how to build my own visual components for metro style apps?

is there a guideline on how to built visual components for metro apps with c#?

i have a project to build for my diploma in byzantine music. and i want to be able to use it from

a tablet.The project is for writing easily byzantine music symbols and text underneath the symbols

so i need to build my own visual components.

would you have any suggestions for me

thanks

ps. i haven't installed win8 yet but after my ssd  return back from rma i'm going to give it a try.

If you haven't installed Windows 8 then writing metro apps won't work.

If I were you I'd wait until Windows 8 RTMs next year before making any concrete plans to integrate your project with it, unless that's an integral part of the project.

@ailatzis:

do you really need a visual component for that? Can we have a markup of what you have in mind? I thought you can easily use a canvas to do overlay, or just a simple visual transform without canvas.

http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D000.pdf

Those music symbols are in Unicode. Does that mean they can be used as special characters in a WinRT app?

@Harlequin: He just needs the right font and that's basically it.

http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/

Symbola font, and it's free....good Lord there's tons of glyphs in this thing

i'm planning to build a custom text editor for better positioning of the symbols and the musical text

(for absolute centeralization of character)

also

a custom keyboard control that will show the music characters (the byzantine font) that is selected binded to the keyboard keys which will provide states of ctr , shift and alt keys and it will change the symbols that are binded to the keyboard everytime there is a state change

the same keyboard control will be used for the musical text and to show the font face characters of the current selected font

it seems prety straightforward don't you think

ps.i installed windows developer tools yesterday and i'm going to do some xaml designing later on

thanks

One thing to look at before you get to far into metro is will it work well for this app.

you need to have some kind of rich document editor that i am not sure metro will really support.

so far we have only seen metro really used to consume content not for creating it.

not to say that it can't be done.  just that i have not seen any good info on how it will work.

also will this app need to print pages of "sheet music" ?

you may want to start with how to layout the printed page and then see how to display that on screen and then how to edit that page with an editing view.

touch can be done on windows 7 or 8 w/o metro.  so start with logic that can work with "classic wpf" and with Metro / xaml and see which fits best.

Sounds like something MIDI integration would be good for. Would be easier for users to use a musical keyboard I think than a computer one where they had to hold down Alt+Ctrl+J to hit a note

As far as I know, MS decided that MIDI support in Metro apps just wasn't important enough to bother with. I might be wrong about that but I remember some people on C9 were complaining about lack of MIDI support. If that is really true, that will be a huge disadvantage.

BTW, I think the OP raises a good point about custom controls in Metro. Even if his particular use case can be solved without creating a custom control, there will still be other cases where a custom control is required. How would that work?

for XAML is would think it's just a control ++  touch enabled.

for HTML - i have no idea.

Maybe a sketch of the app would help