Smappsoft today is pleased to announce the release and immediate availability of Pokertini: Video Poker With A Twist for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. This new title, recently featured at MacWorld/iWorld, brings the classic casino favorite to a whole new level with a detailed and exciting strategic overlay.

In Pokertini: Video Poker With A Twist, players simultaneously play three independent video poker hands, and arrange their simulated bets to maximize payoffs on favored hands. (more…)

AppCraver | iPhone Apps, iPad Apps and iPod Touch Apps

Inventor Spot – Inventions, Innovations, and Interesting Ideas for the Inventor in All of Us

Armchair General Magazine – We Put YOU in Command!

Things To Consider

You can use several different methods in order to process your items but a lot can also depend on your circumstances. For example, it will be important to think about the amount of time that you have in regards to waiting for the documentation to arrive. The amount of money you’ll be willing to spend is also something that you’ll need to take into consideration.

Application

These days, people prefer to mail the necessary documentation rather than having to handle things in person. However, you must be eligible and meet the necessary requirements to do this. A DS-4085 form will need to be filled out and sent with an application fee as well as the individual’s passport. It’s usually recommended to send your items through a traceable delivery service.

Forms

You can find a list of requirements necessary for new pages by mail by doing some research. A DS-4085 is used for fewer than four pages remaining in your passport. If you feel you’ll need more pages, you may want to consider filling out a DS-82 form, which will provide you with a new book. Those who have to fill out their form in person, however, will need to fill in a DS-11 form instead.

Mail Time Frame

Individuals who have a month or more to wait will usually process their paperwork by mail. This process can usually take anywhere between 4 to 6 weeks, although this can sometimes vary.

Cost

If you have about a month to spare but barely any longer, you may want to consider having your application expedited. Of course, this can cost significantly more but many people appreciate having the regular time frame reduced to 2 to 3 weeks. You can pay a small fee for overnight shipping, which can help to lessen your wait.

Online Agency

If you happen to be short on time and expediting your pasport renewal won’t help, you may want to use an agency that specializes in speedy processing. These agencies will cost more, even on top of the initial fees, but they can cut the time frame enormously.

In this third part of our exploration of Windows 8 and WinRT, we’re going to start applying the concepts we learned about in the 2 first parts by using them in code. By now, you should have a good understanding of what Windows 8 Metro style applications are all about. In part 1, we’ve thoroughly explained how Windows 8 applications work inside the Metro environment. We’ve also looked at the improvements made to the desktop mode of Windows 8, which is a place where a lot of us will be spending most of their time I assume.

In Part 2, we’ve seen some very important concepts. We’ve covered WinRT itself: we’ve looked at its architecture and its cornerstones, such as the runtime broker, Windows Metadata and asynchronous development. We’ve also touched on the Windows 8 tailored profile.

This brings us to Part 3. In this article, we’ll start writing code that makes use of WinRT components. Although most of us like to write XAML and C# code, we’ll leave the regular path for once and we’ll write some JavaScript/HTML as well. After some “Hello Worlds”, we’ll dive in more advanced concepts including Capabilities, the Share contract, working with the webcam and some more. Here we go!

Hello World… This time for real

In part 2, I already had the same heading. However, we hadn’t really written any code yet. So let’s do that right now. Note that for all the code we are writing here, you need Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview installed on a Windows 8 machine. To keep things simple, when I use the term”Visual Studio” from now on, it’s this version I’m referring to. If you have Visual Studio 11 installed on your Windows 8 environment as well, the templates that come with the Express edition will also be added to VS11.

A small disclaimer is in place here: the code written in this article is written and tested on the developer preview and may not work correctly with later releases.

Hello Visual Studio

When opening Visual Studio, you’ll notice that things haven’t changed a lot (of course, at the time of writing, we’re using a very early version). When clicking on the New Project link on the Start Page, you get the New Project dialog, shown below.

