Introduction to Building Universal Store Apps With C# and XAML

Working With the View
Hi, and welcome back to another module, and in this module, we are going to be talking about Views. Now, the reason why I've chosen to start with the views when talking about how we target to different platforms, is because it visualizes the problems that we need to manage. In this module, we will be talking about how to cater for a view that has to work across devices and expectations. We will take a look at how we deal with at the highest level, pages, at lower level, user controls for composite approach, to managing smaller differences inline in XAML using conditional compilation with XAML styles, and templates. Now I'm going to keep the examples quite simple just to focus on the options that we have, and I'm sure that you are going to find the solutions that you need to the problems that you will encounter when you make your application.

Sharing Code
Hi. This is Iris Classon, and welcome to the module on Sharing Code. We have just finished a module on Managing Views, and how to handle platform differences between a Windows Store, and a Windows Phone in regards to the views. We're going to do the exact same thing, but focus on code in this module, and before we get started, I'd like to tell you about an application I made a couple of weeks ago, and this is going to be the basis for the application we will be working for most of this module. There is something called OCR. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, and another OCR library for Windows Runtime was released not too long ago. It will ask us to provide an image, use an image, to then go through that image, and find words, and letters. It will then pull out a text for us, and you can do whatever you want to do with the text afterwards. In the application I made, I added text to speech, as well as sharing capabilities. I just wanted to make sure that I never had to read a boring piece of paper ever again. So the application we are going to make is going to use the OCR library. I hope this gives you some ideas of the things that you can do, and I wanted to showcase some of the really cool things that we can do in Windows Runtime. So before we start looking at the different sharing options that we have, let's get started on this application, and simply create an application where we're sharing the code from a Shared project.

Portable Class Libraries
Hi. This is Iris Classon, and welcome to the module on Portable Class Libraries. This module continues on the previous module, where we took a look at the Shared project, and how we can manage platform differences in the Shared project using conditional compilation, as well as covering how you can use partial classes to extend ViewModels and controls. In this module, we're going to take a look at a special type of libraries, which are called portable class libraries. This type of library produces one binary, so both the projects, or more projects that you are targeting with this library, will only use one binary. That means that we can't use conditional compilation, and it gets a little bit more tricky when we need to manage platform differences. So in this module, we're going to take a look at how exactly can we do that.

Resources and Assets
Hi. It's Iris Classon, and welcome to the module on Resources and Assets. Now, we have a large market, which means also that we have a massive potential. There are 191 markets that you can reach out to, with 54 languages supported. So if you make an application that only supports one, or a couple of markets, and maybe just a language, then you're actually losing out on a lot of potential customers. So, why not add more support. For you, if you haven't done it before, it might seem a little bit terrifying. How do you go ahead and do this? Fortunately for us it's quite easy to do, and I'm going to show you how you can use resource files, and how you can share resource files across the Windows Store, and the Windows Phone application. Now there are a couple of ways that we can do this, and I'm going to make sure that I cover some of the most common ways. This is, however, a very short introduction to dealing with resources and assets, and if you want to learn more about this, there is plenty of documentation on MSDN, but this should be enough to get you started.

Handy Tools and Libraries
Hi. This is Iris Classon, and welcome to this module on Handy Tools and Libraries! In this module, I get to show you some of my favorite tools and libraries, some of which I discovered recently when I asked people on Twitter, what are some of the tools and libraries that you wouldn't want to be without, or that you think are really cool, and other people should know about. The tools and the libraries of a Universal Store Application, and I know there are many, many more that probably you need to know about, but these are the best ones that I could come up with, and hopefully this will get you excited, and also will help you with some of the pains we have building Universal Store Applications.

Memory Requirements and Profiling
Hi. This is Iris Classon, and welcome to the module Memory Requirements and Profiling. In this module, we're going to take a look at how we can create applications that are stable, and perform really well, not only from a memory perspective, but also from a user experience. This is going to be a very short module, as I'm only going to touch briefly on some of the core concepts of memory requirements, and profiling for Universal Store applications. We already have a lot of courses in our Pluralsight library that covers in detail many of the things that you can do to have a nice stable and performant application. I'll make sure to point you in the direction of some really good courses as we go along.