Yet Another Podcast #86–Azure Mobile Services with Josh Twist

Posted on December 19, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

This is a not-to-miss podcast on Azure Mobile Services, which tremendously simplifies databases, authentication JoshTwist and push notifications for your Windows 8, Windows Phone, IOS and etc. applications.

Josh Twist is a Program Manager on the Windows Azure team and was the first full-time member of the Mobile Services project. He has worked at Microsoft for 6 years, the first 4 years as a consultant in the UK, before moving to the mother ship in Redmond, WA – with the goal of building awesome products and a focus on user experience. Josh is passionate about Mobile and enjoys all the fruits of the computing garden, with a house laden with computers and gadgets running everything from iOS and Mac OSX, Android, Linux and Windows.

 

Show Links

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Posted in Essentials | Tagged | 1 Comment

Windows 8–Grid View

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

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.  GroupedByCityThe complexity, I believe, comes because GridViews are often used to hold groups of collections, rather than simple collections.  The GridView template assumes that it will be displaying groups of collections of items, and this can make working with the GridView, initially, more complex than it would otherwise be.

Gridview shares all the same methods, properties and events with ListView; all of which they inherit from their base classes.  The two controls are nearly identical; the key difference being that ListView is used to scroll items vertically, while GridView is used to scroll items horizontally. 

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

Windows 8 Persisting Conference Buddy JSON To A File

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

In my most recent posting on Conference Buddy, I showed how to store the data we’ll be accumulating in JSON format.  Today, I’ll show how to write that JSON data to a file for local storage. 

Let’s return to the application; if you need a starting point you can download the source here. CapabilitiesTab

Windows Store applications cannot just access any file anywhere on the local machine.  They must access files only in certain known locations.  You set access permission using the capabilities tab of the appx manifest; in this case checking the Documents Library to allow writing to the Documents folder. 

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Posted in Essentials | 3 Comments

Windows 8: Storing JSON Data for Conference Buddy

Posted on December 13, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

In an earlier postings I described the project that I’ll be creating with Phil Japikse and Michael Crump, code-named Conference Buddy.   In a recent posting we looked at a wire-frame that illustrated some of the data we’ll be collecting. clip_image001In another post, I described how I might use the flip-view to move among the various data-gathering and display “pages.”

Once we gather the data, we’d like to save it to a format that will be consistent across Windows 8 C# and Windows 8 Javascript, as well as Windows 8 Phone.  For now, we’ve settled on JSON as a common persistence and wire-format.  While JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation, there are good libraries for converting .NET objects to JSON and back.  We’ll be using one of the most popular: JSON.NET – an open source serializer for converting between .NET objects and JSON.

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Posted in Essentials | 1 Comment

Windows 8: Adding An AppBar to Conference Buddy

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

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. DataCollection The user fills in the fields, but then how does the user indicate Save or Cancel? 

It would be tempting to add buttons right beneath the data entry form, but the design guidelines call for keeping Chrome, including such buttons, out of sight.

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

Yet Another Podcast #85–Fritz Onion of pluralsight

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

Fritz Onion, one of the founding members of pluralsight, joins me to discuss on-line learning, pluralsight’s fritz-onion-v1 business model, where the opportunities are for instructors and students and much more. 

Fritz is Editor in Chief at pluralsight, and the author of Essential ASP.NET. He’s a  past columnist for MSDN and a regular speaker at national and international conferences such as Tech ED, VSLive and PDC.

 

— Caveat: subsequent to this show, I have agreed to author a course on Windows 8 for pluralsight. —

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Windows 8 and Spell Check

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

WinRT XAML supports system-driven spell checking and auto-complete. Built in and right out of the box. The figure SpellCheckshows spell checking at work. Notice the squiggly underlining of the misspelled word, the options to correct or add to the dictionary or ignore.

You get both spell checking and autocompletion by setting just two properties on the TextBox. 

<TextBox x:Name="JobTitle"
         IsSpellCheckEnabled="True"
         IsTextPredictionEnabled="True"
         Width="200"
         Height="40"
         Grid.Row="2"
         Grid.Column="1"
         HorizontalAlignment="Left"
         Margin="5"
         VerticalAlignment="Center" />

Posted in Windows 8 | 5 Comments

Evolving Simple Wireframes With AppMock

Posted on December 4, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

In an earlier post I introduced the initial wire-frame design for an application that I’ll be creating from scratch in XAML and C#, tentatively named Conference Buddy.  As noted in that article, Phil Japikse will be creating the same application in HTML/JavaScript and Michael Crump will be creating the companion application for Windows Phone 8.

As we think about and design (and re-design), we’ve switched over to a Telerik AppMockPage1show case application named AppMock , available in the Windows Store. 

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Posted in Design, Essentials, Tools and Utilities, Windows 8 | 8 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #84–Chris Eargle Discussing Advanced C# and LINQ

Posted on December 3, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

Chris Eargle, Technical Evangelist for Telerik, joins me in a discussion of C#, advanced LINQ and some of the esotericChrisEargle corners of C# and functional coding. 

 

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Posted in Community, Languages, Linq, Patterns & Skills, Podcast, Tools and Utilities | Tagged | 1 Comment

Creating A Win8 App From Scratch–A Scrolling Home Page

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

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 ready for Prime Time, they were enough to get me started coding (okay, I would have started coding without them, who can wait?) 

ConferenceBuddyPreliminaryImage

Even if our final design looks nothing like this, it does raise a fascinating question: how do you create pages that slide horizontally like the pages shown here.  Certainly there are lots  of examples of this kind of design: see the Weather or News applications that come with Windows 8.

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

Windows 8 and Geolocation

Posted on November 29, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

In this posting, we’ll look at how to track location coordinates in Windows 8.  geolocation (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 Latitude and Longitude) .  Let’s start by looking at how we can get the location values.

To get set up, we’ll create a new Windows 8 Blank application in C# and XAML.  Double click on the Package.appxmanifest and click on the Capabilities tab.  There we’ll want to check the Location box to allow use of location services.  The user still must give permission when the application runs, but this is taken care of for you by the operating system.

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

Intel Ultrabook–Wrapup

Posted on November 28, 2012 by Jesse Liberty

 

In a previous posting I described the IvyBridge Ultrabook I was given to review.   This is the third and final review. 

In short, this is a great machine, and it has been my primary laptop since I got it.  It has a terrific screen, it is fast and responsive and it weighs just 3.5 pounds.  Since I obtained it, Windows 8 was released, and a host of competitive products are now on the market.  My only comparative complaint about the Ultrabook is that it doesn’t fold over (like the Lenova Yoga) to lie flat like a slate.  That is fine, though; this isn’t a slate alternative, it is a laptop alternative and as such it performs beautifully.

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Posted in Hardware, Observations, Opinion, Windows 8 | 2 Comments