The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 (aka the Win8 beta) is now available for download, along with the matching Visual Studio 11 beta. You can download them both from the Developer Center for Metro style Apps and at least when I did the downloading this morning, it was smooth and worked well. In case you’re interested, I downloaded the ISO, not the setup, and I am currently writing this blog entry in Windows Live Writer running inside a WMWare Workstation 8.0 virtual machine running on the Windows 7 host OS running inside Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro. As someone said to me this morning: “That’s a lot of VMs!” Maybe so, but the Win8 and VS11 betas are running surprisingly well inside of my Inception-box.

Metro/JS Templates for VS11 in BUILD

If you played around with the Metro/JS templates in VS11 from the BUILD conference in September, you’ll have noticed that the generated apps were compliant with the Windows 8 UX style guidelines, but that two of the templates — Grip and Split — generated large amounts of code. That’s because these are pretty much the biggest apps that Microsoft has ever shipped as templates. They each have multiples pages and they work hard at being simple but feature complete Metro style apps.

However, as well as the BUILD templates implemented the Win8 UX, their code wasn’t the greatest, for the following reasons:

• The templates were attempting to codify best practices for a brand-new app model. That’s always going to take time to get right.
• There was only so much time to get it right before BUILD — it was either have great code or implement a great UX, so the template team chose the latter.
• The bonehead PM in charge at the time (me) decided it was a better choice to push the data model into each page instead of centralizing it. That was a bad idea.
• The data model, spread as it was across nearly every JS file in the templates, was assumed to be static. However, the vast majority of apps get their data dynamically from some external source and the template-generated code made that very hard to implement.
• There were a number of features that the templates needed that didn’t exist directly in the platform, either in WinJS, the IE DOM or in the WinRT libraries, so the templates needed to provide those features.

All of these reasons meant that the functionality of the generate Grid and Split apps made for an instructional start to building your own Metro style apps, assuming you were willing to wade through a great deal of code. The new templates in the Win8 beta solve nearly all of these problems.

Metro/JS Templates for VS11 Beta

Out of the box, the Metro/JS templates in the VS11 beta (made available today, Feb 29, 2012), get more betterer as they get more complex.Let’s start simple and work our way up.

Blank Application

The Blank Application template is almost the smallest Metro/JS app you can build, except that it includes a reference to the Microsoft Windows Library for JavaScript (aka WinJS):

And to be clear, this is a brand new feature. Including WinJS as a reference instead of dropping the code into each project means that MS can shipped a single shared implementation instead of every app in the store duplicating the code. If you want to duplicate the code into your project, you can do so, but you’ll also have to update the URL references to the JS and CSS files from your HTML files, like this snippet from the generated default.html:

In addition to the new syntax with the leading double-slashes, that the number of WinJS files to include is a far smaller number in the Beta. Now it’s just base.js and ui.js, which makes it easy to decide which one(s) you want and in what order to include them, fixing a common problem in the BUILD bits.

One other thing that’s new in the Blank Application template is that there are stubs for implementing tomb-stoning to easily save and restore your app’s session state in the default.js:

The handling of the terminated state in the onactivated event on line 3 and the checkpoint event handler on like 16 are for reactivating and saving your app state respectively.

And finally, the handy TODO comments are something you’ll find sprinkled throughout the templates based on usability feedback conducted to determine what developers really need help with as they add their own functionality to the app.

Fixed Layout Application

Moving up the complexity scale, the Fixed Layout Application template is meant to do just what it says — provide a jumping off point for apps that are logically fixed layout. The crux of this code is the use of the ViewBox control in the default.html:

Line 2 wraps the content of the app in a ViewBox control, which will scale everything inside of it to the size of the content, which is defined in the default.css file with the fixedLayout style:

You’ll see in lines 5 and 6 that the height and width of the div contained in the ViewBox is 768x1024, which means that the content can be created using absolute positioning and sizing. The job of the ViewBox is as the app is resized, either the computer’s resolution changes or more likely the app is moved between landscape, portrait, split and full sizes, the ViewBox will scale the content to take up as much room as possible, keeping the aspect ratio constant and scaling the content such that the app itself can think of itself as logically 768x1024 (or whatever the top-level div’s size is). This is very handy for building things like casual games where you want scaling, but generally not flowing — you want to control where the Scrabble tiles are or the tic-tac-toe pieces and it’s much easier to do that with a fixed size.

And now that I’ve described it, I’ll tell you that this template is the only one that’s structurally identical between BUILD and Beta. Still, it is useful.

Navigation Application

The next one up the ladder is the Navigation Application template, which is where we get the Back button and the support for moving HTML fragments into and out of the DOM just like the user was logically navigation page-to-page. In the BUILD bits, this navigation functionality was packaged in the default.js file, but in the Beta, default.js is just the same as the simpler templates. Instead, the navigation functionality is packaged into a new file: navigator.js. The reason this file is separate is to make it clear if you’d like to implement a different navigation policy, e.g. MVC, then this is the file to start with. Further, while this functionality would seem a shoe-in to be included in WinJS, it’s not quite “baked” enough, which means that MS hasn’t yet decided that this is “the way” to do navigation.

Still, it’s “a way” to do navigation in a Metro/JS app and a pretty useful one. Essential the way it works is that there is a singleton PageControlNavigator in the default.html file that holds the pages as they’re swapped in. The default.html is also where navigator.js is included:

The navigator.js file defines the PageControlNavigator control, which holds the logical pages as the user clicks around in the application. The home parameter is where to start the navigation. Navigation is to a Page, which is really a mapping between an HTML file and a set of events to handle over the lifetime of that Page:

Of course, navigating to the home page is going to be rare compared to navigating between pages. The easiest way to get a new page to add to your app is to right-click on your project in the Solution Explorer and select Add | New Item:

The last item three item templates on the list are for shell contract implementations, which are beyond the scope of this blog post, but the first one is a Page Control, which gives us a triad of HTML, JS and CSS that fits exactly into the navigation model provided by the PageControlNavigator control:

 

 

Navigating to this new control defined by these files is a simple matter of calling the navigate method:

As far as the user is concerned, the anchor tag shows up as a link like any other:

Clicking on “Page 2” fires the onclick event, which calls the navigate method, passing in the path to the HTML file and causes the Page control defined in page2.html, page2.js and page2.css to be loaded:

 

In addition to whatever content on your Page control, notice that the Back button shows up automatically. The Back button manages navigation via clicking, touching and the browser keys; Ctrl+Left Arrow and Ctrl+Right Arrow work as Back and Forward respectively.

