Yesterday we hosted some guests in a double session event regarding lessons learned developing Windows Store apps. First of all, thank you to all visitors! Secondly, thank you to Peter Bryntesson from Microsoft Sweden for a really good session. We, the XAML team at Jayway .NET, held on session on a bunch of topics – and we here present you with the slides. Enjoy! Robert Hedgate preaching about snapped vs full vs filled view. Peter Bryntesson on Javascript, PCL and…

An error you might bump into is trying to connect to a TFS service and getting an access denied with the message “TF31003: Either you have not entered the necessary credentials or your user account does not have permission…”. tl;dr Delete all saved passwords in your IE browsing history, as described in this MSDN forum thread. UPDATE: The IE-clearing-tip above often works, when it does not – I have to hit “TEAM – CONNECT TO TFS…” in VS again, that…

This is the final exam in the roadmap towards MCSD: Windows Store Apps Using C#. Having just taken and passed the exam, I thought I’d share my links for this one as well. Related posts: MSDN study links for exam 70-483: Programming in C# MSDN study links for exam 70-484: Essentials of Developing Windows Metro style Apps using C# Good luck out there! /A Develop Metro style Apps by Using WinRT (17%) Create background tasks. This objective may include but…

The name of a Windows Store app can be changed, and it’s quite easy to do. Here I’ll walk you through the steps and show you how it’s done. Background We have a JayLabs-app (JayLabs is our playground account where we publish internal apps that are not showcase quality) called Rater that we’d like to rename to Vote Collector.  What we want to see is this flow: An update is available:   The app has after the update a new…

Last week I had the honor of doing two sessions on the new Windows Phone 8 platform. The format was interesting, Microsoft Sweden had created this as an invite-only event and focused on the recording of the sessions – but with a small audience. The other speakers were Tech Evangelists from Microsoft; Tess Ferrandez, Anders Thun and Peter Bryntesson, and last but not least Johan Lindfors from Coderox. The session videos will be released online soon. Slides are on slideshare,…

It’s a great week – the BUILD conference has started and the Windows Phone 8 SDK has been released! Reading through the release notes I found a few points worth highlighting. The emulator has problems with H.264 video Not totally unexpected but good to know, e.g.: Your app may crash during recording if H.264 video-capture APIs (Windows.Phone.Media.Capture.KnownCameraAudioVideoProperties.H264*) are called before recording begins. Workaround: Debug using a Windows Phone 8 device. The emulator may capture images rotated Emulator camera may save…

Microsoft have announced the exams for becoming MCSD on Windows 8, they are now in beta stage. I here present to you links for the skills measured for the exam 70-484: Essentials of Developing Windows Metro style Apps using C#, the second exam towards MCSD: Windows Metro Style Apps Using C#. As you will notice the link set is not in complete for every detail, but hopefully gets you somewhere. Enjoy, and good luck on the exam! Disclaimer: I have…

It lets you stage parts of files for commit, let me show you how. Intro I cannot do one thing at a time, I try to, but never succeed. Especially when It comes to coding. All the time I find myself working on a feature, and when jumping around in the code base I find stuff that needs fixing, and I fix it. As a result of this, my commit messages often have a bullet list, or some “and”s in…

In my current Windows 8 project, I needed an object on the screen to resize with screen size – and keep it’s proportions. Turned out to be a bit trickier than I thought… What I wanted was this:   I had to have it as Stretch alignment to scale with the screen size, so fixed Width/Height was out of the question. The starting point was to have VerticalAlignment=Stretch to always use a third of the screen height, but what about…

Microsoft have announced the exams for becoming MCSD on Windows 8, they are now in beta stage. I here present to you links for the skills measured for the exam 70-483: Programming in C#, the first exam towards MCSD: Windows Metro Style Apps Using C#. As you will notice the link set is not in complete for every detail, but covers the major topics. Enjoy, and good luck on the exam! Disclaimer: I have not taken the beta exam myself…

