HTML5 Canvas, 2nd Edition

Windows 8 Apps and the HTML5 Canvas

One very interesting development that occurred as this book was going to press was the release of Windows 8. Windows 8 offers some very interesting ways for developers to create applications for the operating system and for the Windows Store. One of those methods is to package HTML5 using Visual Studio 2012.

To demonstrate how easy it is to create an HTML5 Canvas application for Windows 8, we will take the previous drag-and-drop example and show you the changes that are required to get it running under Windows 8 as a bare-bones application.

The first thing you need to do is download Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 (if you don’t already have Visual Studio 2012 installed).

Next, you want to create a new Blank App project using the JavaScript template. (See Figure 11-8.)

Figure 11-8. Creating a new JavaScript project in Visual Studio 2012

Next, you need to add all the files we created for the drag-and-drop example to the new project. Copy the files to the solution directory Visual Studio created for you. (This is usually in documents\visual studio 2012\projects\[project name]\[project name].)

After you do this, right-click in the Solution Explorer and select Add->Existing Item. Choose all the files you just copied to the directory. (See Figure 11-9.)