Category Archives: Mini-Tutorial

Windows 8–Grid View

GridView is one of the most powerful out-of-the-box controls in Windows 8, but fully understanding how to use it is not necessarily trivial.  The complexity, I believe, comes because GridViews are often used to hold groups of collections, rather than … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Linq, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8 | Tagged | 1 Comment

Windows 8: Adding An AppBar to Conference Buddy

In an earlier postings I described the project that I’ll be creating with Phil Japikse and Michael Crump, code-named Conference Buddy.  In the most recent posting, we looked at a wire-frame that illustrated some of the data we’ll be collecting. … Continue reading

Posted in Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Windows 8 | Tagged | 4 Comments

Creating A Win8 App From Scratch–A Scrolling Home Page

In a previous article I discussed the project that I’ll be building in Windows 8.  We started with a couple screen mock-ups and then passed these to the designers who came back with preliminary designs.  While these designs were not … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Metro, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Windows 8 | Tagged | 2 Comments

Windows 8 and Geolocation

In this posting, we’ll look at how to track location coordinates in Windows 8.  (Click on image for full size) In order to get this to work, we need to be able to obtain the values we’re displaying (e.g., for … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8 | Tagged | 1 Comment

Creating A Windows 8 Application From Scratch

Phil Japikse, Michael Crump and I set out to create three related applications from scratch.  That is, a Windows 8 version written in XAML with C# (me), a Windows 8 version written in JavaScript (Phil) and a Windows 8 Phone … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Windows 8 | Tagged | 1 Comment

Windows 8–Secondary Tiles

Continuing my series based on the presentations I’m giving on Europe, today I return to Tiles to look at creating Secondary tiles. A secondary tile can be created by the user and pinned to the start menu to provide deep … Continue reading

Posted in Mini-Tutorial, Tiles, Windows 8, WinRT | Tagged | 3 Comments

Creating A Live Tile

Continuing my series of Blog posts that distill the presentations I’m giving this month in Europe and the UK, today I’ll take a look at creating a Live Tile.  Live tiles tell the user that something interesting is happening in … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Tiles, Windows 8, WinRT | Tagged | 4 Comments

Windows 8–Search Suggestions

I recently started a series of postings from my tour of presentations in Europe and the UK.  Today I’d like to return to Searching (which I started to cover here), and this time take a look at what it takes … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Metro, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8, WinRT | Tagged | 7 Comments

Windows 8 App Bars

In my previous posting I said that I’d be distilling parts of my presentations into blog posts.  This post continues that idea, focusing on the App Bar.  If we are going to place Content Before Chrome and remove as much … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Metro, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Windows 8, WinRT | Tagged | 2 Comments

Searching in Windows 8

Windows 8 Store Applications can take advantage of the shared “Charms” that you see when you swipe in from the right edge of your Windows 8 device (or press Win-C).  The top charm is searching and it provides tremendous functionality … Continue reading

Posted in Contracts, Essentials, Metro, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML | Tagged | 2 Comments

Windows 8 & Data Binding. Part 5–Binding to Lists

In Part 4 of this mini-series on data binding we looked at Data Conversion. Today we look at binding a UI Element to a list of objects. The trick in binding to a list, is to teach the control how … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8 | Tagged | 3 Comments

Windows 8 & Data Binding. Part 4–Data Conversion

In Part 3 of this little mini-series on data binding in Windows 8 we looked at Element Binding. Today, we’ll take a look at Data Conversion. At times the data in your business object (the source for your binding) and … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8 | Tagged | 1 Comment