As I said in my last post I’m about to dig down into one of my favorite controls, the button. It may seem like something simple but in all it’s simplicity it’s a great control to begin with. Just copying the template and start playing with it is a good start to learn styling. Also I’ll clear up some of the fog around using different kind of graphics. So we have now reached the forth part in the Styling Windows…

Now your app is getting some style, we got the colors nailed down and now we also got a workflow for how fonts and text styles should be handled in your development resources. Let’s continue with control styling. It’s time to focus on updating the controls with explicit and implicit styling. The Index so far: Styling windows 8 – 1 Colors and themes Styling windows 8 – 2 Text and font styles Styling windows 8 – 3 Implicit and explicit…

Maybe it should be part of my Styling Windows 8 series, but this was a problem that has haunted me for a couple of days. Now, that I finally solved it I might as well share it to get it out of my system. Problem We are building a prototype for one of our clients and they are using a custom set of fonts. The fonts comes as separate files for each variant; medium, light, regular, extra bold, italic, etc….

Now when you have the basic colors in place it’s time to attack the next style issue – texts and fonts. By now it’s obvious that the colors for the text you write shouldn’t be set using the color picker directly. If you start doing it like that you will sooner or later end up spelunking for that almost white text in a generated item template held in a wrap grid buried deep in the structure of a hub page….

When you start creating a Windows 8 store app, the platform will provide you with a basic useful theme. If you have no idea what you are doing when it comes to design, please stick to these themes. It’s not very elegant but at least your applications won’t be a disaster. And if you just take the time to learn about the basic navigation patterns and the silhouette it may turn out to be a decent application. But when you want…

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…

I had a little accident last week and needed a computer fast. The only thing I could get was a computer with Windows 8 Consumer Preview already installed. That was actually no problem as I’m currently working on a Windows 8 project. Problem is that I also work on a number of Windows Phone projects. Apart from the XNA installation problem, the WP SDK was no problem to install and all seemed fine, until I opened up the Windows 8…

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,…

The perhaps most obvious difference between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is that XAML is no longer a part of .NET in Windows 8. The reason for it being so obvious is that all references to System.Windows breaks the build. Simply put – XAML now resides in Windows Runtime instead of .NET. The problem is quite easy to fix. In this post we will discuss why XAML has moved and how you deal with it. This post is a part…

Now we’ve reached the point where we stop talking and start playing around with some code. As concluded in the previous post on porting strategy, we’ll simply copy the code files from the Windows Phone project and create a new Windows 8 project. It won’t build right away, let alone run, but it’s a start. The goal for this part is to have a Windows 8 project that does not build but has all the files from the Windows Phone…

In our previous introductory post we set the stage for what we’re going to accomplish with this conversion. Now it’s time to take the first step. Before we dive in, lets lean back and think about how to proceed. We have a working Windows Phone application and we have nothing when it comes to Windows 8. So, what’s the next step, or more correctly, what’s the first step. In this article we’ll list the different porting strategies that we considered,…

You have to start somewhere, and both a blog series and a conversion starts here. During the following weeks we’ll take a real (is-deployed-to-marketplace-real) Windows Phone application and convert it, step by step, to a Windows 8 Metro application. Our hopes and dreams are, because the similarity between the platforms and the mutual design language, Metro, we will be able to reuse a lot of the C# code and XAML that we already have. As a developer you also nurture…

The live tiles are brilliant to show information regarding your application without forcing the user to open it up. The basic live tile gives you two sides with some text, a count and ability to set background images. Outlined in the MSDN documentation, and thousands sites with getting started information. However, when you want to do something more advanced your mostly on your own. Here is a walkthrough with how you handle images, texts and the hardest part transparencies. In…

The other day I was designing a dark static theme for Windows Phone. As I know it will be a dark theme, no matter if the user selects light or dark theme, I wanted to make sure the SystemTray was visible at all times. In this case I sat the opacity to 0 so that the background would be completely transparent. Then foreground was set to the theme foreground like this (that happened to be an all white theme):

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    Kinect for Windows is now launched, what fun can we do with it? Under a spontaneous meeting we had a quick brainstorm for ideas that could be fun and quick to create in one weekend. Many ideas came up based on the the fun interaction a Kinect is making possible. We want to use motion detection of hand gestures and face recognition, and we want it to be fun for all our colleagues to test. The winning idea…

In November last year, it was once again time for the 2011 Øredev developer conference. For the 2010 conference, we at Jayway created a schedule app with a social twist – a puzzle game that you played by talking to other participants. When updating the app this year, we decided to make use of the live tile feature on Windows Phone. We were happy with the results and the added user value, and would like to share how we did…