Performance best practices for Windows Store apps using JavaScript

An app's performance has a huge impact on the user's experience. Smooth scrolling and panning, efficient animations, fast launch times, and general responsiveness help create a good user experience. Given its impact and the variety of areas it affects, we recommend that you design for performance early to avoid issues down the road.

Here we explain how to design for common problem areas within apps.

In this section

Topic Description

The platform

A quick overview of the architecture of the platform that describes how the host process loads an app and how the app's code executes within the host.

Reducing your app's loading time

Learn how to make your app launch faster.

Executing code

Learn about how your app executes its code and what you can do to improve its performance by using Web Workers and asynchronous APIs.

Optimizing your app's lifecycle

When developing an app, consider 3 important app lifecycle events : activation, suspend, and resume. Here we describe these events and important performance considerations to keep in mind when handling them.

Writing efficient JavaScript

How you write your JavaScript code can have a big impact on your app's performance. Learn how to avoid common mistakes and to architect your app for performance.

Working with state efficiently

There are many different options for storing the state of a Windows Store app using JavaScript. Learn about which options to use to get the best performance.

Accessing the file system efficiently

The file system and media files are an important part of most apps, and also one of the most common sources of performance issues. Accessing media files can be expensive, because it takes resources to store and decode or display the media.

Managing layout efficiently

Learn how to improve performance by reducing the number of layout passes your app performs.

Audio and video performance

When you develop an app that uses audio and video, you should be aware of some important performance considerations. This document summarizes key design areas for getting high-performing media playback in Windows Store apps using JavaScript.

Animating

Animations add beauty, energy, motion and personality to your apps. Learn how to create animations that are fast and fluid.

Handling user input

Windows 8 touch language includes a simple set of gestures such as tap for primary action, slide to pan or drag an object, and swipe for selection. The touch experience should always be consistent and responsive. Despite the simplicity and flexibility of the Windows 8 touch programming model, there still are a couple of important performance best practices for you to learn.

Using ListView

The ListView control can present items in a vertical or horizontal list and lets users select and manipulate individual items. The control works with a data source and an app-supplied template to convert the data items into their visual representation. This topic describes some aspects of the ListView control that you can tweak to improve performance.

Performance Analyzer for Windows Runtime apps using JavaScript

The Performance Analyzer for HTML5 Apps is a tool that enables developers to identify common performance issues within their HTML5 apps. Users expect apps to respond immediately to touch, taps, clicks, gestures, and key-presses. Additionally, users expect smooth animations and quick load times. The performance analyzer for HTML5 Apps enables developers to test their apps in a wide variety of common scenarios.

Tool: Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio provides several tools to help you improve the performance of your Windows Store apps using JavaScript

Tool: Windows Performance Toolkit

Included in the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) and the Windows software development kit (SDK), the Windows Performance Toolkit consists of performance monitoring tools that produce in-depth performance profiles of Windows operating systems and apps.

 

Planning

Plan for performance

UX patterns

Index of UX guidelines for Windows Store apps

UX checklist for Windows Store apps

Guidelines

Guidelines for location-aware apps

Debugging and testing

Using the Windows App Certification Kit

Windows Store app test cases

Magazine articles

Managing Memory in Windows Store Apps