Clint Edmonson

Windows 8 App Spotlight: I Want My Mummy

I wanted to shine a spotlight on one of our local development studios this week and share some of their story. Pig Out Productions has released the first of their many games to the Windows 8 store.

I Want My Mummy is a 70 levels of rock breaking, TNT exploding physics puzzle fun. You tap on rocks to destroy them and try to get your mummy on the black landing platforms. Along the way, exploding bombs will launch your mummy through the air, knocking over walls and triggering more explosives and mayhem. You'll also have to deal with rocks that defy the laws of gravity and float away.

Pig Out Productions is a game studio based in Rolla, Missouri founded by William Garrett. Not your typical software developer, William’s preferred tools of choice are GameSalad and Photoshop. He’s completely self taught and specializes in casual, family oriented games with broad appeal. He works with a local artists and musicians to develop and refine his game concepts. As each game crystalizes, his children become his test audience. If sees them picking them up and playing over and over again, he knows has hit on his hands.

Over the last few years, Pig Out Productions has published a solid collection of great games for the iOS and Android platforms. William and his talented team are working feverishly to bring them to Windows 8 for us to enjoy. Look for them in the Windows 8 store in the coming weeks.

As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft developer announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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Posted On Wednesday, August 28, 2013 12:32 PM | Comments (0)

The Windows 8 Store Application Object Model

While working on my latest Windows Store application, I found that I needed a better mental model of the relationships between the framework classes. Here are some quick sketches that cover the core objects and their interactions during application launch.

Core Objects

The diagram below shows the core objects common to all store applications:

An App class derived from the framework’s Application base class is the starting point. It represents the running process for the application and exposes basic events for startup and shutdown, as well as several other special events triggered by the operating system.

The sealed Window class represents the core container window created by the operating system to host the application’s user interface. It exposes several properties and events related to visibility and sizing. It acts as the host for the visual controls that compose the application.

The Frame class is a visual content container. It is attached to and completely fills the core Window object. It hosts and manages the lifetimes of the individual Page objects that form the user experience of an application. It provides a navigation framework with full backward and forward history stacks to allow movement between pages using a familiar browsing metaphor.

You can see an expanded view of these objects with their attributes and methods here:

Application Launch

The sequence diagram below shows the basic launch steps for a simple store application with a single Main page:

When a user launches the app, it triggers a call to the overloaded OnLaunched() event in the App class. This method instantiates a new root Frame object and attaches it to the framework’s current Window (there’s only one for the newly launched application).

Once the Frame is attached, a call to Navigate( typeof(MainPage) ) triggers the creation of the first page, fills the frame with it, and places it in the navigation history stack. It’s important to point out that the Frame’s navigation framework takes care of instantiating the requested pages, optionally reusing them if desired.

After the Frame is set up and the first page has been primed, a final method call to Window.Current.Activate() brings the application window to the forefront and shows it to the user.

That’s a quick tour of the Windows Store app model to show the fundamental objects and how they interact with each other as the application starts up.

Note: These models are based on a C# + XAML based application. The core object model is fundamentally the same for JavaScript + HTML5, but there are some differences in event names and object interactions due to language and runtime differences. I’ll show the JavaScript + HTML 5 versions of these same models in a future article.

As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft developer announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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Posted On Wednesday, August 14, 2013 7:20 AM | Comments (0)

Windows Azure IaaS Reaches General Availability

Today, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS), including Virtual Machines and Virtual Networking, has reached general availability. These new services make it possible for you to move your applications into the cloud as is.

This announcement is a significant step in our cloud computing strategy, which has been influenced directly by our discussions with customers and partners around the world. One point holds true in every one of our discussions with you - the cloud should be an enabler for innovation, and an extension of your organization’s IT fabric, not just a fancier way to describe cheap infrastructure and application hosting. This brief video explains what we mean by extension of your organization’s IT fabric.

You’ve also told us that you don’t want to have to choose either a low price or good performance; you want a low price and good performance. That’s why today we are also announcing a commitment to match Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as compute, storage and bandwidth. This starts with reducing our GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%. 

Another highlight is the introduction of 2 new high memory compute instance sizes (28GB and 56GB) to meet the needs of memory intensive workloads like SharePoint Server and SQL Server.

Key scenarios enabled by Windows Azure IaaS

If you haven’t taken a look at Windows Azure, there’s never been a better time. Our IaaS offering has been driven by these key scenarios:

You can find more details in the general availability announcement including information about the price reduction at the Windows Azure Blog.

As always, stay tuned to my twitter feed for Windows 8, Windows Azure and other Microsoft developer announcements, updates, and links: @clinted

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Posted On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 10:14 AM | Comments (0)