@spboyer) Using Game Salad for No-Code Game Development on Windows 8 https://msevents.microsoft.com/...

I will be giving two talks this Saturday at Tampa Code Camp, being held at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Fl.  For directions and more information visit http://www.tampacodecamp.com. Schedule for other sessions here.   My Sessions Introduction to ASP.NET Web API - Why you should be using it. 9:50 AM in Room 1102This is an introduction to ASP.NET WebAPI and how easy it is to get started and use it in your application development when building RESTful services. Building Windows 8 Apps w/ MVVM Light 2:20 PM in Room 1301 MVVM Light is a great toolkit for building Window Phone applications and has been updated for building...