we’re gonna need posts… lots of posts
by Dave
Sun 28 October 2012 @ 12:46
Those of you who have subscriptions to my feed will see that there were a bunch of posts over the last couple of days with garbage content in them. Fear not! I haven’t been hacked or something. I’m in the process of writing a Windows Store app for Windows 8 and WinRT which allows posting to a blog.
I generally do this whenever a new technology comes along just to see how it gets implemented with that technology / platform / device etc. In this case I’m liking the ease with which I put together a Surface app in about 30 minutes which posted content to my blog. Lots of it was hard-coded, and there is vast scope for improvement, but it works! It uses the (hard-coded) Metaweblog API endpoint of my blog as a service and posts the content to that. It doesn’t wait for an answer, nor check to see if the endpoint actually exists, nor do anything like asynchronous notifications that the content was posted. However, from a programming perspective, getting the whole thing done and testing it on a Windows 8 machine was a piece of cake.
I will actually build out the rest of the functionality in it at some point soon. I want to have the ability to configure and use (multiple) blogs within the system. Switching between them should be as intuitive as tapping a radio button somewhere. I also desperately need to find some better documentation for async operations. At the moment there is a lot of documentation about how to consume async classes, but very little about creating them yourself (that I could find). The editor is also currently text-only, so I’ll want to look at handling rich text.