New Book: Pro Windows 8.1 Development with XAML and C#
Between releases of my other book (Professional ASP.NET MVC, next release due out soon!) Jesse Liberty somehow talked me into collaborating with him on writing a book on Windows 8.1 development. Actually, it wasn't a hard sell, because I've done a good amount of XAML dev, love C#, and Windows 8 / 8.1 development is a lot of fun. We co-wrote the table of contents, I wrote code samples and very rough drafts (sometimes just bullet points), and Jesse turned it into prose. That worked pretty well, but was a little too slow - especially once my work on Professional ASP.NET MVC 5 ramped up. Fortunately, Phil Japiske agreed to join us and finish the book off. Phil really nailed it - he polished off the remaining chapters, reviewed and greatly improved the existing chapters, and made sure everything was up to date for Windows 8.1.
Pro Windows 8.1 Development with XAML and C# is focused on teaching you how to use your C# skills to build Windows Store applications. It teaches you the necessary XAML skills, the controls, the application model, and takes you from File / New to publishing an application to the Windows Store.
Here's the table of contents:
- Getting Started
- Building Your First Windows 8 App
- Themes, Panels, and Controls
- Binding
- Views
- Local Data
- Remote Data and Services
- Search and Share Contracts
- Notifications
- Application Life Cycle
- Making Money
- Publishing Your App
I'm especially happy with my contributions to the local and remote data chapters. Any non-trivial application needs to tackle these concerns, and it's important to get right. I went through a few iterations on the pattern for data access and settled on a Task based repository pattern that worked pretty well. For the remote data, I showed how to set up Web API services both as JSON/XML endpoints and leveraging OData.
I also wrote a lot of the Notifications chapter, since the primary example demonstrates using Azure Mobile Services to send client notifications.
The book is a little over 300 pages, so it hopefully strikes a pretty good balance on the thorough vs. longwinded scale. I hope you like it!
Today (Friday June 13, 2014) there's a 40% discount code on the Apress site: FRDY13.