In part 2, we talked about the so-called language projections of WinRT. A language projection makes it possible to use WinRT, which is written in native code, from another language. Because of this, developers can keep using the language of their choice to write Metro style applications. The language projection makes sure that language constructs remain intact. Things like a constructor, the var keyword, the await keyword all remain the same if you choose to use WinRT from C#. The language projections that are available can be seen here: we can build Metro style apps from JavaScript, C#, VB and C++. All languages have the same project templates available as well.

Let’s start by selecting the C# option. Create a new project (just select the regular Application template for now) and name it HelloWinRTFromCs. Visual Studio opens a designer that should look familiar to the Silverlight developer. We have our regular drag-and drop interface and a XAML editor, as shown below.

In the XAML editor, we can start writing our typical “Hello World” application as follows:

<UserControlx:Class="HelloWinRTFromCs.MainPage"

    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"

    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"

    mc:Ignorable="d"

    d:DesignHeight="768"d:DesignWidth="1366">

    <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot"Background="#FF0C0C0C">

        <TextBlock Name="HelloWorldTextBlock" FontSize="42" Margin="20"></TextBlock>

        <Button Content="I'm the Hello World generator button" Name="HelloWorldButton"

            Click="HelloWorldButton_Click"></Button>

    </Grid>

</UserControl>

In the event handler of the Button, we write the following code:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Threading.Tasks;

using Windows.Foundation;

using Windows.UI.Xaml;

using Windows.UI.Xaml.Controls;

using Windows.UI.Xaml.Data;

namespace HelloWinRTFromCs

{

    partial class MainPage

    {

        public MainPage()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

        }

        private void HelloWorldButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

        {

            HelloWorldTextBlock.Text = "Hello World from SilverlightShow";

        }

    }

}

Ready? Start your debugging engines! Simply hit F5 as you’re used to. Your first Windows is now being prepared. If you take a look in the Output Window, you can see that an *.exe is being created and that *.exe is being packaged into an *.appxrecipe. This file is basically the deployment file that will be “hosted” inside of the Metro environment. After a few seconds, you’ll see your Metro app up and running as shown below. Hit the Button and you’ll be greeted with a nice Hello World from your app when you click the button.

Visual Studio also comes with a simulator. To use it to test your app on, simply select it from the debug options. The simulator is shown below.

Hello C++

Managed developers should feel reassured already a bit now that they’ve seen that it’s pretty much the same thing we’re doing to build a Metro style app. But what about C++ developers? Let’s build the same app but now from C++. The XAML code can be directly copied and pasted inside the new project. This will work since all XAML classes (such as Button and TextBlock) have now moved into the Windows.UI.Xaml namespace. This namespace is part of WinRT and it is thus the same one we’re using in both C# and C++.

The C++ code for the event handler is shown below.

void Application33::MainPage::HelloWorldButton_Click(Platform::Object^ sender, Windows::UI::Xaml::RoutedEventArgs^ e)

{

HelloWorldTextBlock->Text = "Hello World";

}

When running the application, you should get the exact same result. Behind the scenes, our C++ code is being compiled into a native x86 instruction stream (if we would be running this on an ARM-based device, this would be an ARM instruction stream). C++ is directly interacting with the WinRT components.

And why not… Hello JavaScript and HTML

To make the circle complete, let’s write a Hello World app from JavaScript as well. Of course, we’re unable to copy the XAML; JavaScript works in combination with HTML code. Create a new project and select JavaScript this time.

In the HTML code, write your Hello World app as follows:

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

    <meta charset="utf-8" />

    <title>WinWebApp6</title>

    <!-- WinJS references -->

    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/winjs/css/ui-dark.css" />

    <script src="/winjs/js/base.js"></script>
   1:  

   2:     <script src="/winjs/js/wwaapp.js">

   1: </script>

   2:     <!-- WinWebApp6 references -->

   3:     <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/default.css" />

   4:     <script src="/js/default.js">
</script>

</head>

<body>

    <b>Hello World</b>

</body>

</html>

More WinRT

Although new development platform or language you learn starts with Hello World, it doesn’t get you very far. Let’s look at some more concepts.

