Eye on .NET Programming

As soon as I saw Anders’ talk on TypeScript, I fell in love. If you’re not familiar with it, TypeScript adds a lot of necessary features to JavaScript to make it suitable for building real apps, while still “compiling down” to JavaScript to maintain JS’s single biggest advantage: ubiquity. Further, TypeScript has tooling inside Visual Studio so that it works nicely with a wide variety of Windows projects, including Win8/JS projects. However, while Microsoft has made a nice Win8/TS sample available, there are currently no Visual Studio project templates for building my own apps. Luckily, it was easy enough to build some: You’ll notice three new templates: TypeScript versions of Blank App, Fixed Layout App and Navigation App. All three projects generate code that acts the same, except the code is in TypeScript instead of JavaScript (although the JavaScript is generated and very visible to your inspection). I didn’t build the Grid App or Split App templates yet, since there is a lot of...