Author news: Loads of guidance from Kraig Brockschmidt beyond his free ebook

Hello again, Kraig here. Earlier this year we announced my blog, https://www.kraigbrockschmidt.com/blog, where I’d promised to be posting corrections to my free ebook, Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, along with other material that I wasn’t able to include in the book. As many of you know—seeing as how the page hits on my site increased dramatically!—I’ve been keeping up a steady flow of postings, and thought it’d be fun and helpful to highlight some of the most significant ones or interesting ones. I must admit that this gave me motivation to clean up my tags as well!

First is a three-part series called Alive with Activity that actually isn’t on my blog directly—it’s on the Windows 8 Developer Blog, where you’ll find many posts from different members of the Windows engineering team. My goal in writing this series was to flush out certain areas of Chapter 13 in my book (“Tiles, Notifications, the Lock Screen,
and Background Tasks”) that definitely deserved more extensive treatment, such as Windows Azure Mobile Services. You can find that series of posts here:

• Alive with Activity, part 1: Working with tiles, badges, and toasts
• Alive with Activity, part 2: Writing and debugging services for live tiles

• Alive with Activity, part 3: Push notifications and Windows Azure Mobile Services

Just this week, on my own blog now, I also started a series of posts called Q&A on Files, Streams, Buffers, and Blobs, to help clarify the purpose and relationships between file system entities, all the different stream classes you find in WinRT (like IRandomAccessStream), these things called Buffers that you encounter on occasion, and then blobs and MSStream objects that are found in the HTML5 API.

Other recent favorites include:

• Exploring WinJS Class Patterns in three parts: (1) Defining Classes and Object Construction, (2) Derivations, and (3) Mixins
• Using WinJS.log
• Using XML /// tags in code to help IntelliSense with your own functions
• My Take on HTML/JS vs. C#/XAML vs. C++/DirectX (choosing a language for a Windows Store app)
• Mixing links and flyouts in Settings (WinJS)

There are also a couple of other series of note—these links pull up multiple posts that share the same tag:

• Comparing HTML5 and WinRT APIs (as JavaScript developers typically have a choice between which one to use)
• Windows Store certification tips
• Tips on Testing and Performance

Another fun post is Zero to App in Two Weeks (or, Why Do Some Developers Struggle?), a write-up I did based on my team’s experiences with early partners building apps for Windows 8. I’m delighted to announce I’ll be presenting this as an O’Reilly webcast on May 21^st.

And to fulfill the prediction I made in January that I’d also occasionally post things that aren’t related to programming, I posted a Substitute Recipe for S&W Santa Fe Beans, something that was necessary when S&W discontinued my six-year-old son’s favorite chili dish!

I’m always happy to hear your comments on any of these posts, which you can leave on the site itself. I do read and respond to them.

Kraig

P.S. I hope to see some of you at O’Reilly’s Fluent Conference 2013 in San Francisco at the end of May. I’ll be giving a 3.5-hour app-building boot camp (which means, lots of coding) as part of the event; details and registration can be found on https://fluentconf.com/fluent2013/public/schedule/detail/27800.