Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE WinRT applications, available on both Windows 8 and Windows RT operating systems, make extensive use of asynchronous programming concepts. In fact, with WinRT, Microsoft has followed a simple rule: if an API is expected to take more than 50 milliseconds to run, the API is asynchronous. The rationale behind this decision was to make user experience fluid and not hang or block the UI while an operation is being completed. In this tutorial , we create two

As Microsoft moves toward the release of their new operation system(s), there continues to be some real confusion about terminology and features. I recently was asked by the author of a college textbook to help explain what is happening in the Microsoft space. Below is my response to him. A good description of what is happening can be found in Brandon LeBlanc’s blog . Windows 8 is the official name for the product that supports x86/64 architectures. Remember that these architectures can be found

I have just launched a new web design for myVBProf.com . The new site is HTML based and uses some HTML 5 features. I have tested it with current releases of the major browsers and have not encountered any issues. New videos will be published on the new site and will focus on Visual Studio 11 (or whatever it will be called) and Windows 8. The new site has a link to the old site where all current videos still live. When a new tutorial is published that updates an existing tutorial, the link to the

With the increased importance of XAML in Windows 8, I have decided to update my tutorial on the Model View View-Model pattern . As I said in my original MVVM tutorial, I finally understand the pattern well enough to make some intelligent comments about its use. The tutorial begins by contrasting the traditional “code behind” approach with the MVVM approach and provides motivation for using the MVVM pattern. The tutorial uses a Silverlight client as the demonstration application. We start

In a previous post, I outlined what I plan to do regarding Silverlight 5. As I started working on the material, it became clear to me that I wanted to use the new dbContext class that is now available in Entity Framework 4.1 (and later releases.) However, to use this with the current version of WCF Data Services is not as clean as I like. So I am going to delay the series until things get synched up. We are at one of those points within the Microsoft “developer stack” where things are in flux and

Microsoft released Silverlight 5 in December 2011. As you may have noticed, I have done a number of Silverlight tutorials as the product evolved from version 2 to version 4. There has been a lot written about the future of Silverlight. Will there be a version 6? What will happen to the browser plug-in? I would like to refer you to a great article titled Silverlight 5 released; will there be a Silverlight 6? by Peter Bright for what I think is a great discussion of the issues. For me, I plan to redo

Microsoft is making a big strategic shift in their operating systems and applications. They have decided that they must target a broader set of platforms with a single integrated approach. To this end, they announced Windows 8 and Metro applications at the recent BUILD conference. In this tutorial , we take our first look Win 8 and build a Metro application. We use Visual Basic as the code-behind to write an application that presents the contents of a blog site. You’ll see how Visual Basic and XAML

Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) OData uses a different approach for tombstoning the Data Service State of an application. In this tutorial , we take a WP 7.0 application and convert it to WP 7.1. In Mango OData, methods have been added to the DataServiceState class that improves performance and functionality when storing client state. You can now serialize nested binding collections as well as any media resource streams that have not yet been sent to the data service. The conversion of the WP 7.0 application

Windows Phone OS 7.1 – code named Mango – has been released as a beta from Microsoft. This release includes a significant number of enhancements and new features compared to the initial 7.0 release. This tutorial provides an introduction to the Mango release. The sample application we create uses new OData features to access a database using a WCF web service. The OData enhancements that are demonstrated include the automatic generation of the OData client classes and the use of LINQ

In the original WP7 Golf Application tutorials (WP7 – Parts 1, 2, and 3), the handling of asynchronous data loading using the DataServicesCollection was not handled very well. In this tutorial , that issue is highlighted and a better solution is provided. In this tutorial , we take advantage of the ‘LoadCompleted’ event to manage the user interface and enable capabilities when the asynchronous calls to the data service are completed. If you are working with a remote database and using OData to manage