# Visual Basic > Universal Windows Platform and Modern Windows Experience >  Using 3rd Party tools to build a better Win 8 App.

## brad jones

Light up Your Modern Apps with DXTREME

We just posted this article on Codeguru.  It has an interesting Windows 8 app that is built. The article shows you how to build the app using DevExpress' tools (you can download a trial from a link in the article).

The app taps into twitter. It has a map for location-based stuff, it has translation, it has standard tweet stuff.  The interesting thing is the Character view built into the app. This shows the sentiment associated to the tweets. For example, you can put in "Microsoft" and get the most recent tweets. It will then show how postive versus negative the tweets are. You could do this with your own name too.

The article is pretty long because it shows you how to builld the application. As such, if you've not done anything with Windows 8 yet, this is a fun project to walk through to see what it takes to build an app. It uses the DevExpress tools for the interface elements, so you'll get something a little more functional than the basic controls.

http://www.codeguru.com/csharp/winrt...th-dxtreme.htm

DevExpress reviewed this article (the writer doesn't work for them). They really liked it too.  

Of course, I have to let you know that we do business with DevExpress. Even so, I'm posting this here (and on CodeGuru) because I think you guys will like it.

----------