Grid and Split Application

At this point, we’ve covered almost all of the core concepts that make up the Grid and Split applications: they bring in WinJS by reference, they use controls and they use navigation via the Page controls. In fact, even though the Grid app has three pages and the Split app has two, they’re really just the navigation template with the pages to implement the Grid and Split app patterns that MS decided were the major app patterns appropriate for Win8. However, the Grid and Split application templates do have two major features that the other templates don’t have: support for multiple view states and a centralized data model.

Multiple view state support means that as the app is moved between portrait, landscape, full and split, the app adjusts itself to look good in all states. The view state management is mostly handled with CSS styles associated with media modes, like in the Split App’s itemsPage.css:

In Metro/JS apps, MS has provided a media query predicate called -ms-view-state, which can be one of the four view states and the styles in the media query block will be applied when the app moves to that state. In addition, if you want to handle the view state change in JS, you can do so with updateLayout event in your Page control, like this snippet from itemsPage.js:

In this case, the updateLayout event is called when the control is initially created and as the app moves through the view states so it can change the layout style for the ListView control showing the contents of the page:

Landscape vs. Snapped view state layout for the itemsPage ListView control

The other major feature of the Grid and Split app templates — and this feature is new in the Beta bits — is the centralized data model, which is where the data for all pages comes from. This data model is defined in data.js and it contains the static group and item data as you just saw. The core of the data is exposed from data.js like so:

These three members of the data object are used throughout the templates, e.g. in the itemsPage.js ready event handler:

Notice that the data.groups property is used on line 6 to perform a data binding operation. That data binding is against the dataSource property of the object returned from data.groups, which itself is created by a method on the WinJS.Binding.List object that holds the grouped item data. It’s this binding list, a new feature in WinJS for the Beta, that makes it easy to move from the static data provided by the templates and dynamic data that your app defines.

The binding list is a binding data source, which means that as you add items to it, it notifies any control that happens to be bound to it. This is especially handy when your app starts up with zero data, but you need to initialize the ListViews such that as the data is available (perhaps from an asynchronous network call), it will be shown.

If you open up the data.js, you’ll see the static sample data:

The group data has a unique key, a title, a subtitle, a background image and a description, which are all fields that the data templates used in the Split and Grid apps depend upon (although you can change them if you like). The item data has a reference to the group to which it belongs, a title, a subtitle, a description, a background image and the content for the item itself.

The code that populates the binding list with the sample data looks like this:

As the comment makes clear, it’s this code you’re most likely to want to change. Instead of pulling in static data from the sampleItems array, we want to pull the items in asynchronously, perhaps from an RSS feed or two just like my earlier post:

In this case, our group data is a set of RSS feeds, being careful to continue to use the same group field names so I don’t have to update the data templates in the rest of the app. When the app loads, I still create a binding list, but instead of filling it directly, I start an async xhr call (the WinJS XMLHttpRequest wrapper) for each feed, creating an item for each RSS post I find upon a successful completion. Because I’ve left the data model alone and because I’m using the binding list, that’s all I have to change and now the entire app has been updated to support that data:

The items page with the set of feeds in the Split app template

The split page with the posts from the selected feed

Where Are We?

As you can see, the Metro/JS templates in the VS11 beta start simple and add features with navigation, pages with specific app pattern functionality, multiple view state support and a unified data model. The main difference is the Beta versions of this templates is that code has been simplified, beautified and pushed into WinJS as much as possible to make the inside of your app just as pretty and easy to use as the outside.

Translation

This article has been translated into Serbo-Croatian by Jovana Milutinovich. Enjoy.

Hello, all, and welcome to the February, 2012 edition of the Telerik newsletter! As the newest employee at Telerik, I’m still learning all of the good stuff we’re doing just in the area of developer tools.

For example, the features in JustCode that fix up my using statements (Ctrl+Shift+U) and show me a type’s shape and implementation via the JustDecompile integration (F12) are now ingrained into my fingertips, but I just learned (JustLearned!) that if I want to get completions on types that aren’t even listed in my using statements, I can use Ctrl+Alt+Space and keep right on coding, which is one of a ton of new features in the 2012 Q1 release. More new features in the Just family of tools include a new decompilation engine in JustDecompile to more completely handle new .NET constructs, a new “Largest Memory Retainer” view in JustTrace to find memory leakers and the ability write your very own JustCode extensions. And the Reporting and OpenAccess ORM tools have great new features coming, too!

On the controls side, for which Telerik is very well-known, we have new features in the ASP.NET AJAX and MVC suites, XAML Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 suites and even the WinForms suite. For example, one of the more amazing controls for me is that RadFileExplorer, which provides an entire logical way to explore files over the web, however you’d like to expose them, and is now updated with thumbnail image support. Plus, AJAX adds support for client-side data binding, exporting to Excel for RadTreeList and nearly complete support across the entire suite for OData. Further, MVC, Silverlight and WPF all get much enhanced data visualizations with charting and diagramming.

However, my favorite set of additions in the controls suite has to be focus on the end-to-end app building support from the WP7 team, including handling ratings, tooltips and the new Application Building Blocks, which includes components for sending diagnostic data back to the developer, implementing trial feature and app expirations and a helper for implementing LiveTiles. This set of components came directly out of the experience the WP7 team had in building and shipping the Tasks apps, which started as the ToDoLists sample. The WP7 team that working hard to make mobile developers happy, even providing guidance on how to build apps your customers will love and how you can make money on your apps.

All of this mobile experience is pouring directly into a whole new set of controls, tools and components that we’re building for Windows 8. Even today, JustCode already support the Visual Studio 11 and our controls have a Metro style theme built right in. Of course, we’re not going to stop there; we’re already spinning up a team dedicated to helping you build end-to-end mobile apps on Windows 8. We’re working closely with Microsoft to make sure we release our Visual Studio 12 extensions and support when VS12 ships, but you’ll see more from us even sooner than that. Stay tuned!

Really, there’s too much good stuff to list, so if I were you, I’d hang out on the Telerik blogs and on the @Telerik twitter feed to see what’s coming up. Even better, check out the upcoming webinars to see the new features in action and install the free trials. And, if you’re got questions, even with the trials, drop us a line on our support center and we’ll get you answers right away. Or, if you’d like to talk to me directly, feel free to drop me a line. We care deeply about making sure our customers get when they need, so keep those cards and letters coming!

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the last post in this series, we looked at getting started building Metro style apps built using JavaScript (Metro/JS apps) with Microsoft Visual Studio 11 for the Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11) and Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview (aka Blend).

