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]
Using the new SettingsFlyout API in a Windows 8.1 AND Windows 8 Store app 23. July 2013 Shawn Windows Store (0) Earlier today Ginny Caughey asked a question about how to maintain an app with support for Windows 8 and 8.1. It’s hard to answer a question that broad so I asked her what she wanted to take advantage of with 8.1. Her main use case is handling of screen [and app] sizes but while she was working, wanted to replace the Callisto SettingsFlyout control with the new native SettingsFlyout control in 8.1. I suggested a few ideas throughout the day from #if separation to MEF. I started tonight working on a sample on how you could inject a SettingsFlyout using MEF but decided that it was just too complex for this example. I took a step back and thought about how to make this as easy as possible. I recently blogged about how to use the new Geolocator API within a Windows Phone 8 and Phone 7 application and thought that wrapping the Callisto API would be best suited for this situation as well. The idea behind this blog is that you have one application that supports both Windows 8 and 8.1. Yo... [More]
We couldn’t get your developer license for Windows 8.1 Preview… SOLVED! 3. July 2013 Shawn Windows Store (0) I’ve been trying to get going with developing Windows 8.1 Store apps on my new Surface Pro but was continually running into the following error. It turns out this error is due to how I configure my PCs. Every time I build a new computer or install a version of Windows I create an “admin” account. This account is only used for admin related stuff. My normal account is not an admin account. I have been doing this configuration since XP due to the lack of security that XP originally offered. I tried running Visual Studio 2013 as admin, I tried running powershell and the command “Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration” but all failed. It wasn’t until a helpful Hermit Dave tried to diagnose this issue with me over twitter that I was able to solve it. The solution is to log in as your admin account and either run the powershell command or VS2013 to get the developer account prompt, enter you Microsoft account information and then log back into your regular account. Again, big thank... [More]
Using the WebAPI to send errors for your apps 26. January 2013 Shawn (0) If your app does anything at all complex, it’s going to crash. You’re going to miss checking something for null. You’re going to use a resource that doesn’t exist. Your app is going to crash. Luckily there are some ways to make sure you know what’s happening. Little Watson by Andy Pennell shows us a great way to send application errors but requires the user to email them to you. Bjorn Kuiper extended Little Watson by removing the need to email the report and instead send it to a PHP endpoint. This is a great solution provided your server is setup to run PHP . If you don’twant to use PHP, don’t want to install PHP or if you are using a hosting service that does not run PHP then you’re out of luck. Instead of convincing your web provider to install PHP you could create a WCF service, but that seems like a lot of overhead. You could also create an ASP.NET web page and put the error details into a query parameter, but that seems hokie. Luckily the Web API has been introduced. The Web API... [More]
Easily create light themed styles for your Win8 Settings Flyout 25. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (1) One of the things I love about Windows Store apps is their ability to integrate with the system. One of these integration points is the Settings Charm. I’m not going to show you how to create a settings flyout. There are already lots of examples out there that do this. There are even some helpers like the SettingsFlyout available in Callisto and the helper created by Jerry Nixon. Recently Tim Heuer made a change to the SettingsFlyout to set the background to white. This change allows your app to follow the guidelines. He also added a property that allows you to change what you want the background to be if you are not a fan of white. This change to the background works great if your app has a light requested theme. If you are using the default dark theme then the new background on the flyout becomes a nightmare. It’s a nightmare because now you have to style all of the controls you use for your settings to work properly with a light theme. You could easily start changing the brushes of... [More]
Easily create light themed styles for your Win8 Settings pane 24. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (0) One of the things I love about Windows Store apps is their ability to integrate with the system. One of these integration points is the Settings Charm. I’m not going to show you how to create a settings flyout. There are already lots of examples out there that do this. There are even some helpers like the SettingsFlyout available in Callisto and the helper created by Jerry Nixon. Recently Tim Heuer made a change to the SettingsFlyout to set the background to white. This change allows your app to follow the guidelines. He also added a property that allows you to change what you want the background to be if you are not a fan of white. This change to the background works great if your app has a light requested theme. If you are using the default dark theme then the new background on the flyout becomes a nightmare. It’s a nightmare because now you have to style all of the controls you use for your settings to work properly with a light theme. You could easily start changing the brushes of... [More]
Fixing the AppBarButtonStyle for ToggleButton support in your Win8 apps 27. August 2012 Shawn Windows Store (2) With the RTM release of Visual Studio 2012 the Visual Studio team made some improvements to the various AppBar button styles. One of these awesome improvements was to add support for ToggleButtons. Now you can use any of these out-of-the-box styles with Buttons AND ToggleButtons. This is pretty awesome… Except for the fact that the style is missing a required TextBlock. This TextBlock toggles the color of the button. Without it you do not get a visual indication that the ToggleButton is checked. Even worse, is that the application crashes when the ToggleButton is checked. To fix this, open the StandardStyles.xaml file and go to the AppBarButtonStyle. Insert the following line directly under the “BackgroundGlyph” TextBlock <TextBlock x:Name="BackgroundCheckedGlyph" Visibility="Collapsed" Text="" FontFamily="Segoe UI Symbol" FontSize="53.333" Margin="-4,-19,0,0" Foreground="{StaticResource AppBarItemForegroundThemeBrush}"/> After inserting that line, th... [More]