Category: General

Tweak Touch Behavior in Internet Explorer with User Style Sheets

As touch becomes a more and more prevalent means of interacting with PCs as well as phones and tablets (I’m typing this on a Lenovo Carbon X1 Touch laptop), developers should be aware of how to create touch-friendly sites and apps that help users make the most of touch-enabled devices.

If you’re building apps for the Windows Store, there’s good guidance available on touch interaction design on the Windows Store developer center.

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Microsoft DevRadio: Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps (Part 1)

Here’s my next DevRadio installment, this time with me as a guest, with my fellow TEs, Brian Hitney and Peter Laudati hosting. In it, we discuss some of the topics in my blog series on building back-end services for Windows 8 apps.

Continue reading Microsoft DevRadio: Using Windows Azure to Build Back-End Services for Windows 8 Apps (Part 1)

Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Adding Push Notifications

In previous installments of this series, I’ve shown how you can quickly create REST-based services accessible via HTTP that allow you to easily store and retrieve data in a Windows Store app, using several different approaches including WCF Data Services, ASP.NET Web API, and the new Windows Azure Mobile Services. You can read all of the previous parts of the series here. I recommend reading the intro post at a minimum, so you’re familiar with the games I’m using to demonstrate the concepts in the series.

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Building Back-end Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps: Windows Azure Mobile Services

If you’ve been following along with this series so far, you know we’ve come along way, from my overview of the series, which described the target scenario of a simple leaderboard service for a couple of JavaScript-based Windows 8 games, to the 2-part post (Part 1 / Part 2) on building this service using WCF Data Services, and hosting as an Azure Cloud Service, to the most recent installment, in which I showed how to build the same service using ASP.NET Web API, and hosted in a Windows Azure Web Site.

To round out the group of solutions I’m exploring in the series, in this post I’ll show you how to build the same game leaderboard service on top of the new Windows Azure Mobile Services (in preview as of this writing).

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Building Data and Services for Windows 8 Apps

Introduction

In this post, I’m going to kick off a series in which I’ll walk through the creation of a back-end service for a Windows 8 app. This first post will provide an overview of the series, and introduce a couple of potential technologies you can use to build your back-end services.

The Challenge

As an example of a scenario that might merit a nicely abstracted back-end service, I’m going to create a simple leaderboard service that can store and retrieve high scores and win/loss/tie stats for a variety of games. Since it’s where I’ve spent the majority of my time lately, I’m going to focus on games built with HTML and Javascript, but the platform choices I’m going to describe will work just as well for games and apps build with C# or VB and XAML.

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Microsoft DevRadio: Developing a RockPaperAzure Windows 8 app

Abstract:
In today’s episode Developer Evangelists Andrew Duthie, Brian Hitney and Peter Laudati recap the “Rock, Paper, Azure” – (#BeatTheGu) challenge from this year’s TechEd as well as how they built a Windows 8 App for the competition. Tune in for this lessons learned session on what considerations and features Andrew took into the design of the app. Continue reading Microsoft DevRadio: Developing a RockPaperAzure Windows 8 app