In this installment, we’re going to take a look at the library that brings WinRT and the web platform together: the Windows Library for JavaScript (aka WinJS) and build an app while we’re doing it.

The Need for WinJS

While it is the case, as you’ll see, that a Metro/JS apps have the same access to the underlying Windows platform as any other language projection (like Metro/VB, Metro/C# and Metro/C++ apps), it’s also the case that HTML/JavaScript programmers have a certain style that they are used to programming in. In some cases, those habits need to change because Metro/JS apps aren’t web sites or even web applications; Metro/JS apps are native applications that happen to be built with HTML, JavaScript, CSS, SVG, etc.

However, in many cases, existing JavaScript habits are good ones and should be encouraged. Towards that end, Microsoft engineers have built the Windows Libraries for JavaScript (WinJS), which is a set of reusable JavaScript and CSS files which were created specifically to make it easier for you to build Metro/JS apps with the right Win8 “feel” to them.

The easiest way to bring WinJS into your project is to create an application using any of the Metro/JS project templates, since all of them include the WinJS files:

WinJS is defined by the files under the winjs folder. The Blank Application project template produces an application with an empty window, but it does it with style; specifically the style that makes a Metro/JS app look like a Win8 app. Of course, the styles alone can’t make everything right — you’ll also need the right layout, behavior, etc. As an example of how to build a Metro/JS apps that’s slightly more exciting than the one we’ve been looking at so far, let’s build one of the most famous members of the Windows team — Raymond Chen.

Mr. Chen is a developer on the Windows team that brought you the Windows Developer Preview (aka Win8). Further, he’s the author of the most excellent book “The Old New Thing” based on a blog of the same name:

Chen’s blog is famous for digging into the forgotten nooks and crannies of the Windows platform. And for our purposes, Chen’s blog is an excellent target for our sample because he’s chosen a blogging platform that exposes the full text of his posts in a programmatic form (both RSS and Atom) so that we can build a Win8 app to show them.

Any blog displayed in the browser is essentially the title, date and content from each of the latest blog posts. To start, we need to download the data for each of his posts. To do that, we first need to know where to put that code.

The WinJS.Application object

The Blank Application template-generated default.html loads a minimal set of WinJS JavaScript and CSS files:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <title>RssReader</title>
    <!-- WinJS references -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/winjs/css/ui-dark.css" />
    <script src="/winjs/js/base.js"></script>
    <script src="/winjs/js/wwaapp.js"></script>
    <!-- RssReader references -->
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/default.css" />
    <script src="/js/default.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

Updating the sample with some slightly more interesting HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
...
<body>
    <h1>The Old New Thing</h1>
    <div id="downloadStatus"></div>
    <div id="posts"></div>
</body>
</html>

Here we’re setting the header text of our app and creating two div elements as placeholders: one for the status of our RSS download and one for the data from the RSS when we get it. Also, let’s replace the contents of default.css with styles to match Chen’s blog:

body {
    background-color: #fff;
    color: #000;
    font-family: Verdana;
    padding: 8pt;
}

a:link, a:visited, a:active {
    color: #700;
    font-weight: inherit;
}

h1 {
    text-transform: none;
    font-family: inherit;
    font-size: 22pt;
}

#posts {
    width: 99%;
    height: 100%;
    overflow: auto;
}

.postTitle {
    color: #700;
    font-size: 1.2em;
    font-weight: bold;
}

.postDate {
    color: #666;
    font-size: 11pt;
}

.postContent {
    font-size: medium;
    line-height: 18px;
}

To support app lifetime, Win8 provides a set of app-level events. The generated default.js file subscribes to the app’s mainwindowactivated event and then starts the WinJS application:

(function () {
  'use strict';
  // Uncomment the following line to enable first chance exceptions.
  // Debug.enableFirstChanceException(true);

  WinJS.Application.onmainwindowactivated = function (e) {
    if (e.detail.kind ===
        Windows.ApplicationModel.Activation.ActivationKind.launch) {



      // TODO: startup code here
    }
  }

  WinJS.Application.start();
})();

The contents of the generated default.js file are contained within a self-executing anonymous function declaration (that is a mouthful — it’s fun to use a language with key concepts missing).

By default, any function or variable defined outside of a function in your JavaScript files is global across your Metro/JS app. Variables and functions defined within a function are only visible within that function. The template uses this outer function declaration to help you follow good JavaScript design patterns, ensuring that your functions and variables do not pollute the global namespace.

After grabbing the Application object from the WinJS namespace, the code subscribes to the event fired after the application and its resources (like default.html) have been loaded. This is a good place to do initialization, as we’ll see.

For any of the application events to fire, you need to let the application know you’re ready to receive them, which is what the call to the start method does.

The mainwindowactivated event handler is the perfect place for us to kick off the download of the data from Chen’s blog.

Async HTTP using WinJS.xhr

The xhr function in the WinJS namespaces provides a series of options for downloading data in both text and XML formats using HTTP. The name of the xhr function stands for XMLHttpRequest, which is the name of the object that sparked the AJAX/Web 2.0 revolution around 2005 (although the object has been part of Internet Explorer since version 5.0 released in 1999). The xhr function provided with WinJS is a wrapper that takes a number of options, including which HTTP verb to use (GET by default), which HTTP headers to include (none by default) and which URL to retrieve data from:

WinJS.Application.onmainwindowactivated = function (e) {
  // start the download
  var chen = "http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/rss.aspx";
  downloadStatus.innerText = "downloading posts...";
  WinJS.xhr({ url: chen }).then(processPosts, downloadError);
}

Instead of providing the option to retrieve the data synchronously or asynchronously the way the XMLHttpRequest object does, xhr forces an asynchronous call so that the UI will not be blocked while data is retrieved. You’ll see this all over the Win8 programming model as reflected into Metro/JS and it helps you make more responsive programs. In our case, because we don’t know how long the request is going to take, we’re setting the text content of the downloadStatus div to indicate progress.

Asynchronous functions from WinJS return an object called a promise, which represents results to be provided at some time in the future. The promise object exposes the then method, which takes an optional three functions, one for success, one for failure and one for progress.

