See Also: https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/feed.xml Gus Class's Windows Developer Education Blog Wed, 17 Apr 2019 03:24:50 GMT en-US hourly 1 Handling orientation changes and setting preferred orientation in Metro style apps https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/handling-orientation-changes-and-setting-preferred-orientation-in-metro-style-apps Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:01:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/10/14/handling-orientation-changes-and-setting-preferred-orientation-in-metro-style-apps/ I have recently been working on a very simple version of the game “Simon” in C# and XAML.  The following screenshot shows the game running:

I initially had developed the application without support for orientation.  As a result, when the application reflowed, it would crop components of the application off-screen (not desired!).  The following screen shot shows this happening in the device simulator.

So, I added some preferences to the application manifest that would indicate the application preferred to be in landscape and also set the preferences in the application startup.  To set the preference in the manifest, I clicked on the application manifest in VS11 and then set it to landscape.  To set the preference in the application startup, I added the following code to my Main():

Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.AutoRotationPreferences = Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayOrientations.Landscape | Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayOrientations.LandscapeFlipped;

Now that is enough to just lock the display so that the components don’t flip out when the display gets re-oriented.  Additionally, the application will launch in landscape, so that’s good and well.  However, what if instead, I wanted to handle the case where the device is flipped.  The math for doing this is surprisingly simple: width becomes height for each square, and top becomes left and visa versa for the game board squares.  First, I need to add an event handler for the OrientationChanged event:

Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayProperties.OrientationChanged
+= new Windows.Graphics.Display.DisplayPropertiesEventHandler(DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged);

This will cause the function “DisplayProperties_OrientationChanged” to be called when the device is rotated.  My handler calls a utility function in the game class which will update the width, height, left, and top values as appropriate to make the tiles reorient as shown in the following screenshot:

Key Takeaways

Make sure that you test your app in the simulator and see what happens when the orientation changes to discover orientation and reflow bugs.

See Also

]]> Quick tip: Toggling the device simulator in Visual Studio on the Windows developer preview https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/quick-tip-toggling-the-device-simulator-in-visual-studio-on-the-windows-developer-preview Fri, 14 Oct 2011 11:38:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/10/14/quick-tip-toggling-the-device-simulator-in-visual-studio-on-the-windows-developer-preview/ Yesterday I was struggling to figure out how to turn on / turn off the device simulator in the Windows 8 developer preview after discovering an orientation bug in a Metro style app I have been working on.  The trick is to click the icon in the build/run dialog as shown in the following screenshot:

This is really handy for testing for orientation bugs. I'll share more on this in a later post!

See Also

]]> Learning Windows Development with Quickstarts and How to’s https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/learning-windows-development-with-quickstarts-and-how-tos Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:39:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/10/04/learning-windows-development-with-quickstarts-and-how-tos/ In coordination with the Windows developer preview release for the Build conference, we quietly have added a few new page types across our content sets and today I’ll talk about two very important ones:

These are important because you can find the specific type of content that you are looking for by searching on the developer centers with the keyword "Quickstart:" or “How to:” and can also get right into the code by keeping an eye out for these keywords in page titles.

Quickstarts

The new quickstart page type is designed to quickly get you introduced to a scenario or feature without getting in to the details but instead focusing on just the essentials.  For example, the Adding a flyout quickstart will get you going in just a few minutes from the Building your first Windows Metro style app with JavaScript to having a  simple Metro style app with a flyout.  Another great example is the Quickstart: Adding an app bar page which will quickly get you going from having a simple Metro style app to having a Metro style app with an app bar on the bottom of the screen.

Check the see also section for some more examples of quickstart documentation.

How to’s

The how to’s that we have begun publishing compliment the Quickstarts by diving deeper into edge cases for scenarios and teaching you how to go beyond the basics.  A great example of a list of how to’s can be found in the How to Use Direct3D documentation another great set of how to examples are How to use the App Packaging API and How to Use the Deployment API.  These how to’s will get you through the intermediate steps of using your applications when you are working on releasing and deploying your apps. Check the see also section for some more examples of how to documentation.