Selecting files on the local file system using the FileOpenPicker

Metro apps can’t directly access system resources such as the file system. It’s pretty much the same story as Silverlight that we have here: in-browser Silverlight apps can only get access to file if the user selects the file through an OpenFileDialog. In that case, Silverlight gets read-only access to the file. Apps with elevated permissions can get access to the local system.

In WinRT, we have file pickers. Such a picker allows the user to select a file on the “underlying” Windows desktop environment. In the following code, we are using the FileOpenPicker to allow the user to select an image, which we’ll then display in an Image control.

private async void SelectImageButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    var filePicker = new Windows.Storage.Pickers.FileOpenPicker();

    filePicker.FileTypeFilter.Add(".png");

    var selectedImageGuFile = await filePicker.PickSingleFileAsync();

    BitmapImage bitmapImage = new BitmapImage();

    bitmapImage.SetSource(await selectedImageGuFile.OpenAsync(Windows.Storage.FileAccessMode.Read));

    myImage.Source = bitmapImage;

}

Notice the line where we are selecting the file. It makes use of the await keyword. Every call that can take longer than 50ms is done asynchronously by default in WinRT. Silverlight developers are already used to writing async code: when accessing a service, this is the default. Traditionally, we solved this with a callback method. There’s nothing wrong with that. However, this new approach using the await keyword, makes things cleaner: all the lines that are behind the line with the await keyword are only executed when the asynchronous call is completed. Note that the method itself has the async keyword added to it.

When clicking the Button, the file picker displays itself as follows:

Again, through language projections, the asynchronous development is made natural in the language. In JavaScript, the same can be achieved through a JavaScript promise:

var picker = new Windows.Storage.Pickers.FileOpenPicker;

picker.fileTypeFilter.append(".jpg");

picker.pickSingleFileAsync().then;

Accessing the picture library and Capabilities

Next to the pickers API, Metro-style applications can also access some folders directly such as the pictures library. Although stating “directly” may not be very good, let me explain.

In Windows 8, Metro style applications can declare capabilities. A capability is a way for the application to declare that for it to function properly, it needs to have a certain permission. Such a permission can be accessing the webcam, sending text messages, accessing the picture, movie or documents library and quite a few more. This information will be used in the Windows Store: with this information, the Windows Store can notify the potential user that the application will have the declared permissions so that the user may decide on not installing the application. This is the same process as in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Let’s take a look at working with capabilities. We’ll try them out using a project which can access the picture library. Create a new C# project and name it WorkingWithCapabilities.

To define a capability, we can open the appxmanifest file, included in each Metro style project. In the Capabilities tab, check the “Picture Library Access”.

In the XAML, add a GridView (we’ll look at the GridView later on, for now, just remember that it’s a control allowing you to scroll through items horizontally) as follows:

<GridView Name="PicturesGridView" Height="500" VerticalAlignment="Center"></GridView>

In the code-behind, add the following code:

public MainPage()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

            LoadImages();

        }

private async void LoadImages()

{

    StorageFolder picturesFolder = KnownFolders.PicturesLibrary;

    IReadOnlyList<IStorageFile> fileList = await picturesFolder.GetFilesAsync();

    foreach (IStorageFile file in fileList)

    {

        if (file.FileType.Equals(".JPG"))

        {

            var bmp = new BitmapImage();

            var f = await file.OpenAsync(FileAccessMode.Read);

            bmp.SetSource(f);

            Image image = new Image();

            image.Width = 200;

            image.Height = 200;

            image.Source = bmp;

            imageControls.Add(image);

            image.Tag = file;

        }

    }

    PicturesGridView.ItemsSource = imageControls;

}

Notice that we are accessing the Picture Library through the use of the KnownFolders enumeration, which gives us access to the folder from code. This code will however only work when you have indicated in the Capabilities tab that your app needs access to this folder. Then, we read out the files through another async call (remember, we are accessing the drive, which could be a slow process, hence, the async call). Finally, through data binding, we bind a list of images to the GridView. The running app is shown below:

Summary

In this article, we have done our first development in WinRT. We have looked at the first concepts as well, such as the file pickers and the capabilities. In the next article, we’ll continue on this path, exploring more concepts such as contracts/charms in Windows 8.

