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Monthly Archives: November 2012

  • Teaching a six (well, almost seven) year old to solder

    As a geek, there are a number of milestones or rites of passage for children: First drawing of any vehicle with more than three guns First original LEGO model First time you figure out how to turn on the Xbox and get into a game without help First time you solder something First program written First cosplay at a geek convention First computer you build from parts ...

    Published Thursday, November 29, 2012 | Tagged: , | 3 comments

  • Generating sound at runtime using XAudio2 in a Windows Store app

    In this post, I'll briefly explain how to generate sound in real time in a Windows Store C++ app using XAudio2. I've always liked messing around with synthesizers. Quite some time ago, I built a simple synthesizer using Silverlight. It was cool, but very processor intensive. All the sound was generated in real time, and was then pushed into buffers which were read by the media pipelin...

    Published Thursday, November 29, 2012 | Tagged: , , | 10 comments

  • The update Windows SDK and Windows App Certification Kit tool (now checks branding images)

    A new version of the Windows Software Development Kit for Windows 8 was published last week. A new version of the Windows App Certification Kit (WACK) tool is included as part of this. Installation You can download the Windows 8 SDK from MSDN, here. The installation is simple. I'll include the screenshots here so you can see what's included. Also, I encourage you to enable the Cu...

    Published Tuesday, November 20, 2012 | Tagged: , | 4 comments

  • Building quality Windows 8 apps: Important pre-submission checks for your Windows Store apps

    When you get ready to submit your app to the store, you'll run it through the WACK (Windows App Certification Kit) tool. That tool will report to you the most egregious errors, but it doesn't catch everything you'll want to do to finalize your app. In this post, I have a number of suggestions ranging from the most simple to some more interesting system integration ideas. Have you chec...

    Published Monday, November 12, 2012 | Tagged: , | 3 comments

  • How-to: Name Start Page groups in Windows 8

    By default, your Windows 8 Start Page appears as a base group of standard apps, plus a group of desktop apps (if you upgraded) or Office apps (if Surface with Windows RT). Most of us create a number of additional groups beyond those. Those groups are not named for you automatically. Did you know you could name those groups to make organization easier? Here's how. On the Start Page,...

    Published Sunday, November 11, 2012 | Tagged: , | Leave comment

  • Sometimes coding a solution is faster than finding one: Simple Webcam app in Silverlight 5

    I recently upgraded my main desktop PC to Windows 8. When I did that, the Microsoft LifeCam software stopped working. It was recognized as incompatible with Windows 8. For most people, this is not an issue, as it works perfectly fine with the built-in Windows 8 camera app. For me, however, I need a small camera app sitting on my desktop so I can see the hallway leading to my office. I...

    Published Sunday, November 11, 2012 | Tagged: , , , | 9 comments

  • Windows 8 on a multi-display desktop PC without a touch screen: the Logitech T650 touch pad

    I recently updated my primary workhorse PC (a 6 core desktop with two 30" displays) from Windows 7 to Windows 8. As part of that, I picked up a Logitech Touchpad T650. This post includes my observations. As a Windows 8 platform evangelist at Microsoft, I'm very familiar with Windows 8, especially in a developer context. So far, I've used it on touch and non-touch laptops (I have a Len...

    Published Sunday, November 11, 2012 | Not tagged | 14 comments

  • How to Reset your Microsoft Surface (or other Windows 8 PC) to start from scratch

    At Build, the Surfaces used by Jordan Rudess (and later provided to Jordan and his tech Gianluca Trombetta, just like we did with other Build attendees) were set up in advance with local accounts rather than Microsoft accounts. This made it easy for me to have everything ready for when Jordan took the stage. One thing both Jordan and Gianluca needed to do to make the Surfaces their ow...

    Published Tuesday, November 6, 2012 | Tagged: , | 2 comments

  • My WPF 4.5 talk from Build 2012

    My WPF talk from Build 2012 is live at Channel9. Slides are available via that link as well. I cover a few of the more interesting features in WPF 4.5, as well as techniques for using Portable Class Libraries (PCL) to share code with Windows 8 app.

    Published Tuesday, November 6, 2012 | Tagged: , , , | 28 comments