Developers who are writing Windows Store apps using C# and XAML might find some of the support for Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) lacking. Both WPF and Silverlight provided specific interfaces that enabled you to store validation context about fields on a context and even supported asynchronous validation. Although there are some existing frameworks that provide this support, such as Prism for the Windows Runtime, it is also fairly simple and straightforward to roll your own.

I do appreciate the …

Last week, we introduced WintellectNOW, a new on-demand learning service designed to make the same training content that we provide to Microsoft and other large customers available anywhere, any time. Jeffrey Richter and a team of talented people at Wintellect designed and wrote the software, which we’re continuing to improve on a daily basis. We’ve done some streamlining on the registration process since launch, for example, and we have a cool library-search feature tested and ready to roll …

Various providers often provide documentation and even SDKs that make it easier to connect with and authenticate to their service. The problem is that most scenarios assume a web-based application or specific mobile clients. The process in general looks something like this:

How can you take protocol modeled for the web and make it work in an app that is running on a Windows 8 device? The answer is the WebAuthenticationBroker component in the Windows Runtime.

The web authentication broker is …

The WebView control allows you to display content from sites in your app using a small window that renders the HTML using the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer. It does have some limitations and most likely if you are providing content in your app, your goal is to augment your app with fresh data rather than try to superimpose a full-blown web application on your own native Windows Store app.

Trying to strip down content can be quite cumbersome once you wade through the myriad RegEx …

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 …