Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The "Windows 8 Store Apps Starter Kit" comes in what programming language? Ha! Wrong! VB.Net!

Visual Studio Gallery - Windows 8 Store Apps Starter Kit

Developing Windows 8 Store Apps is a new experience, which not only allows reusing existing skills based on XAML and managed languages, but that also involves interacting with operating system's features like Charms. It is difficult to find examples that show how to implement the Search contract, the Share contract, and the Settings contract to interact with related charms, or to implement secondary tiles to pin contents to Start.

The Windows SDK does a great job, but often examples do not target real usages of various features. Also, it is very difficult for developers using Visual Basic to find specific examples. This is the point in which this Starter Kits comes in.

Building the Sample

This sample works with Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows 8 or higher and targets the Visual Basic programming language. Note: you might need to remove the .pfx file and add a new one.

Description

The example shows how to:

  • use the Async/Await new pattern to asynchronoysly download contents from the Internet
  • implement the Settings contract so that you app integrates with the Settings charm. For this particular case two common requirements are targeted: showing your privacy policy and the technical support contact
  • implement the Search contratct to search items within the application via the Search charm of Windows
  • implement the Share contract so that your app can share contents with other apps (source only, no Share as a target)
  • implement secondary tiles to pin contents to Start and unpin them
  • implement the app bar to show additional commands

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Love seeing VB.Net get some Windows 8 Store App love.

2 comments:

Nikola Radosavljevic said...

Links seem to be broken.

Greg said...

Which one? Both links at the top of the post are working for me...