How to develop metro apps for Windows 8

BANGALORE, INDIA: Last month, we looked at how Windows 8 introduces a completely new API and feature set to allow you as developers to create a whole new style of apps that can work on different devices such as tablets, desktops and notebooks.

WinRT, as it's called, abstracts a number of APIs from you to allow you to start creating apps quickly and easily while still working in a familiar .NET like environment. For Web developers, it also allows you to create full fledged Metro apps using HTML/CSS and JavaScript.

In this article we'll take a look at how and what you can do with the tools that you are provided with for doing these tasks. We'll not delve deep into the new WinRT API as this is bound to change over the next few builds of Windows 8. But working with the tools you are given currently will give you a great understanding of how these apps are going to be built and used by consumers at the end.

Creating an App

To create a Windows 8 Metro app, you will need Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview. This is built in to the Windows 8 Dev Preview x64 version available for download from Microsoft. If you have installed this version, you have everything you need to start creating apps.

The first thing you do is to select the language and template that you wish to start developing in. You get a choice of 4 languages --JavaScript, VB, C# or C++ and a bunch of pre-built application templates such as the blank "Application", rich "Grid", master-child "Split" and test and class library projects.

The first 3 are specifically Metro apps and can be used to start off a new project. Once a project template is chosen you can go ahead and start writing your code using the (slightly different) Metro-XAML and the code behind in JS/VB/C#/C++.

The Grid and Split templates come with a number of things already setup for you which you can customize. These include a number of things as follows.

Application Icons: Each application has at least a small, 150x150 icon used to represent it on the Start screen. It can optionally also have a large 310x150 icon that can be used as a "Live Tile" -- one that also displays some information about what's happening in the App without even running it.

For eg, your app could display the number of mentions or direct messages the user has recieved in Twitter or Facebook on the app tile itself without the user having to run the app himself. The user has the ability to switch the type of icon used on the Start screen for your app.

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