Category Archives: Mini-Tutorial

Windows 8–Data binding Part 2

In my previous blog post I introduced data binding.  It worked, but there was no mechanism for updating.  Updating comes in two flavors, and these are often confused by folks new to databinding: Someone else updates the underlying data; we’d … Continue reading

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

Windows 8 Primer–Data Binding (Part 1)

Data-binding is often thought of as an advanced topic, but there really is no reason for that. data-binding is Critical to writing XAML applications Not very difficult to learn A very powerful technique

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

Exploring Win8 Metro: The RichEditBox & FilePickers

Win8 provides a number of controls in the XAML toolkit that are easy to use and that provide a great deal of flexibility and power.  I’ll be writing about some of these controls now and then, starting with some simple … Continue reading

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

GridView Control in Windows 8

While ListBox and ComboBox continue to work in Windows 8, their use is discouraged. They are not designed well for touch input and there are new and more powerful controls in WinRT that you can use instead; specifically the ListView … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Windows 8 | Tagged | 9 Comments

The Accelerometer and the Emulator

A Windows Phone Tutorial The Windows Phone 7.1 SDK (formerly known as Mango) includes a new extended emulator that allows you to see the effect of moving the phone when using the accelerometer.  We’ll draw a dot in the center … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 4 Comments

Playing A Sound, Simplified

Windows Phone Tutorial In a previous posting I discussed how to play a sound using a background process.  That is great when you need the sound to continue playing even if you leave your application. But much of the time … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 5 Comments

Calling Navigate From The View Model

Windows Phone Mini-Tutorial In the third part of the MVVM Light Toolkit Soup To Nuts (part 1 is here) I started with an application that had two pages, and a button on the first that was to cause a navigation … Continue reading

Posted in Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills | Tagged | 9 Comments

Vibrating the phone

Windows Phone Tutorial A little vibration added to your application can be just the haptic feedback needed. It turns out that vibration is absurdly easy to add; so much so that discussions of adding vibration typically come with the caveat … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 3 Comments

Binding Formatting

Windows Phone Tutorial When you are binding data there are additional properties that allow you to format the display and to handle errors and null values. The StringFormat property allows you to add any standard .NET format string that matches … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 5 Comments

DecryptR Part 2

In a recent post, I discussed the DecryptR application I have been toying with.  While the fundamentals are working, there is much to do.  Today I’ll make a few minor improvements. First, let’s set the font in the list box … Continue reading

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

DecryptR–A Glass House Application

  Periodically, I like to build a “glass house” application – that is one which I document as I go, hiding nothing and showing all the thinking that goes into the application as well as the raw, not ready-for-production code … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills | Tagged | 5 Comments

Context Menu

Windows Phone Tutorial The Silverlight For Windows Phone Toolkit is a magnificent collection of controls and utilities for writing Windows Phone applications.  Unfortunately, there is little or no documentation, and the samples, while wonderful, are quite complex.  At times, it … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Toolkit, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment