A Tour Through the Windows 8 Documentation

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Last night I did a presentation at a very active and exciting Seattle user group called vNext. The topic, of course, was Windows 8. If you read my blog, you know that that’s most of what I’m talking about these days. Instead of creating tangential content, relied on the excellent documentation that you can browse any time in the Windows Dev Center at dev.windows.com.

The Dev Center is an enormous place, but it’s well organized and I think you’ll find it’s not too difficult to find what you’re looking for. Still, I’m including my compiled outline below in case it helps you navigate the sea of information.

The hierarchy of this outline exactly reflects that of the Dev Center, so hopefully mapping the sections will be easy and intuitive.

 

Getting started

Making great apps

Visual Studio 11 Beta

Blend for Visual Studio 11 Beta

Download samples

JavaScript tutorial

JavaScript doc roadmap

Visual Studio templates

Designing UX for apps

Design Principles

UX Patterns

Navigation design

Commanding design

Touch interaction design

Downloading design assets

Case studies

Website to Metro style app

Developing apps

Writing code for Metro style apps (JavaScript)

Coding basic apps

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript features and differences

HTML and DOM API changes list

Features and restrictions by context

Asynchronous programming

Asynchronous programming in JavaScript

Chaining promises in JavaScript

Creating a UI

Defining layout, navigation, and commands

Supporting navigation

Quickstart: Using single-page navigation

How to reference content

How to link to external web pages

How to create a mashup

Adding controls and content

Controls list

Animating your UI

Responding to user interaction

Touch input

Gestures, manipulations, and interactions

Quickstart: Identifying input devices

Working with data and files

Data binding

Quickstart: Binding data and styles to HTML elements

How to bind to a complex object

Managing app data

Accessing data and files

Transferring a file from a network resource

Sharing and exchanging data