Asynchronous Predicates, Actions and Funcs 17. February 2014 Shawn Async (0) I love the built in Predicate, Action, and Func delegates. They provide simple ways for methods to be passed to other objects. Suppose you had an interface that processes some results. In the Process method, it has a parameter that specifies if a given item is valid and ready for processing public interface IProcessResults { IEnumerable<IProcessedItem> Process(IEnumerable<IItem> items, Predicate<IItem> isValid = null); } If the predicate existed, the implementing class would call that method to determine if an item is valid or not. This is all well and good, but we live in async world now. Windows Store APIs enforce async everywhere they can. Windows Phone and the .Net APIs are not quite there, but do provide everything needed so that you may be able to make your app Fast and Fluid. Why should we be held back by these synchronous delegate methods? Let’s see if we can take the existing APIs, and make them asynchronous. ... [More]
Performing an async operation in the OnBackKeyPress method and still exit your Windows Phone apps 14. June 2013 Shawn Windows Phone (0) The OnBackKeyPress method allows you to perform special logic when the user presses the phone back button. You usually override this method when you do not want the user to actually go back a page. An example of this is if you show a popup, when the user presses the back button you should close the popup. protected override void OnBackKeyPress(CancelEventArgs e) { base.OnBackKeyPress(e); if (PopupIsOpen()) { e.Cancel = true; ClosePopup(); } } This workflow works great because everything is synchronous. You may have seen some apps that prompt you with a MessageBox asking if you want to exit. If you say yes the app exits and if you say no, you do not exit the app. protected override void OnBackKeyPress(CancelEventArgs e) { base.OnBackKeyPress(e); var result = MessageBox.Show( "Are... [More]
Creating a custom async dialog for your Win8 apps Part 2: CustomDialog 12. November 2012 Shawn Windows Store (1) In Part 1 of this series I discussed how to create a custom async LoginDialog to use within your Windows Store apps. In this blog, I’ll explain how to turn that dialog into an async dialog that allows for custom content and works more like the MessageDialog. Most of the hard work was already completed in the LoginDialog. It has a constructor that takes content, a ShowAsync method that has the ability to show a dialog asynchronously, responds to a CancellationToken, it is shown as a Popup and responds to the size of the window changing and many more. To create the CustomDialog, I’ll start with the LoginDialog. For the CustomDialog, I wanted to make it almost identical to the MessageDialog class except replacing the content parameter of the constructor from string, to object. For the new constructors, we’ll be using a ContentPresenter to place the custom content. The ContentPresenter will be created in code when the dialog is shown. public CustomDialog(object content) ... [More]
Creating a Custom Async Dialog for your Win8 Apps Part 1 - LoginDialog 28. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (0) For a recent Windows Store App, I needed to create a way for people to log into it. I could have easily created a simple control or page that allowed the user to enter their login information, but I wanted to work with the new async/await architecture. I thought that creating a login dialog that fit this pattern would be a fun adventure. I wanted to follow the same pattern found in the MessageDialog class so it would be easy to use and understand how it works. This is part one of a two part blog. Part one will cover creating a LoginDialog class that only handles the ability to login. Part two will cover changing that class to be a more generic CustomDialog class that allows for custom content. By the end of the blog we’ll create a LoginDialog that will display a login to the user that looks a lot like the login you get from the People app. This first stab at the dialog will focus on the ability to login, so we need a class that will hold the information the user enters. pu... [More]