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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 10:46 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Process Lifetime Management (Part 11/11)

Windows 8 Metro applications introduces new (for desktop version of Windows) philosophy behind application execution - when application runs and when it is terminated. In this post I will overview this process also known as Process Lifetime Management (or PLM in short). In addition, I will showcase creation of custom Splash Screen experience which becomes important especially with in PLM in mind. Windows 8 designed to run not only on desktop PCs and laptops (which usually have descent amount of RAM...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 10:39 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Live tiles, toasts, badges and Push Notifications (Part 10/11)

Windows 8 provides interesting way to “interact” with user even when application is not active anymore.   Push Notifications Windows Push Notifications (WNS) in Windows 8 is quite similar to the Windows Phone 7 Push Notification (MPNS) model. It uses cloud-based push notification services to deliver notifications to registered clients. To enable application receiving push notifications developer must register it at Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect site. The process is very simple...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 10:12 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Quick tip: using location services (Part 8/11)

In this short post I will show how to use location services in you app. Working with location services requires declaring Location capability in application manifest: The location services provides access to location functionality, such as cell triangulations, WiFi (through IP address), and GPS. Also great many modern devices supports resolving location in some way from mentioned before, application must handle the case where location services cannot resolve the location or user has disabled location...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 10:11 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Licensing and In-app purchases (Part 7/11)

Windows 8 Metro applications are distributed by Windows Store. The store handles all installation tasks, updating to the new versions when published by developer. Also it handles purchasing the application, supporting trial mode (if application developer chooses to support it) and handles in-app purchases. All licensing supported by Windows.ApplicationModel.Store namespace. Note : CurrentApp provides license information for the current app.This object obtains its data from the Windows Store, which...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 9:24 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Quick tip: using sensors (Part 6/11)

Windows 8 supports multiple sensors. Some of them could be installed on your device, some of them not. When I planned this series, I had pretty hard choice to make about the sensor – which one to use. Accelerometer/Gyrometer/Compass/Inclinometer/Orientation are cool sensors, but their usage pretty tightly bound to specific scenarios like games (Accelerometer/Gyrometer/Inclinometer), some location aware applications (Compass) or at least orientation-aware apps (Orientation). I had to make a choice...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 9:18 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Local and Roaming application data storage (Part 5/11)

In previous post (Settings – LINK) I explained how to create application’s settings screed and customize it with application specific UI and data. In this post I will explain how to preserve application settings and other application data. Wind8 CP enables few locations to store application data. Application can use temporary directory to save any kind of information which was possible also before Windows 8. In addition WinRT provides native support saving data in application’s data store as collection...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 9:04 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual dStudio 11 Beta – Customizing Settings Charm (Part 4/11)

Before Windows 8 every application invented its own way to present application settings. Here are very few of them: Some apps even provided standalone applications to manage settings. Also from settings storage perspective every developer had to decide when, where and how those settings are saved and in some cases synchronized between different user’s machines. With Windows 8 Metro applications most of those questions and hard choices are gone. Every Metro application can use system-wide standard...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 8:56 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Data Sharing (Part 3/11)

Windows 8 enables data exchange between applications. This was possible in the past, but to make it happen two applications must have knowledge about each other which was always not possible especially for applications developed by different companies. Windows 8 enables easy data sharing between the application by introducing OS-level sharing mechanism. Metro applications can publish information from certain types (“Share Source” applications) from one hand, operation system is responsible of selecting...
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 8:50 PM

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta – Working with Proximity Device (Part 2/11)

This post is about proximity devices and scenarios enabled by using this functionality. WinRT supports Near Field Communication (NFC) scenarios by providing native support using Windows.Networking.Proximity namespace. This namespace enable working with proximity device in two different modes – direct communication using sockets ( ProximityStreamSocket class) and publish/subscribe mode (using ProximityMessage class). ProximityDevice class provides gateway to hardware NFC device component (if present...
Posted by Alex Golesh | 6 comment(s)
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Wednesday, June 29, 2011 6:57 PM

Windows Phone Mango – New Tasks (Beta & Beta2)

Windows Phone Mango adds few more task over initial Windows Phone (RTM) release. This post will cover new task (launchers and choosers) added to Windows Phone Mango Beta and Beta 2. To introduce those features I’ve created sample application which looks very simple, yet have all those new tasks: Before we are starting, one very important note about tasks in general. Some of them works on emulator as on real device (Bing maps, Bing directions, etc.), some of them works but doesn’t produce any “visible...
Posted by Alex Golesh | 2 comment(s)
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Tuesday, May 31, 2011 4:02 PM

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Profiler” - Part 9 of 8)

This post is a “missing part” of series about new features in Windows Phone Mango New and very important feature of Windows Phone “Mango” Developer Tools is the profiler. The profiler enables the developers of Silverlight applications (currently only Silverlight scenarios are supported) to sense important heartbeats of the application and collect information about application behavior at runtime. To measure the performance or the application, navigate to Debug menu option and select Start Windows...
Posted by Alex Golesh | 3 comment(s)
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011 8:48 PM

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Push Notifications & Tiles” - Part 8 of 8)

Mango introduces some changes in Push Notifications mechanism which enables the developers to create more attractive scenarios. First feature I’ll show in this post is a secondary tiles for application. Before Mango, every application could have only one pinned tile on the main screen which could be updated using Push Notification mechanism (I blogged about it quite some time ago here and here ). Mango release enables to have additional tiles which can be pinned and removed from application code...
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011 8:46 PM

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Silverlight/XNA Interoperability” - Part 7 of 8)

Windows Phone RTM didn’t allowed to mix Silverlight and XNA content. Mango enables the scenarios where Silverlight content can be rendered along with XNA content. In the sample presented in this post we will build 2-pager Silverlight application with pure Silverlight page (1st page) and mixed 3D XNA & Silverlight page (2nd page). Final application looks like the following: In order to ease on the developers, after installing Mango developer tools, Visual Studio provides us with two templates...
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011 8:43 PM

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Fast Application Switch (FAS)” - Part 6 of 8)

The Windows Phone RTM operating system had only one active application and when application were sent to the background the state was serialized and kept in the application’s isolated storage. This process called tombstoning and application in such state called tombstoned. When user return to the tombstoned application, he would have to wait a while as the application deserialized its state and recovered and we as developers had to take care about saving the application’s state and resuming it. With...
Posted by Alex Golesh | 15 comment(s)
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Tuesday, May 24, 2011 8:42 PM

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Background Agents” - Part 5 of 8)

One of most requested and discussed features of Mango release is “multitasking”. In Mango the multitasking term has slightly different meaning than standard (PC) multitasking. Multitasking for Mango phones means ability to execute the code while application in not active and play audio started by the application in a background. This is achieved by Background Agents. In addition to them Mango also introduces APIs to download and upload files while application is in the background and add Reminders...
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