It doesn’t seem like a great idea to go into a series of posts talking about Metro-style apps without briefly defining the core components that they are built on. The most fundamental piece of the puzzle for these apps is Windows Runtime, or WinRT for short. WinRT is probably best described as an unmanaged, native API that can be leveraged from many different languages via a mechanism called language projection. Read more to find out some more details about how WinRT works.
Windows 8 Metro Style app development starts with choosing a user interface technology path. Developers will need to choose whether they will create their user interface using XAML or HTML5. Choosing XAML means that the business logic for the application can be implemented using C++, C#, or VB. HTML5 apps will mainly use JavaScript for this purpose (note: it is possible to call into C++/C#/VB code in an HTML5 app).
In the process of writing my first Windows 8 Metro style app using C# and XAML, I came across some limitations of the current WebView control’s implementation. The flow for the feature I was working on is fairly simple:
This is a pretty straightforward concept and I thought the implementation would be just as intuitive. Judging by the similarity of the WebView control to the Silverlight WebBrowser control, I went about implementing this functionality as I would have for Silverlight. I set the WebView’s Source property to the initial Uri where I wanted the browsing to begin. I wired up a test button that I thought would kick off the parsing process. That’s when I started to run into problems.