Windows 10 development for absolute beginners

[News]

The absolute beginners series is back for Windows 10. It doesn’t matter if you’re a pro dev or just starting out, there’s valuable content for everyone. If you’re looking for a faster pace content that dives, the Developer’s Guide to Windows 10 series may be for you. The only thing that the absolute beginners series assumes is that participants understand the basic language fundamentals of C#; if you don’t have this covered, you should take a look at the C# Fundamental series first.

Your guide through the series, Bob Tabor from Link Removed, walks you through how to create Windows 10 apps on the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) – meaning you’ll gain access to all the Windows 10 screens: PCs, phones, tablets, and even on a Raspberry Pi, HoloLens, and Xbox. Bob will challenge you with exercises, help you build a reference sheet for future reference, and explain the techniques and concepts being used along the way in a simple, friendly manner. The series source code for each video is at https://github.com/Windows-Readiness/AbsoluteBeginnersWin10.


The curriculum is laid out around in two major parts. The first part will teach you the skills to build basic apps. The second part you’ll create of four separate full blown apps: soundboard, weather, an album cover matching game and a hero explorer app. We recommend those new to the platform start at the beginning. But for those already familiar, here are direct links to the sections you are likely to find most helpful.

1. Link Removed (Video 49) This first sample app plays funny sounds when the user taps a given tile. The UWP Soundboard app will allow us to create an app allowing the user to filter the sounds by category, a search feature to find a sound quickly, databinding, working with the media element, drag and drop when using the app in desktop, and the process of submitting the app to the Windows Store.
2. Link Removed (Video 57) This second sample app focuses on making calls to external web services to retrieve data from a third-party web service, deserializing the JSON returned from the call into an object graph of classes generated by an online tool, working with Location services, adding capabilities to apps, debugging location using the Phone Emulator’s map and location feature, and more.
3. Link Removed (Video 63) This third example demonstrates how to access known folders like documents, images and music. The application traverses a folder structure to find all .mp3 files, reads the meta data about each file including the album art, and randomly chooses files to play. The example makes extensive use of ObservableCollection<T>, databinding and data templates. This app demonstrates the use of a storyboard used to stop and start music and perform the count down, game logic and scoring, advanced use of the Progress Bar and more.
4. Link Removed (Video 71) The final example allows the user to explore Marvel Comic’s universe of characters via their programmatic API. The application makes calls by create an MD5 hash of a public and private key as well as a timestamp to authenticate the call. The app will deserializes JSON data into an object graph of classes, shows how to overcome inevitable failed calls to web services through the use of exception handling, async, await and Task, and makes extensive use of ObservableCollection<T> to allow results to stream into view. Finally, the example demonstrates how easy it is to include Cortana integration into your app.

We hope you enjoy the series and if you are looking for examples on how to do certain tasks, please reach out to us via the comments or Link Removed.

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