About the author

Gill Cleeren is Microsoft Regional Director (www.theregion.com), Silverlight MVP (former ASP.NET MVP) and Telerik MVP. He lives in Belgium where he works as .NET architect at Ordina (http://www.ordina.be/). Passionate about .NET, he’s always playing with the newest bits. In his role as Regional Director, Gill has given many sessions, webcasts and trainings on new as well as existing technologies, such as Silverlight, ASP.NET and WPF at conferences including TechEd Berlin 2010, TechDays Belgium – Switzerland – Sweden, DevDays NL, NDC Oslo Norway, SQL Server Saturday Switserland, Spring Conference UK, Silverlight Roadshow in Sweden, Telerik RoadShow UK… He’s also the author of many articles in various developer magazines and for SilverlightShow.net and he organizes the yearly Community Day event in Belgium. He also leads Visug (www.visug.be), the largest .NET user group in Belgium. Gill recently published his first book: “Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook” (Packt Publishing). His second book, Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook will be released March 2012. You can find his blog at www.snowball.be.

Twitter: @gillcleeren

SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

You Need A Passport

By going through the government entities, a traveler has three options: expedited service, routine service and life or death emergency service. In this case, the traveler needs expedited service. You will also need to make sure you have all the necessary materials.

You Need An Itinerary

According to the US State Department, there are a number of items the traveler will need to begin the process. You will need the necessary forms from the federal government, proof of citizenship like a birth certificate, a valid photo ID, your social security card, the application fees and your expected date of travel.

You Need Help

One can also contact an outside firm. They will handle all of the details for obtaining your travel document. However, they must first get your information, which will mean additional costs.

You Need Documents

According to the US State Department, you must be sure to have the items needed for a passport. The list includes: the prescribed forms from the US government, proof of citizenship, a photo ID, your social security number and card and the application fees. If you choose to visit your local, regional agency, you should be prepared to have your travel information readily available.

You Must Pay The Fee

According to travel agents, the best course of action to get an expedited passport is to visit a regional office, which can be located by calling a specific number. In order to get assistance from a regional office, however, you must have a travel date within two weeks. When calling the regional office, the traveler will get an exact location of the local office and an appointment time will be given. The traveler will be required to be at the meeting. All documents and payment will be required at that time.

You Need A Speedy Delivery

If the traveler is in need of a passport in a much shorter time frame, he can locate a third party to assist with this need. There are a number of companies on the Internet that can get you one in the time frame of 24 hours to 4 weeks. The cost from this type of agency will depend on how fast you need the passport.

You Can Track The Progress

Travelers handling their own U S passport name change can begin tracking them a week after applying. The State Department notes travelers should consider paying for overnight shipping of the documents to and from them to ensure timely delivery. Any special needs or requests should be stated at that time as well.

Inventor Spot – Inventions, Innovations, and Interesting Ideas for the Inventor in All of Us

This piece of artwork was created by Jonas Springborg and really sets the theme for Project Pandora: Grim Cargo as the Corporation Troopers, back-to-back, try to fend off the Veer-myn Night-Crawlers with a hailstorm of laserfire.

See you next week!

Mantic Games

For three years I have been pouring myself out on digital paper for the masses to read and respond or ignore as they see fit.

I’ve covered a lot of ground in those three years so I thought it would be neat each month this year to recap where we’ve been. I’m one of those freaks that won’t start commenting on a blog or even really reading current posts until I’ve devoured their archives, but I recognize that most people won’t do that. This may come in handy for people looking for a little insight into where the blog has been.

