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 …

When I teach classes at Microsoft, I often precede a juicy tidbit of information or code sample with the statement “Here’s a good interview question for you.” Well, here’s a good interview question for you – especially if you want the interviewee out of your office as fast as humanly possible. How do you get a reference to a front-facing or back-facing camera on a Surface RT? It’s easy to enumerate camera devices in WinRT, but distinguishing between front-facing and back-facing cameras …

As I wrote the Contoso Cookbook app and accompanying labs for Microsoft last winter, I found myself thinking that it would be cool to build another end-to-end Windows Store sample – one that could go beyond the basics and demonstrate fun features and programming techniques that Contoso Cookbook did not. At the same time, I’ve been wanting to carve out time to create a Windows Store app to catalog my comic book collection, which currently comprises more than 1,700 Silver Age comics, mostly DC …

I received an interesting question from a customer today. He wanted to know how to manipulate the navigation history to skip a page in the backstack in a Windows Store app. In other words, he wanted to do in Windows 8 something similar to what NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry does in Windows Phone 7.1. The scenario he presented was one in which the navigation flow includes a login page, but once the user has logged in and navigated to another page, clicking the back button should take the user …

A few years ago, I needed a CoverFlow control for a Silverlight project I was working on. Since Silverlight didn’t include a CoverFlow control, I did a little searching and found an open-source XAML CoverFlow control on CodePlex. So I downloaded the code, tweaked it a bit, and quickly had a control with the basic functionality I needed for my project. Fast forward to this week. I needed a CoverFlow control again, this time for a Windows Store app that I’m building. (Called MyComix, it lets you …

Microsoft’s Surface RT lacks a GPS receiver (bummer!), but you can still use WinRT’s location API to build location-aware apps for it. As long as you have a WiFi connection, the location API can determine where you are with a reasonable degree of accuracy – sometimes with astonishing accuracy – using WiFi positioning. Furthermore, you can combine the location API with the Bing Maps control available in the Bing Maps SDK for Windows Store Apps to present location data in a rich and informative …

One of the cool things about Microsoft’s Surface RT is that it comes with a rather complete array of sensors. Among those sensors are an accelerometer, which allows software running on the device to sense the acceleration along the X, Y, and Z axes in real time. As a practical matter, that means software can determine the device’s 3D orientation in space and respond to changes in orientation as well. Want to build a simulated carpenter’s level or a Labyrinth-type game in which the user rolls a …

Windows 8 is out, ads are flooding the airwaves (bravo, Microsoft!), and the punditshpere is teeming with articles generally praising the platform but decrying the lack of apps. As Reuters recently put it, “A lack of apps is Microsoft's Achilles heel as it attempts to catch Apple Inc and Google Inc in the rush toward mobile computing.” Now, granted, Windows 8’s success is far from guaranteed. It IS a radical departure from the past, and it represents a bold strategy on Microsoft’s part to …