Takeaways

When you’re looking at search results and browsing the documentation, make sure to pay special attention to the Quickstart and how to documentation because these pages are focused to getting developers solutions to typical problems they will encounter while developing Windows apps.

See Also

]]> Viewing the Windows Developer Preview documentation offline https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/viewing-the-windows-developer-preview-documentation-offline Wed, 28 Sep 2011 15:09:30 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/28/viewing-the-windows-developer-preview-documentation-offline/ Viewing the Windows Developer Preview documentation offline

As many of you have pointed out, the developer experience is a rather significant departure from what has been the traditional documentation approach for Windows.  The documentation on the Windows Dev Center has been moving into an encapsulated experience where you follow down a path starting from a big picture and moving deeper into the learning task as you follow links.  What this means is that rather than having the traditional table of contents as “branches in the tree” on the left pane of your Window, with “peer” nodes as leaves as seen in the following screenshot:

You instead have the breadcrumb on the top of the page to replace the branches and “peer” nodes rendered within the left pane.

We have received feedback that the experience where you have the TOC is convenient sometimes when you are looking for a reference and, believe it or not, this experience still exists for all of the Windows developer content.  To view the TOC and go through the documentation in the more traditional way:

  1. Open Visual Studio
  2. Either press “Ctrl+Alt+F1” or select the menu item Add and Remove Local Help Content from visual studio as shown in the following screenshot:
     
  3. You should now see the offline help viewer which looks like the following screenshot:
     
  4. Once in the offline help viewer, you can add and remove the local content.  If you have installed the BUILD version of Windows 8 that included Visual Studio, you will have the “Tailored Windows Development” offline help content already which contains the documentation for creating Metro style apps.
  5. Once you have the documentation you need, you can click on the Contents tab from the offline help viewer which should be in the bottom left corner of the window:
  6. Once you have the Contents tab selected, all of the locally installed documentation will be shown.  The following screenshot shows how the Windows Metro style App Development documentation appears in the offline viewer:

See Also

]]> What’s new in the Windows Dev Center part 4 (Conclusion): Forums, Samples, and Search https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-4-conclusion-forums-samples-and-search Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:59:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/21/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-4-conclusion-forums-samples-and-search/ We talked previously about the new look and feel, content integration, and controls for the Windows Dev Center. Also new is what we’ve referred to as “applications” that are components of the dev center.  The three key applications are the samples gallery, the forums, and search. Before going deep into what’s new here, I want to thank the MSDN team who has done an amazing job in engineering and designing these updates.

Samples Gallery

The samples gallery has been updated significantly for this release.  New to the samples gallery are the following:

  • New look and feel
  • 300 new samples uploaded across the Windows Desktop Samples Gallery, Windows Metro Style App Gallery, and Windows Hardware Samples Gallery
  • Improved description and details format
  • Improved scoping specific to the Windows SDK and library
  • Improved submission process to ensure that all gallery content is a valid sample.
  • Addition of the code browser / viewer
  • Sample Packs – Windows Desktop Sample Pack and Windows Metro Style Apps Sample Pack Integration with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview – search and open samples from the new Project dialog

The following screenshot shows the new code browse/view interface. It even supports syntax highlighting!

Forums

  • The Windows Desktop Developer Forums have been updated to have a single category, we’ll be reorganizing them soon
  • The Windows Metro Style App Forums have been created to support developers for our new model
  • The Windows Hardware development forums were updated to support the new features and tools
  • The forums have a new look and feel
  • Voting – you can now upvote and downvote posts ala StackOverflow
  • Related threads – avoid asking the same question twice
  • Filtering to find posts with code and other metadata about threads
  • Improvements to core functionality such as the new threaded view

The following image shows the related threads UI.  When you begin posting a new thread, the Forums application suggests existing threads that may already address your topic.

Search

We have been continuously making improvements to the Windows Dev Center search.  New for the Windows Developer Preview release are:

  • Improvements to refinements
  • New look and feel
  • More information in results UI

Although it’s subtle, the improvements in search should make it much easier to filter through the results that you will get when you perform searches on the dev centers.  The following image shows how search reveals whether a forum result is answered or has responses:

So this pretty much concludes our short post series about what’s new in the dev center.  Thank you for reading!

