Chapter 18Programming for Windows 8

  • How applications written for Windows 8 differ from desktop applications
  • What XAML is and how you use it
  • How you create the user interface (UI) for an application targeting Windows 8
  • The characteristics of the interface to the Windows 8 operating system
  • How to create a project for Windows 8
  • How to create the UI for an application graphically
  • How to modify UI elements in C++ code
  • How to implement event handling
  • How you can animate UI elements

You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter on the Download Code tab at www.wrox.com/go/beginningvisualc. The code is in the Chapter 18 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

WINDOWS STORE APPLICATIONS

Applications written for the Windows 8 UI are called Windows Store apps. There is a great deal of detail involved in a comprehensive explanation of how you program these, certainly more than enough to fill an entire book. Consequently this chapter will just provide you with a start down the path, a toe in the water. After a brief outline of the basics, most of the chapter is devoted to walking you through developing a Windows Store app using C++, so it’s learning by doing.

A Windows Store app is very different from a regular Windows desktop application such as Sketcher. The application context is different, the structure of the code is different, and the way the user interacts ...

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