WinRT
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In the previous post in this series, we saw the code for an initial, basic implementation of a 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service developed for Windows 8 using WinRT. In this post, we extend that code to provide support for a few basic gestures, particularly swipe-spin, pinch-zoom and tap-pause. To properly show the gestures in action, I recorded the app working inside the Windows 8 emulator (which in turn was running inside Windows 8 running inside a Parallels VM, so fairly far from "the metal", as it were). Here's a quick video of the updated app in action: Unable…
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After tackling the implementation of a basic 3D viewer for our Apollonian web-service using a variety of technology stacks – AutoCAD, Unity3D, Android, iOS & HTML5/WebGL – I felt as though I really needed to give it a try with WinRT, the new runtime powering Windows 8. All of the previous stacks had some "object" layer I could use above the base graphics engine – Rajawali provided it for Android/OpenGL ES, iSGL3D for iOS and Three.js for HTML5/WebGL – but for WinRT all bets were off. The general guidance for developing Metro-style 3D applications (typically that means games) is to…
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I visited another Windows 8-related conference in Zürich, yesterday. Despite much of the content being repeated from the last one I attended, I actually found it really useful: having spent time working with Windows 8 and WinRT over the last few weeks, I found I got more out of the demos and could also ask more intelligent questions of the Microsoft personnel in attendance (thanks for all your help, Ronnie :-). And there was some new content I hadn't seen, previously: I managed to sit in briefly on an Azure session (which was admittedly a bit too IT-centric for my…
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As part of my quest to understand WinRT more completely, I had a few goals for the MetroCAD application we saw in this previous post. Firstly, I wanted to add some contract support to the application, allowing it to participate in operations that Windows 8 has standardised across Metro-style applications. The main contracts I wanted to support were for search, sharing and settings. Secondly, I wanted to be able to launch AutoCAD – or another DWG editor – from within our Metro-style application. The three contracts I wanted to support are all accessible via the "Charms" menu in Windows 8:…
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As promised in my last post, I spent some time hacking together a basic application to get a feel for what it's like to develop inside the WinRT sandbox for Windows 8. If you're interested in the source code, here it is. Be warned: the code is really just to prove a concept – there's a lot therein I'd consider sub-optimal for a production application. If you're more interested in seeing the application in action, but haven't yet installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then here's a quick screencast I recorded: A few comments on the experience of developing with…
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I've just arrived home from a long day (mainly because of the 4-hour round-trip rail travel) at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, focused on Windows 8. It was a pretty interesting day – thankfully, as I'm still a bit jetlagged from my trip to California, and I didn't want to doze off in the lecture theatre. And yes, I've certainly dozed during a few lectures in my time, but not since leaving University. The main developer-oriented session I attended – which covered writing a WinRT application to pull down Teletext into a XAML + C# application, which was just…