Building a Windows Store Application
by Mike Snell, Lars Powers
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Unleashed, Third Edition
- About This eBook
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents at a Glance
- Table of Contents
- About the Authors
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- We Want to Hear from You!
- Reader Services
- Introduction
- Part I: Introducing Visual Studio 2015
- Chapter 1. A Quick Tour of Visual Studio 2015
- Chapter 2. The Visual Studio IDE
- Chapter 3. The .NET Languages
- What’s New in C# 6.0 and VB 14
- Language Primer
- Language Features
- Infer a Variable’s Data Type Based on Assignment
- Create an Object and Initialize Its Values (Object Initializers)
- Define a Collection and Initialize Its Values
- Creating an Instance of a Nonexistent Class
- Add Methods to Existing Classes (Extension Methods)
- Add Business Logic to Generated Code (Partial Methods)
- Access and Query Data Using the .NET Languages
- Write Simple Unnamed Functions Within Your Code (Lambda Expressions)
- Splitting an Assembly Across Multiple Files
- Working with XML Directly Within Your Code (VB Only)
- Removing Unused Arguments from Event Handlers (VB Only)
- Creating an Automatically Implemented Property
- Dropping the Underscore in VB for Line Continuation
- Working with Dynamic Languages/Objects
- Covariance and Contravariance
- Asynchronous Programming
- The .NET Framework
- Summary
- Part II: An In-Depth Look at the IDE
- Chapter 4. Solutions and Projects
- Chapter 5. Browsers and Explorers
- Chapter 6. Introducing the Editors and Designers
- Part III: Working with the Visual Studio Tools
- Chapter 7. Working with Visual Studio’s Productivity Aids
- Chapter 8. Testing Code
- Chapter 9. Refactoring Code
- Chapter 10. Debugging Code
- Chapter 11. Deploying Code
- Chapter 12. Developing Applications in the Cloud with Windows Azure
- Chapter 13. Working with Databases
- Part IV: Extending Visual Studio
- Part V: Building Web Applications
- Chapter 17. Building Modern Websites with ASP.NET 5
- Chapter 18. Using JavaScript and Client-Side Frameworks
- Chapter 19. Building and Consuming Services with Web API and WCF
- Part VI: Building Windows Client Apps
- Chapter 20. Building Windows Forms Applications
- Chapter 21. Building WPF Applications
- Chapter 22. Developing Office Business Applications
- Part VII: Creating Mobile Apps
- Chapter 23. Developing Windows Store Applications
- Chapter 24. Creating Windows Phone Applications
- Chapter 25. Writing Cross-Platform Mobile Applications with Apache Cordova
- Index
- Code Snippets
Building a Windows Store Application
As with most concepts in the IDE, the best way to truly understand how the Visual Studio tools work is to go through the process of creating an application using those tools. Our inspiration will be the WPF image viewer application that we built in Chapter 21. But instead of just constructing the same image editor, we’ll create an application that enables you to rate pictures. We’ll try to reuse as many of the concepts and actual code as we can from our earlier WPF effort, but we’ll have some unique constructs to deal with in the WinRT world.
As a base set of requirements, here are the capabilities we will try to deliver:
Display a list of pictures from the user’s Pictures library.
Click a photo that will provide details about it.
Edit the picture’s rating value and save it back to disk.
Make everything inherently usable on touch-enabled devices. (That is, the application will work as well for touch only as it will for keyboard and mouse setups.)
The application will make use of the GridView and the app bar and will use capabilities to tie into the Pictures library. With the end goal now in sight, let’s get started.
Note
It is worthwhile to reinforce the fact that the Windows Runtime Library (WinRT), although powerful in many different ways, is not a complete replacement either for Win32 or for the .NET Framework. In other words, there will still be some things that are extremely difficult or impossible to do with WinRT. For example, our WPF sample application from Chapter 21 was able to do some simple image manipulations (such as blurring an image) in just a few lines of code. WinRT, however, doesn’t have the required pixel shader classes to do this. Trying to implement that same functionality using C#, XAML, and WinRT is nearly impossible (or at best, prohibitively difficult without third-party libraries).
Keep in mind that WinRT was first and foremost designed to equip a certain class of applications with what they need to implement their feature set. Writing a full-fledged image-editing application like Adobe Photoshop is an exercise still best left in the desktop, and not Windows Store, world.
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