Author news: Announcing Kraig Brockschmidt’s blog

672611.inddKraig here. Anytime you write a book, such as Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, a free ebook that we released last October in conjunction with Windows 8, you almost immediately see things to change or update! There are always more topics you would have liked to cover, but didn’t have time in completing the overall book. There are also the inevitable glitches here and there (like these bad links—only three out of more than 1400), and many little tidbits that would’ve take too much time to work into the book’s flow. You can’t push out deadlines indefinitely!

Within Microsoft, I also see many little questions and answers fly around our internal discussion groups, many of which are certainly useful to developers in general. While I might incorporate many of these into future editions of the book, they're of course valuable to developers in the here and now.

All of this makes great material for a blog, and so I wanted to announce that I've spun up a new blog primarily for the purpose of supporting Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript , though I'll probably post some other stuff on occasion as well.

You can find the blog, already populated with a number posts, on https://www.kraigbrockschmidt.com/blog. The RSS feed is https://kraigbrockschmidt.com/blog/?feed=rss2. I've actually been posting since late November to get warmed up, and now that I have my rhythm established (and a schedule of topics out several months) I'm ready to share it with you all.

Posts will vary in length, from simple video highlights, Store certification/submission tips, and code snippets to fuller expositions. For example, I have two posts thus far comparing the overlaps between HTML5 and WinRT APIs (Geolocation and base64 encryption), with others coming that address storage, XML, file, and socket APIs. A couple other longer posts include Suggested skills for a Windows 8 developer, The purpose of this.<event>bind, and Live Tiles and the Three Gunas. Shortly you’ll see one entitled “Zero to App in Two Weeks” that highlights the factors that seem to help you create apps quickly, based on the experience we’ve had with app partners around the industry.

I’ll be including observations from apps that I play with (such as The Splash Screen: More than an Hourglass), useful insights (like Simultaneously debugging script and managed/native code in Windows 8 and A Page Navigation Gotcha), and, well, you get the idea. I think it’ll be worth subscribing to!

Comments on the posts as welcome, and if there are topics you'd like to see more about, I'm happy to take suggestions via kraig(at)kraigbrockschmidt.com. In any case, happy reading!

Kraig

P.S. If any of you know a good way to preserve Visual Studio’s code coloring when pasting into WordPress, let me know! Right now it takes a bit of manual work to make it look nice….