Windows Store App Development, with Christophe

Christophe Nasarre-Soulier is a development-focused PFE I’ve worked via the Windows Store App Labs program.

As part of that program, we provide design and development assistance to Windows Store App developers across the world, and gained a lot of exposure to common questions, issues, and techniques.

Christophe’s been busy blogging some of his learnings on Windows Store Apps – including (naughty!) testing-only features that are fun to play with in local development environments but that won’t pass Store certification requirements – and has a veritable smorgasbord of posts for you to consume.

First up, his series on inter-process communication with Windows Store Apps:

Since the pre-release of Windows 8 at the Microsoft BUILD conference in 2011, I’ve been investigating the different ways for a Windows Store App (WSA in the rest of the post) to interact with either other WSAs or Desktop Apps (DA in the rest of the post). Unlike .NET that was built from the beginning with interoperability in mind , WinRT is another beast.

A Microsoft collegue has been working on a WSA that makes it simple to deploy and launch applications in an enterprise environment (visit https://companystore.codeplex.com/ for more details). However, some actions are not allowed from a WSA such as looking for installed WSAs and launch them. This was a great opportunity to turn my research into real code. I’m sharing the outcome in a few blog posts starting with this one.

The first post (linked above) covers the basics of possible interaction mechanisms between Windows Store apps (file associations and protocol handlers), and it’s a quick, helpful read.

The second post delves deeply into using file associations to allow app activation outside the bounds of a Windows Store App into a desktop app – with the requisite warning that you can’t do this in a Store-published app:

WARNING: all these techniques are violating the point 3.1 from the Windows Store Requirements that states: “Your app may only depend on software listed in the Windows Store“. Therefore, you should not use them for a WSA that you plan to publish into the Windows Store because it will be rejected.

It’s a fascinating look into the internals of how file association activation works.

Christophe’s back-catalogue covers lots of other WinRT-related goodness, from Windows Store checklists to make it easier to make great Windows Store apps, to a tool that identifies BCL classes available vs excluded from WinRT and the .Net Framework 4.5. Enjoy!

Posted by Tristan Kington , MSPFE Editor that just got to use the word “smorgasbord” in a serious context