WinRT XAML for Serious Beginners – Tips for successful online searches
This is a very short post, but at the same time it might be the most valuable of all. As the old saying goes:
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
This blog post does neither. But it shows you how to find other fishermen!
How to find WinRT XAML resources online
Given the confusing and overlapping usage of terms (see my other post Where are we? Navigating Win32, MFC, GDI, GDI+, Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, Windows Runtime, WinRT and Windows Phone, XAML is used in WPF as well as WinRT; WinRT could be a version of Windows or the API surface; etc.), here are some tips to help you get useful results online.
A) Searching for MSDN references
Using the query “windows runtime xaml <what you’re looking for>” (without quotes) usually works and finds what I need among the first results. For example:
- “windows runtime xaml EnableDependentAnimation” (Bing, Google)
- “windows runtime xaml themeresource markup” (Bing, Google)
B) Searching in Forums / Community resources
Adding the word “WinRT” in the search query will help you get meaningful results for modern apps since, more often than not, people in the community use WinRT to mean “Windows Runtime” rather than the specific Windows version.
That’s it!
If you have any suggestions or feedback, please leave your comments below and I’ll do my best to address them in a timely manner.
In the next post we will start learning XAML from the ground up: The XML in XAML.