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 …

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 …

There are several reasons you may wish to show HTML content in your Windows Store app. You may have information that is updated frequently and makes the most sense to consume as HTML data. Your app may aggregate feeds that contain HTML content. In some cases you may be creating a native client that accesses an existing web-based application that you need to interoperate with. Fortunately, the WinRT has a control that addresses these needs: the WebView control. It is important to understand …

After several months of comparing various Windows 8 devices to replace my old 1.5” thick 6-lb. Dell laptop, I finally settled on the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13. My requirements are fairly straightforward: I want 8GB of RAM and a minimum of 256GB SSD, I have to have a touch display and the resolution needs to be at least HD+ (1600 x 900). I wasn’t as concerned about budget and there was one device that fit the bill perfectly: the ASUS ZenBook Prime Touch. The only catch was that the 8GB version isn’ …

Most people think of the Windows Runtime as being synonymous with the formerly-known-as “Metro” applications, now called Windows Store apps. To add to the confusion, of course, is the fact that the ARM-based version of the Windows OS is branded as Windows RT. Programmers, being lazy, like our abbreviations so the runtime has been adopted by the world at large as WinRT. Did you know you can reference WinRT from desktop applications? It’s possible, but not easy nor straightforward. There are …

My daughter turns 13 today and to celebrate, our family took a trip to Paris, France. We celebrated Christmas and New Year’s Eve (bonne année) there. I recently purchased an ASUS VivoTab RT and turned over my Samsung Series 7 slate to my wife. We decided to travel light and only bring the slates – no heavy laptops. We were gone for 10 days – so how was the experience? In a word, fantastic! Before I share some updates around the slate itself, I wanted to mention a few technologies that eased my …

Ivy Bridge. Clover Tail. No, wait, Cloverview. ARM? Atom! Understanding the processors that drive today’s tablets and laptops is definitely like wading through alphabet soup. If the fact that there are two versions of the latest Windows operating system (Windows 8 and Windows RT) isn’t confusing enough, there are literally dozens of CPUs available and most have an affinity to one OS version or the other. Oh, and by the way, you’ve probably heard that Windows RT runs on ARM processors, right? …

Does the snapped view required for Windows 8 apps provide insights into the future of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development? Windows 8 app developers are required to create a snapped view for their applications. This is the one option for on screen multi-tasking in the Windows 8 world. The usefulness of this view on either a tablet or a laptop form factor depends on how well it is implemented. For example, the Windows Store doesn’t offer any useful functionality when it is snapped – it …