Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

UNDERSTANDING WINDOWS 8 APPS

This chapter introduces the fundamentals of how you develop Windows 8 Apps with Visual C++. There is a great deal of detail involved in a comprehensive explanation of how you program for Windows 8 in C++, certainly more than enough to fill an entire book. Consequently this chapter will just provide you with a start down the path, a toe in the water. After a brief outline of the basics, most of the chapter is devoted to walking you through the development of an application, so it’s learning by doing.

Writing a Windows 8 app is very different from writing a regular Windows desktop application such as Sketcher. The application context is different, the structure of the code is different, and the way the user interacts with the application is different. This is because Windows 8 apps are primarily aimed at computers with touch screens, such as tablets, and would typically be distributed through the Microsoft application store. This is similar to the Apple store for iPad and iPhone applications and the Google Play store for applications aimed at Android phones and tablets. Because of the nature of the target platform, Windows 8 apps run in a sandbox that insulates the application from the environment in which it is executing and limits what it can do with the resources in the environment in which it is running. Access to files, network connections, and the hardware are all constrained. You interact with a desktop application through the mouse and the keyboard, ...