See Also

]]> Windows Dev Center Updates for 09.16.2011: BUILD and Windows 8 https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/windows-dev-center-updates-for-09-16-2011-build-and-windows-8 Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:45:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/16/windows-dev-center-updates-for-09-16-2011-build-and-windows-8/ This week, we launched the Windows Developer Preview at the BUILD conference.  This release shows the new user interface of Windows 8, adds functionality for developers, and also introduces a new programming model and language enhancements. Needless to say, it has been an exciting week! 

New Dev Center Updates

We have been going over the enhancements for the developer center separately in the 3 posts so far covering:

We've got plenty more to update you on about the changes, but it will take a few posts for us to cover everything.

BUILD Presentations

There have been tons of great presentations at BUILD and some of the big keynotes for the desktop from the first day of BUILD have been:

You can watch all of the BUILD videos online at Channel 9.

Top Resources from the Dev Center

There is a lot of content on the Windows Dev Center but there are definitely some pages that we expected to get more traffic than others and a couple resources that are really important right now.

The Windows Developer Preview Windows 8 guide gives you a great introduction to Windows 8. Windows 8 Guide XPS  / Windows 8 Guide PDF

If you're looking for community support for the Windows developer preview, there is a forum that we have created for this very purpose, the Windows Developer Preview General OS Questions forum. There are other forums - Windows Metro style apps development forum,  Windows desktop app development forum, and Windows hardware development forum.

We have some great samples for the preview and have created some filters so that you can see just the samples you're looking for.  The Windows Metro style app samples, the Windows hardware samples, and the Windows desktop samples.

Getting started is a key resource on the Dev center: Get started with Desktop app programming, Get started with Metro style app development, Get Started with Windows hardware development. We will be continuously updating the developer content and we'll make sure to highlight additional key resouces moving forward.

If you're looking to download the Windows desktop developer preview make sure that you calculate a SHA-1 hash of the ISO to make sure that the download wasn't corrupted.  To do this:

  1. Download the file checksum calculator utility from Microsoft.
  2. Run the checksum utility passing in the path to the downloaded ISO and the SHA-1 flag. (for example: fciv c:\users\gclassy\desktop\WindowsDeveloperPreview-32bit-English.iso -sha1)
  3. Verify that the SHA-1 checksum matches the value that we have on the Windows Developer Preview Downloads page for the ISO you downloaded. When I ran the code against the 32-bit ISO, the following output came from the program, indicating my checksum is valid.

//
// File Checksum Integrity Verifier version 2.05.
//
4e0698bbabe01ed27582c9fc16ad21c4422913cc c:\users\gclassy\desktop\windowsdeveloperpreview-32bit-english.iso

Social Media and Other Cross-technology Communities

We've been engaging on the Windows Developers Twitter account and we also have a Windows Developer Facebook page that you can Like and receive updates from us.

Closing Thoughts and Feedback

Let us know how we're doing, it's been a busy week which has afforded us little time to sit back and think about what's working and what's not. Drop some comments if you have a strong opinion - positive or negative.  Thanks!

See Also

]]> What's new in the Windows Dev Center part 3: New center controls https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-3-new-center-controls Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:48:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/15/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-3-new-center-controls/ So we've talked a bit about the new look and feel as well as the library.  These additions to the Windows Dev Center have been part of a "bring up" that creates a more integrated experience that matches the look and feel of Metro style apps.  We've also added some rather cool functionality to the center through some new controls, most notably the new rating and feedback control and the video control.

New Rating and Feedback control

The new rating and feedback control appears at the bottom of every reference page that is surfaced through the Windows Dev Center.  The control looks like this:

When you click the control, you get more options for specifying what the feedback that you're giving pertains to as shown in the following screenshot:

I'll bet you're wondering what happens when you fill out the form and click submit :)  Well, the feedback gets stored into a database and the writer receives the feedback directly. With the aggregated feedback, the writer can update the topic to address your concerns and the documentation gets better!