The call to the xhr function returns the promise immediately, at which point we set the functions to call in the case of success or failure, ignoring progress:

function processPosts(request) {
  // clear the progress indicator
  downloadStatus.innerText = "";

  // parse the RSS
  var items = request.responseXML.selectNodes("//item");
  if (items.length == 0) {
    downloadStatus.innerText = "error downloading posts";
  }

  for (var i = 0, len = items.length; i < len; i++) {
    var item = items[i];

    // append data to #posts div
    var parent = document.createElement("div");
    appendDiv(parent, item.selectNodes("title")[0].text, "postTitle");
    appendDiv(parent, item.selectNodes("pubDate")[0].text, "postDate");
    appendDiv(parent, item.selectNodes("description")[0].text, "postContent");
    posts.appendChild(parent);
  }
}

function appendDiv(parent, html, className) {
  var div = document.createElement("div");
  div.innerHTML = html;
  div.className = className;
  parent.appendChild(div);
}

function downloadError() {
  downloadStatus.innerText = "error downloading posts";
}

When the xhr call has completed successfully, the processPosts function is called with a request object which has all the information as if we’d use the XMLHttpRequest object directly. The property we care about is responseXML, which contains the RSS data we requested. From the RSS, we use an XPath expression to select the set of item nodes, extracting the title, pubDate and description data to be used to create a div element per item, with div elements for each of the pieces of data we’re showing, styled appropriately.

For readers of The Old New Thing, the output should look pretty darn familiar:

At this point, you may worry about whether our use of the xhr function will actually work, since a page provided by a web server would fail. The reason this works is because Metro/JS apps run in a secure sandbox and are, by default, allowed the ability to make cross-domain HTTP requests even though web pages are not.

Actually, it’s not quite true that Metro apps are allowed access to the Internet by default — it’s just that Metro app project in VS11 are provided that access by default, as it’s such a common need.

Where Are We?

At this point, we’ve built a working Metro/JS app that does a real thing using WinJS. In the next installment, we’ll look at how WinJS provides features to make DOM manipulation better.

Portions Copyright © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. Reproduced with permission from Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the previous post in this series, we discussed how to build a deploy a Metro style app built with JavaScript completely from the command line. That’s a useful exercise to prove that there’s no real magic, but I don’t expect most people to do things that way. I expect most people to use Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 11

Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11) is the premiere tool for developing applications for Windows and has been for quite a while. It provides project management for keeping your application’s source files together, integrated build, deployment and launching support, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, graphics and Metro style app manifest editing, debugging and a whole lot more. Visual Studio 11 Express comes for free and includes everything you need to build, package and deploy your Metro style apps.

Out of the box, VS11 provides several project templates to get you started:

The most basic template is the Blank Application project template. Running it produces a project file (.wwaproj) along with nearly the same set of files we used to create the first sample project from the command line. The Blank project template also creates some additional files, which we’ll discuss presently.

The format and the contents of the package.appxmanifest file is the same as the appxmanifest.xml file we’ve already seen, but the .appxmanifest extension allows the file to have a custom editor in VS11:

If you open the provided default.html, you’ll see it’s a nearly empty vessel, waiting to accept your creativity. The provided default.js (under the js folder) is similarly nearly empty, with just some skeleton code that we’ll discuss later.

To debug your application, choose Debug | Start Debugging, which gives you the kinds of debugging tools an experienced Visual Studio user is used to:

• Debugger: Set breakpoints, step and watch JavaScript data and behavior.
• JavaScript Console Window: Interact with JavaScript objects at a command line.
• DOM Explorer Window: Dig through the HTML Document Object Model and see styles by element.
• Call Stack: See the current JavaScript call stack.

In addition to debugging your application on the local machine (which is the default), you have two other options: remote machine and the simulator. You can change these options by choosing Project | Properties and selecting the debugger to launch:

The idea of remote machine debugging is that you can develop on a high-powered developer machine but debug on a more modest consumer-grade machine, like a tablet. This is handy to make sure your application works well on the type of machines you’re targeting.

The simulator option, on the other hand, is meant to let you run another little machine on the machine you’re already running. The simulator is a remote access session that’s configured to allow you to simulate various resolutions, landscape and portrait rotations and touch, even if you’re not using a touch-capable device:

And as that if that weren’t enough, Visual Studio is not the only tool you’ve got in the drawer. If you’d like a WYSIWYG design experience for the visual portion of your application, you’ve got Blend.

Expression Blend 5

Previous version of Blend focused on the XAML developer. Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview (aka Blend), however, adds HTML support for building Metro style JS apps specifically. Blend comes with the following features for designing and building Metro/JS apps:

• Integration with Visual Studio: You can load the same projects in both VS and Blend. In fact, you can load the project you’re currently working on in VS by right-clicking on a project in the Solution Explorer and choose Open in Expression Blend.
• Project Templates: Blend and Visual Studio have the same set of project templates.
• WYSIWYG Design: Each page of your application is laid out as you’d see it when the app is running because Blend is actually running your application to display it accurately as you edit.
• Interactive Design: You can throw a switch in Blend to actually run your application interactively as you navigate page-to-page, then when you get to a page you’d like to design, you can flip the switch again and edit your application. Talk about a quick edit-test cycle!
• Tool Pallet: The full set of controls and options are available from a tool pallet and property editor.
• Layout Simulator: In the same way that VS provides a device simulator, Blend allows your application to be run and edited in one of several sizes and rotations.

Here’s Blend in action on the “Hello” sample:

Those of you familiar with Blend will notice many similarities between the XAML version and the HTML version.

Where Are We?

At this point, you have all you need to know to get started building Metro/JS apps using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, SVG, etc. (assuming you know HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, SVG and et cetera). Next time, I’ll introduce the library built to bridge the two worlds of the WinRT and the web platform — WinJS.

Portions Copyright © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. Reproduced with permission from Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

A “Windows Metro style app” is an application built for the devices running the new Windows user experience of Windows 8. A Metro style app built using JavaScript is a first class Windows application built with the technologies of the web, e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG, etc. Unlike a web site, a Metro JS app is not deployed page-by-page from a web server, but rather installed locally on the user’s machine. Like any other first class Windows app, a Metro JS app has access to the underlying platform and is able to share information with other apps.

Like any web site, a Metro JS app starts with an HTML file:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head><title>Hello, Win8</title></head>
<body><h1>Hello and welcome to Metro style Win8!</h1></body>
</html>

This HTML, if it were loaded in the web browser, would result in the world’s most boring web site. Also, surfing to a web page in the browser is not at all how your customers will execute a Metro style app. Instead, they’ll install it from the Windows Store and execute it from the Start Screen:

Further, a web page (or series of web pages, styles, code, resources, etc.) is not a Metro JS app. A Metro JS app includes these things, but also includes metadata and resources:

• A manifest file to describe your application, including the name, description, the start page, etc.
• A set of large and small logo images to be displayed by the shell.
• A store logo to be displayed by the Windows Store.
• A splash screen to show when your app starts.

