Introduction to Windows 8 development. Presented by Laurent Duveau on February 9th during a Montreal .NET Community special event. Parts of the presentation were taken from existing Microsoft presentations.

1. Laurent Duveau
Windows 8 Instructor
MVP / MCT / RD @laurentduveau Montreal
February 9th, 2013
ldex.ca
Windows Store
app development

2. Agenda
Tools
Controls
Orientations & display modes
Tiles & Notifications
Contracts (Search & Share)

4. Tools
 Visual Studio 2012 + Expression Blend
 Get Blend with:
• Visual Studio Express for Windows 8
• Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 8
 Requirements
• Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 SDK

6. Controls
Combo box
Button
Check box
Progress bar
Password box
List box
Hyperlink
Progress ring
Radio button Slider
Viewbox

7. Presenting Data

8. Semantic Zoom

9. Commanding surfaces

11. Devices

12. Different display sizes

13. Different resolution / DPIs
 As the resolution goes up, elements
become smaller.

14. Different resolution / DPIs
 When the DPI/PPI hits a certain
threshold, Windows scales all of the UI to
140% or 180% of the original size.
Assets:
Images/en-us/logo.scale-100.png
Images/en-us/logo.scale-140.png
Images/fr-fr/logo.png
Code:
Images/logo.png

15. Display modes

16. Orientation

17. Orientations and display modes

21. Live tiles
Local, scheduled,
periodic and push
updates

22. Alive with activity without apps running
1. Issue direct updates, perhaps using queue,
scheduled, and expiring updates
2. Tell Windows a service URL where it can go to
obtain periodic updates
3. Obtain a Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)
channel and have a service send notifications to
that
These actions can happen from app code or
background tasks
There are three
ways an app
configures this
to happen

23. What makes an update?
 Choices:
Tile template catalog / toast template catalog
 Whoever issues an update builds the XML
• URIs for images can use http[s]://, ms-appx:///, or
ms-appdata:///local/
 Notifications Extensions Library provides
an object model
Reduces mistakes that cause updates to not show
Tiles, badges, and
toasts are bits of
XML that come
from predefined
templates (to
avoid chaos)
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/app-tiles-and-badges-sample-5fc49148

24. Live Tiles

25. Toast templates
MSDN: The toast template catalog
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/Hh761494

29. Search Anatomy
1. Search box is scoped to
the main app screen
2. Query suggestions
provided by the main
app on screen
3. List of installed apps that
have implemented the
search contract

30. Search Anatomy
4. Result suggestions
provided by the main app
on screen
• Must include thumbnail and title
• Indicates a strong or exact
match
• Takes users directly to the
details of the result

31. Implementing Search

35. Implementing Share Source