This article will show you how we turned our progress spinner, that we use on all pages in the Reseguiden Sista-minuten app, into an even nicer reusable component than what it was before. The spinner looks like this: We have it on every page of the application, and the backing properties controlling the behaviour are in our BaseVM, the superclass for all view models. The properties are IsBusy and ProgressVisibility. The text comes from a resource, LoadingPage_LoadingData.Text, and the Windows…

The short story A high DPI screen is scaled so you can always ask for Bounds and get the normal DPI (dots per inch) result for a screen of that size. For example, set the simulator to 1920×1080 for a 10.6″ screen and the Window.Current.Bounds will say ~ 1371×771 – which is close enough to 1366×768 which is the resolution for a normal DPI screen. Why does this matter? Well – you can adjust and adopt your UI to different…

In Windows 8 Metro apps, the navigation model has been improved over the previous one found on Windows Phone. One difference is that page caching has to be manually enabled for each page, as we explained in part 8 of our Windows Phone to Windows 8 conversion series. And, the page cache is active for both forward and backward navigation, which recently gave me some headaches. The solution is to clear the cache when backing away from the page, and…

We started with a Windows Phone application and converted it to a Windows 8 equivalent. The end result was far from a clone, neither visually nor in function, but that was never the goal. The goal was to take a real application through the trembling steps of converting into a fully functional prototype on Windows 8. The idea of this last post in the series is to look back and discuss what we had done differently building the Windows Phone…

The Mango (7.1) update for Windows Phone brought us a lot of goodies including the Scheduled Task Agent. It allowed us to create a feeling of push notifications without actually doing any server push implementation. In the Reseguiden app we use the background agents to do new searches for trips and displaying the top result in the app tile. Sort of a budget-push. So, the question is, does the same functionality exist in Windows 8? The answer is yes; same…

Live tiles was introduced with Windows Phone. Compared to an icon, which only used to start an application, a live tile is more like a window into your application. A window where you can present up to date information even if your application is not running. Live tiles in one of the strengths of Windows Phone and it has, of course, been transferred to Windows 8. But there are differences between live tiles in Windows Phone and Windows 8. With…

I don’t think I need to stress how important it is to place all of your texts (as in language specific texts visible to the end user) in the same place. To look around in your code and XAML after strings that may be duplicated through the application makes us sad developers. Even if you from start only support one language (and don’t plan to support any other) you can save a lot of time by adding all of your…

Today I’ve had the honor and privilege to present at TechDays Sweden and at TechDays@campus, Örebro University. The topic was Beginning Windows Phone development and at both venues I had a big crowd with interested developers – couldn’t be better! I here bring you the code samples and slides – thank you for coming! Code download code Slides Techdays 2012 – Beginning Windows Phone development – Andreas Hammar View more presentations from Andreas Hammar.

Navigation in Windows Phone has a clear legacy from Silverlight, you get around using Uris and query strings. What might have been the best solution for the web is clumsy and cumbersome in a native environment. This has often led to custom wrappers around the navigation APIs. All this has changed in Window 8, navigation feels more modern and easy to use. In this article we’ll take a closer look at the old and new way of navigating. This post…

Just as with most Windows Phone applications, you typically add value to a Windows 8 application when caching data. You gain some offline ability as well as a quick and snappy application that doesn’t need to go online and download data all the time. In Reseguiden’s application we are not actually saving any data in our cache. This is because all data really need to be fresh so we really can’t cache it any longer than the application runs. But…

Right now, one of the big differences between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is what third party components you can use. For Windows Phone you have a huge selection of components that you can choose from to get help with anything from MVVM to animations. We used several when implementing Reseguidens sista-minuten application. One we used quite extensively throughout the application is ServiceStack.Text to parse JSON. If we had been lucky we would have been able to re use the…

Just to be clear, this is not a necessary step for us to take in our conversion process. But it’s a step that spreads some light on some of the differences regarding how you write code for Windows Phone and Windows 8. You can even say that it will show how much easier life gets with C#5 and .NET 4.5. We’ll take a look a the heart of the application – where the data is fetched from the server. Usually,…