The manifest file is an XML file called appxmanifest.xml and a minimal one looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Package xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/appx/2010/manifest">

  <Identity
    Name="hello"
    Version="1.0.0.0"
    Publisher="CN=Microsoft Corporation, O=Microsoft Corporation,
               L=Redmond, S=Washington, C=US" />

  <Properties>
    <DisplayName>Hello</DisplayName>
    <Description>Hello</Description>
    <PublisherDisplayName>csells</PublisherDisplayName>
    <Logo>images\storelogo.png</Logo>
  </Properties>

  <Prerequisites>
    <OSMinVersion>6.2</OSMinVersion>
    <OSMaxVersionTested>6.2</OSMaxVersionTested>
  </Prerequisites>

  <Resources>
    <Resource Language="en-US" />
  </Resources>

  <Applications>
    <Application 
      Id="hello.App"      
      StartPage="default.html">

      <VisualElements
        DisplayName="Hello"
        Logo="images\logo.png"
        SmallLogo="images\smalllogo.png"
        Description="Hello"
        ForegroundText="light"
        BackgroundColor="#0084FF">

        <SplashScreen Image="images\splashscreen.png" />

      </VisualElements>
    </Application>
  </Applications>

</Package>

The manifest has things in it like the name of the application, the description for the application, a reference to the images and, most importantly, the name of the HTML file that represents the app’s start page.

With the manifest and supporting files in place, getting your super exciting app registered with the system is a matter of starting up PowerShell (which you can do from the Start Screen by typing “powershell”), and importing the “appx” module (Figure 1).

If you’re not familiar with it, Windows PowerShell is the next-gen command line shell built into Windows. Out of the Win8 box, it comes with the “appx” module, which allows you to manage the modern applications installed on your computer:

• Add-AppxPackage: install an application so that it can be launched
• Get-AppxPackage: get a list of installed applications
• Get-AppxPackageManifest: get the manifest details of an installed application
• Get-AppxLastError: get the details for the last appx-related error
• Remove-AppxPackage: uninstall an application

The “appx” part of the command names come from the packaged form of a Metro style app, which is called an “appx” after the file extension. To create one, you can use the “MakeAppx.exe” command-line tool available via the Developer Command Prompt available on the Start Screen. The job of MakeAppx.exe is to package your application, manifest and all, into a single file with a “.appx” extension. An appx file is a file in the Open Packaging Conventions (OPC) format, which essential means it’s a .zip file with a few extras. If you’re going to package and sign your application for submission into the Windows Store, you may decide to use MakeAppx.exe and SignTool.exe as part of that process.

However, to simply test an application on your developer box, Add-AppxPackage gives you all you need:

In addition to taking a path to a .appx file, the Add-AppxPackage command allows you to pass in the path to a manifest file using the -Register option, which gives you the ability to install your application for testing without going through the extra step of packaging:

You can double-check that your application has been installed using the Get-AppxPackage command.

Once your application has been installed, you can see it in the shell:

Launching it will you show the inspirational “Hello” message displayed full-screen without any Windows chrome.

Where Are We?

After seeing what files and tools used to build and install a Metro style app, you’re probably already hoping for a tool to help you create, edit, package, launch and debug. For that, we’ve got Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for the Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11), which we’ll talk about next time.

Portions Copyright © 2011 Microsoft Corporation. Reproduced with permission from Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

If you recall from REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011, I’ve been playing around building a little C# REPL app using Roslyn. That version was built as a Console application, but I’ve refactored and rebuilt it as a WPF application:

You can download the source code for both the Console and the WPF versions here:

RoslynRepl Sample Download

The benefit of a real GUI app is that output selection makes a lot more sense and that you could imagine real data visualization into data controls instead of just into strings. However, implementing a REPL shell in a GUI environment requires doing things considerably differently than in a Console app. Besides the stupid things I did, like doing a lot of Console.Write, and things that don’t make sense, like #exit or #prompt, there are a few interesting things that I did with this code, including handling partial submissions, rethinking history and rewiring Console.Write (just ’cuz it’s stupid when I do it doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t work).

Partial Submissions

In this REPL, I decided that Enter means “execute” or “newline” depending on whether the submission is complete enough, according to Roslyn, to execute or not. If it is, I execute it, produce the output and move focus to either the next or a new submission TextBox. If the submission isn’t yet complete, e.g. “void SayHi() {”, then I just put in a newline. Further, I do some work to work properly with selections, i.e. if you press Enter when there’s a selection, the selection will be replaced with the Enter key.

So far I like this model a lot, since I don’t have to something like separate “execute” and “newline” into Enter and Alt+Enter or some such.

Rethinking History

In a GUI shell with partial submissions and multi-line editing, the arrows are important editing keys, so can’t be used for access to previous lines in history. Further, a GUI apps makes it very easy to simply scroll to the command that you want via the mouse or Shift+Tab, so there’s not a lot of use for Alt+Arrow keys. Pressing Enter again replaces the old output (or error) with new output (or error):

Currently when you re-execute a command from history, the command stays where it is in the history sequence, but it could as easily move to the end. I haven’t yet decided which I like better.

Redirecting Console.Write

Since this is a REPL environment works and acts like a shell, I expect that Console.Write (and it’s cousins like Console.WriteLine) to work. However, to make that work, I need to redirect standard output:

Console.SetOut(new ReplHostTextWriter(host));

The ReplTextWriterClass simply forwards the text onto the host:

class ReplHostTextWriter : TextWriter {
  readonly IReplHost host;


  public ReplHostTextWriter(IReplHost host) {
    this.host = host;
  }

  public override void Write(char value) {
    host.Write(value.ToString());
  }

  public override Encoding Encoding {
    get { return Encoding.Default; }
  }
}

The hosts implementation of IReplHost.Write simply forwards it onto the currently executing submission (the ReplSubmissionControl represents both a submission’s input and output bundled together). You’ll notice that the TextWriter takes each character one at a time. It would be nice to do some buffering for efficiency, but you’d also like the output to appear as its produced, so I opted out of buffering.

