In addition to the reusable components and the reference app, we are releasing an extensive documentation explaining some of the best practices for developing Windows Store LOB apps. Below you can find our proposed table of contents of the project docs (items in bold are included in the latest drop). Getting started with Kona Key decisions in Kona Guidance summary for Kona Designing Kona's UX Developing for the Windows Runtime Using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in Kona Creating and navigating between pages in Kona Using touch in Kona Validating user input in Kona Managing application data in Kona Handling suspend, resume, and activation in Kona Communicating between loosely coupled components Working with tiles in Kona Using search * Improving performance...

A few days ago we have published a new drop of the first drop of the Patterns & Practices Kona Guidance on Codeplex. For those who are not familiar with this project, the goal is to provide written guidance as well as reference implementation to describe recommended practices for building LOB Windows 8 client apps using WinRT and .NET. This guidance will focus on how to create apps that are maintainable and testable, porting some of the best practices of previous versions of Prism and MVVM. Note: For more information about the project and its scope, please refer to Blaine's post. We are early in the project so we need your review and feedback. Also, expect regular updates of the...

A couple of weeks ago I've been given the task of developing a Calendar in a CRM, that also synchronizes with the user's Google Calendar. To fully understand the flow, I developed a simple sample that covers the full experience in C#, using the Google API Client Library for .NET. It consists of an ASP.NET MVC 4 app that demonstrates how to perform CRUD operations in your Calendar, but also addresses other tasks of the flow, like asking for an authorization code to create an access token, or using a refresh token to get a new access token, in case the old token expires. All of this in an ASP.NET MVC 4 environment. You can grab the sample from here:...

A few months ago, David Pallman introduces us a way to access to Windows Azure via client-side, javascript code, named azureQuery. By combining the powerful ASP.NET Web API with a fluent, jQuery-like chaining API, you can easily grab data from your azure storage account with a single line of code like, for instance, aq.storage.container('orders').blobs() that retrieves all blobs within the orders container. In this post, I'm going to walk-through the steps to set-up azureQuery in your project and how you can use this API to query your azure storage account at client-side. Since the current version, v0.1, only works with blob storage, I'm going to focus this post initially on accessing blobs. As soon as a new version is released...

In this post, I'm going to show you how you can create a circular animation in a metro style application (XAML/C#). In my case, we needed to animate a circular progress arc that fires when the user waits for some process to complete. In this case, we're going to use a full 360° animation, but take into account that you can go up to any angle you want (if that's your scenario). I developed a sample so you can test this approach, you can find it here. Feel free to use it in your app, modify it (and do whatever you want). The XAML We animate two ArcSegments inside a Path. The Data attribute contains the value of the initial...