Learning to build Windows 8 apps on MVA

What is MVA?

MVA is Microsoft Virtual Academy and you can learn building apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 free of cost. That is right, at no cost to you (Well, that is mighty generous). Of course you can learn a whole lot of others besides Windows 8 and Windows 8 Phone.

Form factors is an important difference between these two platforms. Issues / concerns are described.

Check it out here:
http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/windows-8-and-windows-phone-8-app-development


For example, this particular course has 4 modules:

• Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
• Basics of View Models
• MVVM
• Sharing Code

This paraticluar module (Comparing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8) is neither about building apps for the two platforms nor it is going to show code that works for both platforms.
Code reusability is explored between the two operating systems.

Application Life cycle is explored:

 

Each platform has its own XAML Controls
UI reuse is not a thing that you can look forward to, but data model is the one that makes reuse easier. Data Model APs are portable (specifically read/write) across these two paltforms.

*Windows Phone 8 SQL CE
*WIndows 8 has no specific built-in database api
*MVVM helps porting code between the two platforms. Review Portable Class Libraries project template in Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate (non-express edition is needed).

 

 

The screen shots are captured from the video at the above site. The last screen shot is from Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate.



 

Published today: Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch Business Application Development

This book was published today (Sept 21, 2011).

Visual Studio LightSwitch or simply LightSwitch is the latest addition to Microsoft's VS Suite. I believe this is game changing software when it comes to data-centric applications for the Desktop, or the web, or for the Microsoft Cloud Platform.

I started writing this book during the Beta 1 period and finished soon after the RTM. Before RTM there was a Beta 2 which was almost a finished product.  Similar to my other books, each chapter builds upon the previous, and by the time you finish, I believe you will have learnt a lot about LightSwitch. Instead of taking a real business application and explain away how LightSwitch implements the application - a top-down approach, I have taken a bottom-up approach building bit by bit from scratch. Another reason for this approach was the fact that there are already very many online resources which utilize the top-down approach.

Of course, similar to my other books, this book is also replete with screen shots, and you can find codes both in VB and C# for most of the chapters. The projects created to describe the contents of the chapters can be downloaded from Packt site.

Here is the table of contents:

• Preface

• Chapter 1: Getting Started with Microsoft LightSwitch
• Chapter 2: Microsoft LightSwitch IDE and Architecture
• Chapter 3: Accessing Data from a VSLS Application
• Chapter 4: Screens in VSLS application
• Chapter 5: Working with Entities
• Chapter 6: Querying and Filtering Data
• Chapter 7: Writing Code in Microsoft LightSwitch
• Chapter 8: Authentication and Authorization in Microsoft LightSwitch
• Chapter 9: Deploying LightSwitch Applications
• Chapter 10: Troubleshooting, Debugging, Custom Controls, and Extensions
• Index

A sample chapter is available here.