However, one thing I don’t like is the extra newline at the end of most string output. I want the main window to decide how things are output, setting margins and the newline looks like a wacky margin, so the trailing CR/LF had to go. That’s an interesting algorithm to implement, however, since the characters come in one at a time and not line-by-line. I want separating newlines to appear, just not trailing newlines. I implement this policy with the TrimmedStringBuilder class:

// Output a stream of strings with \r\n pairs potentially spread across strings,
// trimming the trailing \r and \r\n to avoid the output containing the extra spacing.
class TrimmedStringBuilder {
  readonly StringBuilder sb;

  public TrimmedStringBuilder(string s = "") {
    sb = new StringBuilder(s);
  }

  public void Clear() {
    sb.Clear();
  }

  public void Append(string s) {
    sb.Append(s);
  }

  public override string ToString() {
    int len = sb.Length;

    if (len >= 1 && sb[len - 1] == '\r') {
      len -= 1;
    }
    else if (len >= 2 && sb[len - 2] == '\r' && sb[len - 1] == '\n') {
      len -= 2;
    }

    return sb.ToString(0, len);
  }
}

Usage inside the ReplSubmissionControl.Write method is like so:

public partial class ReplSubmissionControl : UserControl {
  ...
  TrimmedStringBuilder trimmedOutput = new TrimmedStringBuilder();

  public void Write(string s) {
    if (s == null) { trimmedOutput.Clear(); }
    else { trimmedOutput.Append(s); }

    consoleContainer.Content = GetTextControl(trimmedOutput.ToString());
  }
}

Now, as the input comes in one character at a time, the trailing newlines are removed but separating newlines are kept. Also, you may be interested to know that the GetTextControl function builds a new read-only TextBox control on the fly to host the string content. This is so that the text can be selected, which isn’t possible when you set the content directly.

Right now, there’s no support for Console.Read, since I don’t really know how I want that to happen yet. Pop-up a dialog box? Something else?

Completions, Syntax Highlighting and Auto-indent

I was a few hundred lines into implementing completions using Roslyn with the help of the Roslyn team when I realized two things:

1. Implementing completions to mimic the VS editor is hard.
2. Completions aren’t enough — I really want an entire C# editor with completions, syntax highlighting and auto-indentation.

Maybe a future release of Roslyn will fix one or both of these issues, but for now, both are out of scope for my little REPL project.

In part 1 of this now multi-part series (who knew?), I discussed my initial attempts at moving my digital life into the cloud, including files, music, photos, notes, task lists, mail, contacts, calendar and PC games.There were some issues, however, and some things that I forgot, so we have part 2.

Before we get to that, however, it’s interesting (for me, at least) to think about why it’s important to be able to move things into the cloud. Lots of vendors are busy making this possible, but why? There are backup reasons, of course, so that a fire or other natural disaster doesn’t wipe out all of the family pictures. There are also the ease of sharing, since email makes a very poor file sharing system. Also, multi-device access is certainly useful, since the world has moved into a heterogeneous OS world again as smartphones and tablets take their place at the table with PCs.

For me, however, moving my data into the cloud is about freedom.

The cloud enables me to get myself bootstrapped with data associated with my personal or business life, using whatever device or OS I feel like using that day. It provides me freedom of location or vendor.

The cloud is still forming, however, so hasn’t really been able to make this a seamless experience, which is why I’m onto part 2 of this series.

Mail, Contacts and Calendar

Hotmail is a fine system for online access to mail, contacts and calendar that integrates well with Windows Phone 7. However, the integration with desktop Outlook and my custom domain isn’t good enough yet to rely on. The primary problem was the Hotmail Outlook Connector, which isn’t ready yet for prime time. It worked great with calendar and contacts, but fell down badly when it came to large email folders that I moved from my PST file. It never showed the sync’ing progress as complete, which made me uncomfortable that it never actually completed sync’ing and therefore my data wasn’t safe. Also, when I sent an email from Hotmail, either via the web or via Outlook, it showed the reply address as hotmail_44fe54cff788bdde@live.com. I assume the latter would’ve been fixed with Windows Live custom domains, but the former was the real deal-killer for me.

Also, I heard that Google Apps is the way to go, but that also requires some special software to enable sync’ing with desktop Outlook — I wanted something that was native to both Outlook 2010 and Windows Phone 7. Further, it cost money, so if I was going to pay, I wanted something that Microsoft was going to integrate well with.

So, I bit the bullet and hooked myself with the latest in hosted Exchange — Microsoft Office 365. That’s what I’m using now and just like the on-premise Exchange that worked great for me as a Microsoft employee, I’ve been very happy with it. However, because of the way I was using it, it was a pain to configure properly for use in hosting my csells@sellsbrothers.com email.

The easy way to configure Office 365 is to let it be the DNS name manager, which lets it manage everything for you, including your web site (via SharePoint), your mail, your Lync settings and any future service they care to tack on. However, that doesn’t work for me, since I didn’t want to move my 16-year-old web site into SharePoint (duh). Instead, I wanted to leave my DNS name manager at securewebs.com, which has been a fabulous web hosting ISP for me.

A slightly harder way to configure Office 365 for use with your domain is to only be used for selective services, e.g. set the MX record for mail, but don’t mess with the CNAME record for your web site. This would’ve been nice, too, except I don’t want to move all of the email accounts on sellsbrothers.com — only csells. Why? Well, that’s a family matter.

Over the years at family gatherings, to seem geek cool, I’ve offered free email boxes to my relatives. “Oh? You’re moving to another ISP again? Why don’t you move your email to sellsbrothers.com and then you can keep the same email address forever! And the best part is that it’s free!”

Now, of course, I’d recommend folks get an email address on hotmail or gmail, but this all started before the email storage wars back when you needed an actual invitation to set up a gmail.com account. Now I’ve got half a dozen family members with “permanent” and “free” email boxes and I don’t want to a) move them, b) charge them or c) pay for them myself on Office 365.

As cheap as you might think I am, it’s really migration that I worry most about — having successfully gotten them set up on their phones and PCs with their current email host, I don’t want to do that again for Outlook or migrate their email. Maybe it’s easy, maybe it’s hard. We’ll never know ’cuz I’m not doing it!

