Often when building Windows 8 apps you’ll want to provide a menu of options from the app bar, this may be a list of different ways to sort or filter the data. For these simple menus WinRT provides the PopupMenu control (for more complicated popup user interfaces I recommend the Flyout control from the Callisto library), these menus are very easy to create by creating UI Commands and appending them to the menus Commands collection.
I’m finally ready to give you all the first look at the Windows 8 Metro application I’ve been working on. Hubble is a new way to create and manage issues on your GitHub repositories.
Lately I’ve been working with the System.Net.Http.HttpClient originally from the WebAPI and part of what’s available to build Metro style apps in Windows 8. I really like the way the client has been designed and especially the async /await support.
One thing that always helps when building xaml applications is to have easy access to reference the Theme resources and control Templates.
A week ago I had the opportunity to attend a hackathon run out of the Auckland Microsoft office. The idea was to spend the weekend building a Windows 8 Metro application either as a one off experiment or for the longer term goal of having something ready for the launch of Windows 8. When developing with new platforms such as Metro and WinRT searches on Bing or Google won’t help you so having some Microsoft experts and a lot of other developers around really helps smooth the rough edges you’ll invariably encounter. It also provided the chance to sit down and use Windows 8 in anger, I think it’s only after this sort of use that you can really judge a new operating system.