It’s been fun following and contributing to the growing sense of transformation in Microsoft. Windows 8 is continuously being improved, with alot of creative innovation going into the core experience, not to mention that even Woz is appreciative of the effort.

One of the cooler things I find great in Win8+ is the ability to write native apps using HTML5/CSS and JavaScript, and to top it off, you can mix in TypeScript for an even better coding experience.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that enables design-time error checking and more predictable tooling. It compiles back to JavaScript (just like CoffeeScript), and the coolest thing about it? You can easily leverage open source, and the community is backing it up.

I put together a 17 minute video that gets you started with writing a native Win8.1 app using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, AngularJS, Bootstrap, underscore, BankersBox and jQuery. The goal of the tutorial is to go through the end-to-end experience of developing a win8.1 app as quickly as possible while not developing a random ‘hello world’ app.

[ar_youtube id=”mPljRj4IS3w” mode=”normal” align=”center”]

[Source Code]

Windows has quite a few controls you can leverage, but for this tutorial I wanted to keep it to a minimum just so we can focus on leveraging open source.

The app parses some JSON, implements search, does data biding with AngularJS, uses bootstrap for the layout, filtering with underscore, set-operations with BankersBox and glued with some jQuery.

Make sure you leave some comments!