Windows 8 applications operate in a sandbox that severely restricts access to the file system. By default your app only has access to its own local, roaming and temporary storage folders. This can be extended by declaring some capabilities such that your app can access some specific known folders such as the Pictures Library. But what about elsewhere?
A few months ago I saw a cool CSS project making the rounds called SpinKit, a collection of CSS spinner styles created by Tobias Ahlin of GitHub. Getting rather bored with the standard spinning circles I thought I’d try and recreate these in Xaml as Styles for the Windows 8 Progress Ring control.
These days there’s a plethora of Inversion of Control (IoC) containers in the .NET ecosystem, from classics such as Castle Windsor and Autofac to the smaller ones that seem to ship with every MVVM framework. They all have their own idiosyncrasies in their behavior that really let you find one that best suits the way you code.
Durandal is an open source web framework to help you build web, desktop and mobile apps. It’s created by Rob Eisenberg the excellent developer who created Caliburn.Micro which I think shows it’s pedigree well.
In the last few months Windows 8.1 has been released and I’ve had a few questions about Caliburn.Micro and where it stands. Also Caliburn.Micro is releasing an alpha of a new version announced by Rob.