A very welcome feature embedded in the new JavaScript Windows Metro style app templates in the Visual Studio 11 beta is that they accommodate built-in support for databinding, using sample data in a JSON array. People who have XAML world background might not see this as a particularly big deal, since Silverlight and WPF have supported databinding for a long time. G. Andrew Duthie in this blog titled "Databinding in Windows 8 JavaScript Metro style Apps" introduces you to databinding in Windows 8 JavaScript Metro style apps. This Microsoft Developer Evangelist in this article covers the basics of the databinding implementation. It is easy and straightforward, and having a template that provides a clear implementation with sample data can help you get started with your own...

It seems Microsoft is making it difficult for third parties to create browsers for Windows 8 tablets. A blog post on Mozilla’s website claims that Firefox will not be able to bring a proper version of Firefox to Windows 8 tablets due to restrictions by Microsoft. Since then Google has also chimed in with the same concerns.Restrictions on tablet platforms aren’t unheard of, but this move is still a little odd. It is due to restrictions on iOS devices that the only browsers available for it use WebKit, so why is Mozilla concerned about Windows tablets but not the iPad? Turns out there are some very good reasons. Before we go into those, let us see how these restriction affect Firefox in the first place.Two KindsIt is well known by now that there will be two kinds of...

Even as Google and Oracle are involved in patent litigation over the use of Java in Android, Xamarin showcases an experimental version of Android build on C# rather than Java.Xamarin is the company currently working on Mono, an open source toolkit that is compatible with Microsoft’s .NET Framework. Xamarin claims that their implementation of the .NET runtime is more mature and performant than Android Dalvik JVM. Xamarin created tools for creating Android and iOS applications using .NET and C#, however they also decided to experiment with the possibility of going much deeper and completely replacing the use of Java on Android with C# instead. This has lead to what they now call the XobotOS.Since Android uses Java heavily, this was no easy task, and Xamarin used automatic,...