When you're developing for Windows 8 you need to acknowledge that you are developing for a touch-first platform.  This means that as you design your app you will constantly need to be aware of the impacts of designing for touch.  Although the Windows Simulator that comes with Visual Studio 2012 does a pretty good job helping to emulate some of the aspects of touch for Windows 8, nothing will be as good as using a Windows…

If you ask enough people what they think about the Windows 8 UI, you would begin to think that every single application looks the same.  Many people seem to have this mistaken opinion that we're restricted to hard edged squares and rectangles and there's no room for creativity on the platform.  That's simply not the case and in this tip I will provide a few examples.  At the very least, I hope you'll take away from this…

One of the defining aspects of Windows 8 is the grid view layout that many application hubs use.  These horizontally panning lists of items are used everywhere from the Start Screen tiles to many of the built-in apps such as Windows Store, Bing News, and Sports.  The GridView control in XAML, or ListView control in WinJS, allows for a lot of customization.  Taking advantage of this customization will allow your application…