January 2009

Only 5 posts this first month and 3 were about arena. Huh, wonder what happened there?

My first post, Why, introduced me and sort of laid out why I was blogging. (Hence the name, ‘cuz I’m clever like that.) I have gone back and updated this post just to keep things current.

I would like to add another reason to why I blog: it’s as the closest socially accepted thing to talking to myself. And I do plenty of that anyway.

My other non-arena post from this month was celebrating looting a PvP chest from VoA. Deadly Gladiator’s Silk Raiment has, get this, 50 Intellect. And I was fucking thrilled to have it, lol.

I started the blog out with 24 views that month.

January 2010

By January 2010 we apparently exploded over here with 13,851 views and 20 new posts. In game play, this was the month I was made guild master of Shadow Rising (which intimidated at least one player and he left the guild). We were in ICC and floundering on killing the dogs and Festergut.

This is when I wrote my “WoW: The [noun]” post series. The post that started it all (WoW: The Game) is still relevant in today’s raiding environment – perhaps even more so with the introduction of LFR. This is where I laid out my ground work of WoW as a GAME, versus a HOBBY, versus a JOB.

In WoW: The Community I laid it all out in a graph (graphs are sexy, yo) and added the value of skill to our game/hobby/job factors.

Tir interrupted my series with his guest post, Another Voice, where I think the only thing we disagreed on was the flavor of the cake being frosted (yellow cake or GTFO).

We continued to what I can rightfully DEMAND, EXPECT, and WANT from others playing the game in WoW: The Expectations. Again, this was one where you can replace all instances of “heroic” with “LFR” and it’s completely current. (Apparently I had plans to roll a worgen and run around /biting people. I never did that. /sadface) At the end, we even saw the reformation of an elitist into a more gentle, caring player. Not that Dark/Soth plays anymore, but he saw the light before his computer blew up.

Probably the most amusing in the series was WoW: The Numbers where I gave a value of the DPS I was considering to be non-fail in a heroic: 1k. That’s right, back in 2010 if you were in a heroic with me and pulling at least 1k I was totally fine with it. How soon, Blizzard, until we’re at “MEGA DAMAGE!!!!!”?

I also have a post that compares end game gearing to the exception strength percentile roll in D&D. No, seriously, it makes sense.

January 2011

We slowed back down a bit in 2011 and only had 8 posts with 3,093 views. By this point we were in BoT and triumphant of our kill of Atra-fucking-medes. Arioch was sitting in the Filthy Animal, flirting outrageously with the waitstaff, and relaxing while it was Selwyn’s turn to save the world.

It was here that I fell in love with Atonement healing, spent an entire post bemoaning the expense of buff spells (thankfully fixed now),  whined some more about how disc healers were undervalued, exploring the wonky playstyle of disc,  and closed the month with a discussion of what healing as disc *feels* like.

January 2012

Picking up some steam again! This year I published 17 posts in January and had 3,316 of you lovely people read them. Or one really bored person refreshing the page all day.

I had transferred to an Alliance guild and was hating it so posted a reverse-recruitment. Although the post didn’t pan out in finding me a new home, a networking tool at work found me a guy in a guild that turned out to not be recruiting, but put me on the server that I now call home.

I gave the “state of the mage” address and interviewed Selwyn about his recent experiences on the Alliance side. I had another guest post from Tir (since he can’t get in to his blog anymore) about the 5% nerf to the Dragon Soul raid.

The tanking adventures of my baby warrior started this month – or more accurately, did NOT start due to a lack of a shield.

TITTIES IN VENT!

And don’t forget raiding compared to bra cup sizes. With pictures!

Last, but not least, I finally got my Horde/MLP crossover T-shirt design up for sale.

…

So that’s been January over the years in a nutshell. WordPress sucks when it comes to being able to pull information about specific time frames for search parameters and stuff like that, but we’ll see what I can do next month.

clearcasting