WindowsDevNews.com

Windows Dev News for March 22, 2012 - #0055

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In This Issue: Sumit Dutta (-2-), Joanna, Alex Golesh, Kirupa Chinnathambi, Ollie Riches, KHK, Jake Sabulsky, Beth Massi, Sasha Barber, András Velvárt, Shawn Fleming, and Kunal Chowdhury.

Above The Fold:

Windows 8/Metro:	"Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta - Show Message Dialogs and Popup Menus (Part 9/11)" Alex Golesh
LightSwitch:	"LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Shell and Theme for VS 11 Beta" Beth Massi
Code:	"CodeStash" Sasha Barber
WP7:	"Windows Phone Performance Part 4 of many - The Power of the GPU" András Velvárt

Shoutouts:

Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up

Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up

Koen Zwikstra announced a trio of releases, not the least of which is Silverlight Spy March 2012 Update check out his Document Toolkit March 2012 Update and Document Toolkit for LightSwitch 1.5 as well!

From WindowsDevNews:

Part 68 - Windows Phone - Launch Marketplace App

Sumit Dutta explains the use of the MarketplaceDetailTask to provide your users with a link to buy the ad-free version of your app, for example

Part 69 - Windows Phone - Launch Application from Picture Hub

Sumit Dutta shows how to get your image-related app to appear in the Picture Hub and launch from there.

Insider's view: Authoring XAML-based Metro style apps in Blend Beta

Joanna discusses Blend in VS11 and what the team's considerations and thoughts are... this should give you a good feeling about the tooling and keep those cards and letters coming!

Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta - Show Message Dialogs and Popup Menus (Part 9/11)

Alex Golesh talks about why thre's no MessageBox in Metro, but there is a MessageDialog, and popup menus... all with pictures and code

Fixing an Element's Position (CSS)

Kirupa Chinnathambi talks about the Fixed property in CSS and getting some content to scroll while other does not

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

Ollie Riches educates us luddites on proper MessageBox display in MVVM... I was expecting to be doing mine wrong but was pleasantly surprised :)

Windows Phone 7 Text Style Picker Control

Another anonymous user posted on WindowsPhoneGeek with a short discussion of his (her?) Codeplex project for a text style picker control

What's changed for app developers since //build/ (part 2)

Jake Sabulsky has part 2 up of this series talking about Tile & Toast, JS tools, C++ Data Binding, HTML/JS controls, etc... and there's lots of good info in the comments as well

LightSwitch Cosmopolitan Shell and Theme for VS 11 Beta

Beth Massi reworked her Contoso Construction sample app to use the new Cosmopolitan Shell and Theme released last week

CodeStash

Sasha Barber announced the release of a tool on Codeplex that is a searchablecode snippet repository that plugs into VS2010... He has some great info in 3 articles linked at the bottom, and they also have the Codeplex link... which doesn't have a download yet I'm afraid...

Windows Phone Performance Part 4 of many - The Power of the GPU

András Velvárt has Part 4 in his series taken from the book he helped author... in this one he discusses turning on the GPU Acceleration and what that all means for us

SolidColorBrush

Shawn Fleming takes a good look at SolidColorBrush and how to define and use it in the various ways possible - good reference for the days you need that info.

How to Launch the WP7 Marketplace Hub using the MarketplaceHub task

Kunal Chowdhury describes the MarketplaceHubTask and how to use it to launch the marketplace hub client and display marketplace items in your app

Stay in the 'Light!