Windows Store Developer Solutions

Many people posting in the forums express confusion over the documentsLibrary capability's " Special Use " categorization. This capability is highly restricted and not intended for general use, and apps which try to use it generally will fail certification...

So, you tested your application using the Windows Phone SDK tools. Everything ran flawlessly. You publish your app. You download your published app. Users download your app and report that the app crashes during its splash screen on start-up. What to...

WebView continues to be a hot topic in the Windows Store Apps forums. The ability to bring in web content and manipulate it as you wish is a strong desire for many developers. With this blog post, I am starting a series of short videos which demonstrates...

If you are developing a Windows Phone 8 LOB application to distribute to the users in your company, then the company must acquire an enterprise mobile code signing certificate from Symantec. The company needs this certificate to generate an Application...

When your data is in the cloud you should only download information that a user is actually looking at. In the case where you have thousands of items and you want to give the ability to scroll through them you should only fetch the data that the user...

You can leverage WCF functionality from a Windows Store app to call a WebService using Plain Old XML (POX) style of messaging. This blog and the sample included below documents the steps a Windows Store app should perform to consume such a service. The...

New to Windows Phone 8 is the Windows.Networking.Sockets namespace. This namespace is also used in the Windows Store app development environment, which makes it convenient for developers who wish to port networking applications to both targets. Windows...

As everyone knows, with the release of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 we have brought the two platforms closer together than ever before. The keyword here is “closer”. There are still some fairly major implementation and terminology differences...

A common problem we’ve seen from customers is how to handle pointer input and manipulations on elements inside of collection controls such as ListViews, GridViews, and FlipViews. The app can get the PointerPressed event on items inside the View, but after...

This is a common request in forums so I will show you how to use the new HttpClient class and the DataContractJsonSerializer to post JSON data to a web service.  Posting serialized JSON objects to web endpoints is a common way to get data over HTTP...

Deployment of a development version of your Windows Store app package through Visual Studio 2012 can sometimes lead to an error that looks like this: Registration of the app failed. Another user has already installed a packaged version of this app...

You have developed a Windows Store app and are in the process of building your app package and uploading it to the Windows Store using Visual Studio 2012. During this process, Visual Studio should bring up a dialog that lets you sign-in with your Windows...

With the rise of mobile applications (Windows Store and Windows Phone Store apps), the need for remote processing and storage has never been greater. The necessarily-small footprint of these apps, the limited storage capacity of the hardware, and the...

The title says it all and we have seen some forum and support cases about this subject. I have a workaround for you though! Background When programming with WebView you can use NavigateToString to populate a HTML and JavaScript and if that JavaScript...

To build user confidence, a user’s files are protected from arbitrary access by Windows Store apps. This has produced a large number of threads in the Windows Store apps Forums from developers who are used to having full access to the file system and...

Most of us are familiar with the standard .NET OpenFileDialog object. With the introduction of Windows 8 Store apps the OpenFileDialog has gotten a facelift, a simplified API and yet somehow it’s still not quite the same. The new FileOpenPicker...

The CurrentAppSimulator class is useful for exploring licensing information for your Windows Store app.  Once you are done testing you can change the class name to CurrentApp with confidence that your app will perform correctly when deployed to the...

Consider a scenario where you've been working on developing business logic for your Windows Store app and you switch to the Visual Studio designer to check a UI element. You may notice the below message in the designer view of some XAML pages: The...

In some environments network administrators have chosen to require users to authenticate through their proxy servers.  I will give you a good starting point to code your application to deal with authenticating proxies.  You can make the decision...

In my previous blog post, I posted some information about using a font which is included as part of the appx package (point #9) which turned out to be not correct. I took that information from this post on the Windows Store C# forum. Since then, I've...

Hi - I am Matt Small, a Sr. Escalation Engineer on the Microsoft Windows Store Developer Solutions team. I have been working on Windows 8 since before the Release Preview, and I have spent many hours working in the Store forums, primarily in the C# forum...

Background: Consider the following scenario. You are developing a Windows Store app and need to consume a WCF Service. The most common approach of consuming a WCF service and using the .NET framework is to create a managed Windows Store app based on...

How can you implement and test WNS push notifications for your Windows Store app and how can you use the Windows 8 push notification service without azure? I was playing with the Push and periodic notifications client-side sample in the Dev Center and...

Welcome to the Windows Store Developer Solutions blog! Why another Windows 8 blog? There is already a ton of great information out there on MSDN Docs , Channel 9 , and even the Windows Store for Developers blog . They provide the information critical...