Windows Store apps have a variety of tricks up their sleeve for engaging the user even when they are not running. Tiles are a perfect example because they provide at-a-glance information to the user from the start screen. Tiles can provide images, text, or a combination of both and support queuing multiple notifications.

Tiles are defined by various pre-built XML templates. The catalog of tiles is available online in the tile template catalog and can be enumerated via TileTemplateType as …

One of the things I enjoy doing most is teaching developers how to write Windows Store apps using XAML and C#. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, both for Microsoft and for other customers as well. But it has become clear to me as I teach these classes that in a typical class, half the people in the room know XAML pretty well, and half have little or no experience with it. That makes designing a course a challenge, because you either have to bore half the class by teaching them something …

Numerous times in the last month I’ve been working with different teams and when I whip out my PowerShell window and start doing all the magic, especially with Visual Studio command line tools, the young kids go crazy. The mix of command line development tools and PowerShell is a powerful aphrodisiac. Too bad that Visual Studio is living in the dark ages of batch files required to set various environment variables so everything works. The trick is getting those environment variables into …

“We are on the path to Windows and Windows Phone Convergence” (//Build 2012 – How to Leverage your Code Across WP8 and Win8, Slide 6)

I often hear people saying the phrase “Windows 8 Phone” when they are talking/asking about “Windows Phone 8”.  Throughout presentations that I’ve given and other discussions I’ve had over the past several months that covered the topic of Windows Phone 8, I’ve made it a point to emphasize that …

On May 9th, I’ll be speaking at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, WA on all about IntelliTrace. See location and signup info here. IntelliTrace is the first real Windows debugging technology since the hair band days of the 1980’s. This session will be PowerPoint free and nothing but demos and questions on how you can make the most of this amazing technology. It doesn’t matter if you are doing ASP.NET, WPF, Azure or even console applications, IntelliTrace will speed up your debugging. …

I've spent a lot of time this spring learning about Near Field Communication (NFC) and the NFC networking API in WinRT. That part of WinRT is present both in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, which means it's relatively easy to get tablets and phones talking to each peer-to-peer. One of the things I love about NFC is that while NFC itself only works when two devices are in close proximity (3 or 4 centimeters), devices that are tapped together can use NFC to establish a network connection and …

The Model-View-View Model (MVVM) pattern is more popular than ever and is built into the Visual Studio templates for creating Windows Store apps. Developers familiar with Silverlight already encountered the platform shift to using asynchronous operations because it was impossible to generate a WCF client with synchronous methods. The Windows Runtime (WinRT) takes this further by dictating any operation that may potentially take longer than 50ms to complete should be asynchronous. How does the …

The GridView control is one of the most used layout controls within Windows 8 Store applications.  By using the Grid App project template with Visual Studio 2012, your first page will look similar to the following: While this looks great, what if you’d like to create a items that vary in size?  Something like the following: This type of layout is possible using the GridView with very little extra work.   There are multiple methods for accomplishing this task; some easier …