So now, I have to make csells@sellsbrothers.com sync with Office 365 and leave everyone else alone. This is the hardest way to use Office 365 and involved the following:

• Set up a custom domain in Office 365: sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com
• Add myself as a user: csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com
• Verify that I own sellsbrothers.com by asking securewebs.com support to add a DNS TXT record as specified by Office 365 (this took two weeks and a dozen emails)
• Make csells@sellsbrothers.com the primary email on that account
• Make csells@sellsbrothers.com the From address by removing csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com and adding it back again
• Configure my ISP email (SmarterMail) to forward csells@sellsbrothers.com email to csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com (I’m not also deleting the email on my ISP account yet when it forwards, but eventually I plan to)
• Login to my Outlook Web Access account on http://mail.office365.com
• Find my Outlook host name via Help | About | Host name (ch1prd0502.outlook.com) for use as my Outlook server on my Windows Phone 7 (along with my From email address: csells@sellsbrothers.com)
• Stumbling onto the right technical forum post to figure out how to configure desktop Outlook 2010 using advanced settings:
• Server: ch1prd0502.mailbox.outlook.com (my host name with “mailbox” thrown in)
• User name: csells@sellsbrothers.com (my From address)
• Exchange Proxy Server: ch1prd0502.outlook.com (my Host name again)
• Check both checkboxes to use HTTP first before TCP/IP
• Authentication: Basic Authentication

Obviously, this is a crappy configuration experience, but no amount of manual updates to Outlook provided by the Office 365 site seemed to help. It was nice that the WP7 Outlook was much easier, although I’d really loved to have just told desktop Outlook that I was an Office 365 user and had it figure out all the touchy config settings.

Everything seems solid except one minor annoyance: when I do a Reply All, csells@sellsbrothers.com stays in the list because my mail programs don’t know that my csells@sellsbrothers.com and csells@sellsbrothers.onmicrosoft.com email addresses are logically the same. I assume if I was hosting my MX records at Office 365, this problem, along with the crappy config experience, would go away.

The good news is that I’ve got access to my full range of Mail, Contacts and Calendar from the web, my phone and my desktop, including multi-GB email folders I’ve copied over from my PST file, all for $6/month. Had I to do it over again, I’d have long ago moved my family to hotmail and avoided the config nightmare. I may yet do just that.

Encrypted Files

With my mail et al sorted, my next fix from last time was the lack of confidence in my most sensitive files with Dropbox. Dropbox can be hacked or subpoenaed like anyone else, so I want a client-side encryption solution. Dropbox may someday provide this themselves, but currently they gain a great deal of storage savings by detecting duplicate blocks amongst their users, saving significantly on uploads and storage, which client-side encryption disrupts. In the meantime, I really want an app that encrypts on the client and drops my data into Dropbox, which BoxCryptor does nicely.

In addition to supporting Windows, BoxCryptor also supports MacOS, iOS and Android, although not WP7 yet. Further, it’s free for 2GB and only a $40 one-time fee for unlimited data, so it’s cheap, too.

I also looked at SecretSync, which has a similar cross-platform story and pricing model (although it’s $40/year instead of $40/once), but it requires Java and I don’t put that on my box. For an open source solution, you may be interested in TrueCrypt.

Financial Data

I’m a mint.com user. I like the idea of an all-up look at my finances across 29 online financial accounts. However, as a backup of that data, I wrote a mint.com scraping tool that downloads the CSV transactions export file and digs current snapshot data out of the homepage HTML. The format on the web site is constantly changing of course, so it’s a support problem, but having that data even a little messed up over time is way better than not having it at all, so I’m happy. The data itself goes into CSV files that I can query with LINQPad and that are stored in my Dropbox folder, which keeps them sync’d.

Books and Bookmarks

I can’t believe I missed this last time, but one of the big things I keep in the in the cloud is my set of Amazon Kindle books. I think that the proprietary format and DRM of Kindle materials will eventually open up because of competition, but until then, Amazon has been a great steward of my online books and bookmarks, providing me clients for all new platforms as well as their own e-ink-based hardware. I have an extensive book collection (this is just part of it), but am adding to the physical part of it no more.

Further, in the case that I have the “what the hell was that book I used to have?” moment after I finally truck all of my books off to Powell’s, the Brothers Sells have scanned all of the ISBN numbers from my 500+ books into LibraryThing. I won’t have the books anymore, but at least I’ll be able to browse, refresh my memory and add the books to Kindle on demand. The reason I picked LibraryThing is because it was easy to get all of the book metadata from just an ISBN (so it’s easy to spot data entry errors early), it’s easy to export from in a CSV file and, should I decide, easy to user their API.

App Specifics

In addition to the big categories, several apps keep data important to me:

• Twitter keeps Twitter users I’m following and searches
• Facebook keeps Facebook contacts, which is nice because they can maintain their own contact data for me and I don’t have to be constantly out of data with my copy
• Windows Live Messenger keeps my IM contacts for me, although Facebook has largely replaced that for IM chatting
• As of the latest update, Xbox game state in the cloud for me, although I’m not a big enough gamer that I really need it anywhere else except my home console. I assume in the future, MS will also keep the Xbox games I’ve purchased in the cloud as well
• Hulu keeps a list of several TV shows I like and notifies me when new episodes are available
• Netflix keeps a partial list of movies I’d like to see, but unfortunately not all of them
• I keep my blog posts in an instance of SQL Server maintained on securewebs.com, which I assume they backup regularly. Someday I’ll write the script to pull that data out into my Dropbox just in case. The source code for the site itself is already stored in Dropbox, so I’m set there
• Favorites: I don’t have a good app here, but I’d love it if some app could keep my IE favorites sync’d between my phone and my other computers. Suggestions?

Things Left On The Ground

As you may have surmised, I don’t put a lot of sentimental value in physical things. They’re not nearly as important to me as people, experiences or data. However, there are some things that I’d want to rescue in case of disaster given the chance:

• A few wrist watches that reminds me of a special person or event
• An inscribed copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes that my grandfather, my father and I have all read
• Inscribed copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy that my mother read to me as a child
• A leather bound copy of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns because Frank Miller kicks ass
• Two pieces of marble and maple furniture that my grandfather built to withstand the onslaught from my mother barreling through each room at top speed as a child (I’d have liked to see the first collision of the immovable object and the irresistible force that day!)

As hard as I try, I can’t think of anything else. Should I have to jam, my plan is to place these few items into safe keeping and sell, donate and/or toss the rest.

Where Are We?

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Sandy, OR, 20 minutes from a cabin I’m renting for a few days. When I’m done here, I’ll explore the town, see a movie and make myself some dinner. I won’t worry about my phone, my laptop or my home being lost or destroyed, since 98% of the possessions I deem most valuable are being managed by cloud vendors I trust.

The cloud doesn’t just represent a place to backup or store data — it represents a way of life.

My data stores a lifetime of experiences, people and knowledge. By keeping it safe and available no matter where I go, I gain the freedom to wander, to experience new physical places and new hardware and software solutions, all without being unduly burdened.

