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I'm also assuming that your interest in Windows 8 has at least two basic motivations. One, you
probably want to come up to speed as quickly as you can, perhaps to carve out a foothold in the
Windows Store sooner rather than later. Toward that end, I've front-loaded the early chapters with the
most important aspects of app development along with "Quickstart" sections to give you immediate
experience with the tools, the API, and some core platform features. On the other hand, you probably
also want to make the best app you can, one that performs really well and that takes advantage of the
full extent of the platform. Toward this end, I've also endeavored to make this book comprehensive,
helping you at least be aware of what's possible and where optimizations can be made. (Note, though,
that the Store itself is discussed in Chapter 17.)
Many insights have come from working directly with real-world developers on their real-world apps.
As part of the Windows Ecosystem team, myself and my teammates have been on the front lines
bringing those first apps to the Windows Store. This has involved writing bits of code for those apps and
investigating bugs, along with conducting design, code, and performance reviews with members of the
Windows engineering team. As such, one of my goals with this book is to make that deep
understanding available to many more developers, including you!
What You'll Need (Can You Say “Samples”?)
To work through this book, you should have Windows 8 installed on your development machine, along
with the Windows SDK and tools. All the tools, along with a number of other resources, are listed on
Developer Downloads for programming Windows Store Apps. You’ll specifically need Microsoft Visual
Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8. We’ll also acquire other tools along the way as we need them in this
ebook. (Note that for all the screenshots in this book, I switched Visual Studio from its default “dark”
color theme to the “light” theme, as the latter works better against a white page.)
Also be sure to download the “Sample app pack” listed on this page, or visit Windows 8 app samples
and specifically download the SDK’s JavaScript samples. We'll be drawing from many—if not most—of
these samples in the chapters ahead, pulling in bits of their source code to illustrate how many different
tasks are accomplished.
One of my secondary goals in this book, in fact, is to help you understand where and when to use the
tremendous resources in what is clearly the best set of samples I’ve ever seen for any release of
Windows. You’ll often be able to find a piece of code in one of the samples that does exactly what you
need in your app or that is easily modified to suit your purpose. For this reason I’ve made it a point to
personally look through every one of the JavaScript samples, understand what they demonstrate, and
then refer to them in their proper context. This, I hope, will save you the trouble of having to do that
level of research yourself and thus make you more productive in your development efforts.
In some cases I’ve taken one of the SDK samples and made certain modifications, typically to
demonstrate an additional feature but sometimes to fix certain bugs or demonstrate a better
understanding that came about after the sample had to be finalized. I’ve included these modifications in
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