We're really excited about this new control because it will help us to create better documentation when you see something that's wrong. 

New Video Control

The new video control is based on HTML5 and lets us embed videos within the documentation. We prioritized producing good code and accurate documentation for BUILD but in the future you'll hopefully see the control used in our docs.  The following screenshot shows how it might look in docs once we have produced and embedded video:

We're working (as I write, in fact!) on getting some videos together for the new documentation and hopefully you will see them embedded within the developer documentation in the coming weeks!

See Also

 

]]> What's new in the Windows Dev Center part 2: MSDN Library integration https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-2-msdn-library-integration Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:19:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/14/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-2-msdn-library-integration/ In our first What's new post, we discussed the new look and feel of the Windows Dev Center.  This experience would only be partially complete if all the documentation was presented in an older style. So, we worked closely with MSDN to improve the way that the "library" content appears on the developer center.  To compare and contrast, here is the older developer center experience:

This evolved into a "lightweight" experience which simplified the table of contents to address feedback that we were getting from customers that the table of contents was getting too long (vertically):

The lightweight experience evolved again into the experience we have today which moves the parent table of contents elements into what we've been calling the "breadcrumb" which appears on the top of the site and moving peer elements to the left side of the site:

Note that the navigation links on the top of the site no longer change to the library links.  This way, you know that you're staying locked into development resources for Windows rather than developer resources all up for Microsoft.

Some related changes have been critical to improving the experience in content such as the ability to integrate video into content (content coming soon!) and the new ratings control (we'll talk about this in another post).  But at a high level this was one of the most significant updates that we made in the center for BUILD.

See Also

Update:
Note that you still can use the "classic" look and feel for any content that appears in the MSDN library.  First, go to the MSDN library and navigate to the section of interest.  Next click the gear icon in the top right section of the page:
Next, change the preferred view to classic:
Thanks James for asking :) 
 
Update 2:
 
Jeff Braaten wrote a great blog post on how he and his team engineered the integrated library experience, or, "An MSDN Library for the Windows Dev Center". And also pointed out that the major benefit of the "Lightweight" UI for MSDN made a huge difference in how much real estate was available to the content area.
]]> A few Windows developer preview keyboard shortcuts https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/a-few-windows-developer-preview-keyboard-shortcuts Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:25:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/13/a-few-windows-developer-preview-keyboard-shortcuts/ I'm sure that a number of developers have been downloading the Windows developer preview.  With the preview comes new (unofficial) shortcuts.  The following list are the ones we're aware of:

Key

Action

Windows logo key+Y

Temporarily look at the desktop

Windows logo key+Enter

Launches Narrator

Windows logo key+F

File Search

Windows logo key+I

Settings

Windows logo key+K

Connections

Windows logo key+H

Share

Windows logo key+Q

Search

Windows logo key+W

Settings search

Windows logo key+Z

Flip open apps

 Windows logo key+C

Toggle control
]]> What's new in the Windows Dev Center? (Part 1) https://docs.microsoft.com/archive/blogs/seealso/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-1 Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:18:00 GMT https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/seealso/2011/09/13/whats-new-in-the-windows-dev-center-part-1/ Today, we launched the new version of the Windows Dev Center.  This is a major release that includes a number of very awesome updates:

  • New look and feel
  • Content integration with the library
  • New forums
  • New samples gallery
  • New download experience
  • New social communities
  • Improvements to search
  • Support for video embedded within content

There are probably a few other things that we can't remember in the chaos that has been BUILD.  But, we're up, and we wanted to show you a few of the finishing touches we put on our Windows developer preview release.

For now, we'll just show you the new look and feel of the homepage:

Notice that we've now integrated what was previously the Windows Hardware Developer Center content with the Windows Desktop (Client) Developer Center content and have made room for the brand new Metro style apps content.  This has been a HUUUGEE effort that involved moving lots of varied content into a single location. We hope that you enjoy developing with Windows 8 in the coming months!  More to come!

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