Creative work requires a comfortable place to labor filled with the tools and the materials the worker needs to be creative. Today my tools are an Apple MacBook, Windows 7, Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010 and a Samsung Focus. Yesterday those tools were different and I’m sure they’ll be different again tomorrow. However, while other people build up their place with comfortable things around them — a bookshelf for reference, a comfy chair, knick-knack reminders of events or trips — my place is a lifetime of data and anywhere that provides access to electrons and bits.

Having my data safe, secure and available makes me feel comfortable, creative and free.

With the exception of //build/, I haven’t really been a public part of the Microsoft developer community for about a year. So, to make up for some lost time, I’m giving a talk about some of the //build/ bits at the Portland Area .NET User Group first thing in the new year. This means that I need a running installation of the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my new laptop, ’cuz THE MAN took my old laptop back when I handed in my badge (although, to be fair, they paid for it in the first place : ).

My constraints were as follows:

• I really like boot-to-VHD. I find that any other kind of virtualization technology slows an OS down enough that it negatively affects any talk I would give.
• I have an existing VHD I wanted to reuse with Win8 and VS11 installed and running just fine already.
• I am running it on a MacBook Air. It’s the big one with quad-core i7, 4GB of RAM and 256GB of SSD, so it’s got the muscle but it needs to drivers to make everything work properly.
• I’m running Windows 7 on my MacBook. The wonderful Boot Camp Assistant in MacOS makes it a snap to get Win7 up and running on a MacBook, but making it run with Win7 and Win8 is a special challenge.

So, with all of that in mind, of course I started with Hanselman’s Guide to Installing and Booting Windows 8 Developer Preview off a VHD post. If you’re willing to build a new VHD, that’s the way to go. However, I was able to use the techniques I learned from that post, especially the comment section and a couple tips from my friend Brian Randall to make my existing Win8 VHD work. Some of this may work for you even if you don’t have a MacBook Air.

Getting Windows 7 Running on my MacBook Air

I started with a virginal MacBook and used the built in Boot Camp to create a Win7 partition, point to a Win7 Ultimate ISO I have on a network share for just these kinds of emergencies and get it installed and running. It wasn’t seamless, but Bing was helpful here to straighten out the curves.

Replacing the Boot Manager

The way I like to create VHDs is via Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V. Once I have the VHD, I drop it onto the c:\vhd folder on my computer, do a little bcdedit magic and boom: when I reboot, I’ve got a new entry from which to choose my OS of the moment.

However, Win8 doesn’t boot from the Win7 boot manager, so the first thing I needed to do (as implied by the comments in Scott’s post) was use bcdboot to replace the Win7 book manager with the Win8 boot manager. To do that, boot into Win7 and fire up the Disk Management tool (Start | Run: diskmgmt.msc). Select your BOOTCAMP drive and choose Action | Attach VHD. Choose the path to your VHD and you’ll get another virtual disk:

In my case, C was my Win7 Boot Camp HD and F was my Win8 VHD. Now, start an elevated command prompt and use bcdboot to replace the Win7 boot manager with the Win8 book manager.

DISCLAIMER: I’m stealing the “works on my machine” graphic from Hanselman’s site because this action replaces a shipping, maintained, supported boot manager with one that is still in “developer preview” mode. Make sure you have your computer backed up before you do this. I am a trained professional. Do not attempt this at home. All stunts performed on a closed course. Some assembly required. Void where prohibited. I’m just sayin’.

Now that you’ve got the right boot manager in place, getting Win8 to boot requires bcdedit.

Getting Windows 8 to Boot

Scott’s post on booting to VHD involves bcdedit, which describes adding a new boot option in the “Setting up your Windows Boot Menu to boot to an Existing VHD” section:

Use bcdedit to point to the Win8 VHD.

Logging into Windows 8 on a MacBook

Now when you boot your MacBook, you’ll choose to boot to your Windows partition as you always have (which should just happen automatically), but then the Win8 book manager will kick in and you choose your Windows 7 install or your new Windows 8 install. Booting into Windows 8 shows you the login screen as normal, but now you have another problem.

The MacBook keyboard comes without a Windows Delete button. Oh sure, it’s labeled “delete” in trendy lowercase letters, but it’s really the equivalent of the Windows Backspace button. And that’s a problem, because you need to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to log into Win8.

Of course, Apple thought of that, so they created the Boot Camp drivers for Windows that maps fn+delete to Delete, but you can only install them after you’ve logged in.

So how do you log into a MacBook without a Delete button? Easy. You attach an external USB keyboard, press that three-fingered salute and login as normal.

Once you’re in that first time, you can install the Boot Camp drivers and never have to use the external keyboard again.

Installing the Boot Camp Drivers on Win8

When I created the Boot Camp USB to install Win7, it came with a set of drivers in the WindowsSupport folder with a wonderful setup.exe that makes Windows run great on the MacBook. Unfortunately, when you try to run it, you get a message that says you can’t:

If you search the internet, you can find folks that have gotten past this by tricking setup.exe into thinking it’s running on Win7, but you’ll also find that those tricks don’t seem to work for 64-bit installs on MacBook Air, i.e. the one I was doing. However, this is where Brian had another suggestion: you can edit the Boot Camp MSI itself.

DISCLAIMER: This is something that I made work surprising well on my own personal MacBook Air, but I provide no guarantee that it won’t cause your computer to burst into flames on an international flight causing your body to be lost at sea. These techniques are not supported by Microsoft, Apple or the American Dental Association. You’ve been warned.

You may wonder, “To what MSI is Mr. Sells referring?” And I answer: WindowsSupport\Drivers\Apple\BootCamp64.msi. This is the 64-bit MSI with the check in it for Windows 7. To make it work for Windows 8, you need to edit the MSI and change the version number. And to do that, the easiest tool I know of is the unsupported, discontinued Orca MSI editor from Microsoft, now hosted on technipages.com. Running Orca allows you to edit BootCamp64.msi and change the Windows version part of the LaunchCondition from 601 (Windows 7) to 602 (Windows 8):

Once you’ve changed this version, WindowsSupport\setup.exe seems to run just fine, installing the keyboard entries that allow you to login and the control panel that allows you to customize everything.

Where Are We?

Starting from a Boot Camp installation of Windows 7 on my MacBook Air, I showed you how I was able to get Windows 8 booting from a VHD. It wasn’t pretty and it required tips from all over the internet. I gather them here today so that future anthropologists will know how hard we worked to enable the coming of our robotic overlords. If you’re able to use these instructions to expedite their arrival, I’m sure they’ll take that into consideration when they’re sorting us into work details.

P.S. This post is dedicated to Jerry Pournelle. I used to pour over his Byte magazine column every month like he was the computer Sherlock Holmes.