Windows 8 breaks with this “tradition”: a new type of application lifecycle is introduced in Windows 8, entirely managed by the operating system itself. However, it has several places where we as developers need to hook into to build great experiences for our users.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the options we have to manage how our application behaves in combination with the new application lifecycle management. We’ll take a look at executing code in the background as well.

The code for this article can be downloaded here.

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Since apps are going to be distributed through the means of a store, topics such as accessing data also requires some thought. In many views, accessing data through services is similar to accessing data in Silverlight applications. Although the principles are similar, the implementation tends to differ in many places.

The apps we build need to give the user the feeling of being connected. When we’re building a stock ticker application, the app needs access to up-to-date data. An RSS reader would be pretty useless without access to RSS feeds. A LOB app may need access to a CRM data. Without being connected to (up-to-date) data, many apps can’t even execute their normal routine.

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Join part 2 next Wednesday, July 25 at 10 am PST.

Webinar summary: Windows 8 is just around the corner! As developers, we need to be ready to build Metro style applications. In the last couple of months, we got a lot of information already, although most of it covered the basics. It’s time to move beyond that.
This webinar picks up where the intro talks (see the recordings of earlier webinars on Windows 8) stopped, so expect coverage of topics you may have seen some content about or even none at all!

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Day 1: Know the ecosystem; Start
Day 2: Layout, Navigation & Visual States
Day 3: Semantic Zoom
Day 4: Controls & Styling
Day 5: Search, Share & Settings Contracts
Day 6: Data Persistence & Application Life-Cycle Management
Day 7: Use of OData or Web Services
Day 8: Live Services integration

Day 2: Layout, Navigation & Visual States

App Layout:

So, you have the next big app idea. The real question is – will it delight the user? All Windows 8 Metro apps should and it is critically important to plan towards it. One curse for us developers is how easy it is to get started with an idea and go File->New Project in Visual Studio. As the Metro design principles stated again & again, let’s sweat the details. Pen & paper can be a wonderful companion to plan out the overall application layout. How will you slice & dice your content? Is the app content going to laid out in an information hierarchy or in a flat system? How would the app support Metro design principles & integrate with the rest of the OS?

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That, is one of the promises of Windows 8 - the next iteration of the most popular computer OS. Be excited, as this is the biggest & boldest change in Windows since 95 and there is a lot in it for developers. If you are a .NET developer, the programming paradigms in Windows 8 Metro apps should be very interesting, with fragments of it boiling over to other .NET development. XAML devs should feel right at home, as should web folks with strong HTML/JS/CSS skills. Metro apps are fun to write, in my opinion, and there is a huge potential to make a name for yourself when the Windows Store opens with Windows 8.

I have had the superb pleasure of working on several Windows 8 Enterprise LOB Metro apps for proof-of-concept, along with some very talented internal developers/designers. Unfortunately, that also means NDA and not being able to talk about stuff yet. But what I can do is share some coding experiences, since there is a decent learning curve.  I will try to keep the articles short for readability & jump into what you need to make your first Windows 8 Metro app.

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In this first part (2 more parts expected to be released, following the development of the series) Andrea introduces the basic concepts of Windows 8 development, and covers developing your first application, the application life-cycle, the new metro controls and more. 
From the author: In the recent days an epocal change is becoming evident. If you tried to download the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview, available for free on Microsoft website, you know what I mean. The change, that is greatly focused on a new user experience, is driven by the growing power of portable devices that are becoming prevalent on common desktop and laptops. Up to the day before today, tablet PCs, smartphones, and generically speaking touch-enabled devices was expensive and not effective, but they are now something that common people start to take in serious consideration from the effectiveness perspective and also from the economical point of view.

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View the webinar slides (.ppt / .pptx) | Get demos | Go to the QandA page

Webinar summary: In this webinar Silverlight MVP Michael Crump will look at how Silverlight developers skills translate over to WinRT. He will dive straight into 10 things that he has discovered while working with WinRT. You will quickly find out just how much you will need to learn to work with this new platform.

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Introducing Semantic Zoom

When you think at zooming something, you probably recall to your mind how you zoom a map in google or bing, or probably how you zoom an image or a document.

These kinds of zoom go under the name of "optical" zoom, because you are enlarging your optical view of an element as you were using a lens. If you think at a GridView, or also at a ListView, you easily understand that optical zoom cannot be applied just because it does have a real importance. What you can try to zoom instead, are the groups you defined for your view. In the case you have a number of items in your grid it may be difficult to scroll and scroll just to reach the item you are searching for, but probably you know what is the group it belongs to, so you can zoom out to the groups, select the group and then zoom in again to the items in the group. This is the so-called semantic zoom, a zoom that does not imply an optical enlargement but that is based on the semantic of your grouping.

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Download the slides | Get the demos | Go to the Q&A page

Webinar summary: In this webinar Silverlight MVP Brian Noyes will give a quick overview of what Prism is and what its feature set includes. He'll do a very quick review of what WCF RIA Services does,and will focus on how you can build a Silverlight Prism application and factor your functionality into modules while still making the RIA Services functionality available in multiple modules. Attendees will find out how to leverage the Repository pattern to pull all the RIA Services client side code into one place, expose the data from a Repository service that you can then pull into any scope in the application that wants to consume it.
As usual, we had a free ebook giveaway for the attendees and tweeters of this webinar:

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In metro-style applications, the concept of "make it asynchronous" is exploded to the extreme consequences. WinRT, the underlying wrapper for Windows API, request to run asynchronously most of the tasks, with the rule that, if it may run longer than 50 milliseconds, then it has to be asynchronous. Calling the network, using a device, grabbing a photo from the camera, all these actions are asynchronous in metro-style applications but, async is hidden also behind simpler tasks like opening a message box.

All this surfeit of asynchronous, promises to make programmer's life a hell. Luckily, the .NET framework 4.5 introduces a set of tools to the rescue, making asynchronous simpler as drinking a glass of water.

The pitfall of asynchronous programming

Just before diving in the new asynchronous model in metro-style applications, it is required we make a step behind and remember why asynchronous is so boring to people. The problem here is matter of context. When you call a synchronous task, all your code runs in a unitary context so, after the task ended, you are in the same context and you can continue the work without any trouble. Differently, an asynchronous task requires a context switch, from a base flow that continues to run, to another flow for the spanned task. So when the asynchronous task ends, your original context has been lost. Let me make a practical example. Let say you have to call a web service to get the list of products for a specific season, and with the result you have to fill an existing Catalog instance; in a synchronous world you will write this code:

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