Setting the device wallpaper in Windows Universal Apps 29. July 2015 Shawn Universal Apps (0) Windows 10 launched today and with it comes a new SDK for building “Universal Apps”. This new SDK comes with a lot of new functionality. One of those pieces is a new way to set the wallpaper of a device. This new API is available on the new UserProfilePersonalizationSettings class. This class is used for setting the lockscreen, and the device wallpaper. The new UserProfilePersonalizationSettings class has a TrySetWallpaperImageAsync method that accepts any local StorageFile (I have not been able to set the wallpaper using the FileOpenPicker). This means you can save an image to the local or roaming folders, or use an existing image packaged with your app. var file = await StorageFile.GetFileFromApplicationUriAsync(new Uri("ms-appx:///Assets/AwesomeWallpaper.jpg"));await Windows.System.UserProfile.UserProfilePersonalizationSettings.Current.TrySetWallpaperImageAsync(file); This example uses a file packaged with the app in the Assets folder. You should check if the device has the abi... [More]
Setting the lockscreen in Windows Universal Apps 29. July 2015 Shawn Universal Apps (0) Set lockscreen within Windows 10 universal apps [More]
In depth look at the Windows RelativePanel 9. April 2015 Shawn Windows Apps (0) Windows 10 released a lot of new functionality and controls. One of the new controls is the RelativePanel. This panel takes the great Grid panel and cranks it up to 11. The Grid panel gives a lot of control with how you layout controls. You specify rows and columns of various heights and widths and then place controls within the grid and define the row and/or column through attached properties. Instead of rows/columns, the RelativePanel places controls relative to itself or other controls within it. Just like the Grid, the RelativePanel uses 16 different attached properties to define where elements should be placed. In fact, the RelativePanel has no additional properties or methods from a regular Panel. It only contains attached properties. Aligning relative to the RelativePanel The relative panel does not respect controls with traditional alignment via HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment. Instead there are six new properties to define how an element should align relative to th... [More]
Getting and Setting the SeletedIndex (visible section) of the Hub, now with Binding! 26. August 2014 Shawn Universal Apps (0) In my last post I talked about how you can restore the last visible section of the Hub. In that post I talked about the lack of the SelectedIndex and SelectedItem properties in the Hub control. These properties were in the Panorama control. Not having these properties means setting the visible section from a view model requires access to the Hub. This is not ideal. When functionality is not available, create it! When you want to add functionality to a control there are two basic solutions. Extend the control by creating a new one. Extend the control with attached properties The first solution is generally accomplished by inheriting from the control itself. The second is most often solved with a behavior. Whenever possible I prefer option 1 over option 2. The downside to option 1 is adding more and more functionality trying to come up with a good name for your control. Extending existing controls is really easy. There [usually] is not a need to create a new style for the control. We ... [More]
Transitioning your app from the Panorama control to the Hub control 3. April 2014 Shawn Universal Apps (0) At //build today Microsoft announced the new Universal Apps that will allow you to build desktop, tablet and phone apps using the same code. These are different than PCLs as they allow for platform functionality (I won’t get into differences between PCLs and Shared Projects here). These new apps will be based on the XAML platform that Windows tablet apps are built on. So this means that you can build Windows Phone apps with new XAML elements that are available in Windows [tablet] Apps like the GridView, ListView, Hub and more. This also means that Silverlight Windows Phone controls will not be available. One of these missing controls is the Panorama control. We’ll look at how we can take an existing Panorama app, and convert it to a Hub app. Migrating to the Hub control from the Panorama control is very easy. To start, I’ll create a new Windows Phone [Silverlight] Panorama app. I’ll call in PanoramaConversion. Next I’ll add a new project to the solution. For this project I’ll c... [More]