MyFinances for Windows 8

5 March, 2012

With the release last week of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, we've decided its time to dive into doing something related to the new development stack - we've got a few ideas in mind but the one we're going to run with is this idea - demonstrating how to build a business-style application on WinRT.

Goals

The goal of this project is to build an application that supports entering, importing and reporting on personal financial data - income and expenses mostly. We want to keep the scope simple for the initial week's work, but we may expand on it down the track based on interest and feature requests.

We're looking to show off how you put together a Javascript-based application for WinRT, and make it a sexy demonstration for the capabilities of the platform - touch, integration with hardware and cloud services, applying Metro design principles to a real-world application, and so on.

A crude mockup I did last night of one of the potential screens.

How can I get involved?

We'll set up the project structure on GitHub tomorrow. The Trello board also needs some love, so stay tuned for that tomorrow. Got some ideas? There's people in the JabbR room to discuss ideas with.

If you are not familiar with WinJS, I suggest having an experiment with the project templates included in VS11. And although they were talking about the Developer Preview of Windows 8, many of the BUILD videos discuss building Metro-style applications and are a great starting point for understanding more about the platform.

These two session in particular are worth watching.