While your Windows 8 Store application is running, you want to be saving data all the time. After all, the user can switch to another application at any time, and you only have five seconds to store out your data at that point.
While that is true for major data points, there are certain “status” values that you want to store only at the last minute. This might include which information is visible, what is selected, user input data, and so forth.
With chrome pushed out of Windows 8 Store applications, most of the navigation has been moved into the AppBar. A good AppBar has buttons that are easy to reach and easy to recognize.
While there is much work yet to be done on Conference Buddy on the client side, it isn’t too early to start thinking about how we’ll store data on a server. One option that might be ideal would be to use ASP.NET Web API.
ASP.NET Web API is a framework for building HTTP services. ASP.NET Web API has been designed to work well with RESTful (where REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer) design principles.
Discussion with Pete Brown, Microsoft Evangelist, on creating great Windows 8 applications. 
We also discuss his forthcoming book on Windows 8, hardware, good software design and much more.
Links
Microsoft Visual Studio offers a number of templates for building Windows 8 applications. In most of my postings, we’ve been using the Blank application template, but the Grid App template is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, it is not obvious how to adapt it to your own data and it doesn’t come with an instruction manual.
Talking with Phil Japikse of Telerik about Windows 8 programming with WinJS.
Talking with Laurent Bugnion about MVVM in detail, including the ins and outs of commanding and 
managing events in Windows 8.
Talking with Chris Bowen, Principal Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, about developing games for Windows 8 Store.
Talking with Rob Eisenberg, a .NET architect and developer working out of Tallahassee, FL. Rob is the President of Blue Spire
Consulting and he publishes technical articles regularly at devlicio.us and has spoken at regional events and to companies concerning .NET technologies, Agile software practices and UI engineering. He is coauthor of Sam’s Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours and is the architect and lead developer of the Caliburn, Caliburn.Micro and Durandal frameworks.
Much of the animation that you want in your application is already built in. Pages and objects make their transitions smoothly. At times, however, adding a bit more animation can make the difference between a “fast and fluid” application and one that looks less professional.
Adding animation can be tricky however; and often takes the subtle skills of a UI designer. Windows 8, provides a set of “Theme Transitions and Animations” that greatly simplify adding animation to your application while ensuring a very high level of professional design – that is, they’ve worked out all the details for you and all you have to do is add a couple lines of XAML to make it “go.”
I’d like to have a page in Conference Buddy that lists all the customer contacts. We’re currently writing these contacts to file in JSON 
format as described in this article.
My goal for today is to read that file and populate a ListView with the contents, using data binding.
To get started, I need to ensure that my JSON file is right. Until now, I’ve been adding new records one by one to the file, but that won’t give me correct JSON. The right solution is to keep a list of all the customers in memory, append to that list when new records are added and then write that list to file, so that we get the correct brackets, etc.
We can then read that file back into a collection class and bind to that class to populate a ListView.
In a previous posting I demonstrated how you can create a powerful display of grouped data using the 
GridView, which is typically used to fill the screen. Every Windows 8 application must also support SnapView, however, in which your application is allocated 320×768 pixels – that is, your application is squeezed into a relatively thin sliver on the left or right of the screen.
GridView leaves much to be desired in SnapView and the common solution is to hide your GridView and to display the same data in a ListView, which works well in those dimensions as it scrolls vertically.
