Impressions, slides and code from TechDays Belgium and Netherlands
Published by on 19.02.2012 at 22:30

Update: Posted the video of “MVVM Applied” below. This week I was “on tour” in Belgium and Netherlands and presented 3 times:

“MVVM Applied, From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8”

(in Belgium and Netherlands) The goal of this session was to make people feel confident that the skills they acquired working in various XAML frameworks (Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF, Surface, etc) are going to help them tremendously when developing Windows 8 applications. It was a session packed with code, where we went from a Silverlight 5 application, added design time experience, reworked the design in Expression Blend, then created an application reusing most of the code in Windows Phone (including design time experience in Blend), and then created a WinRT application which, again, reused most of the code (including design time experience in the Visual Studio Designer). Of course the sample code uses the MVVM Light Toolkit in order to make the coding easier, and to maximize code reuse. I also showed techniques to keep as much compatible code as possible between the frameworks, and abstract the differences. For instance, Windows 8 is more asynchronous than Silverlight (which was already more asynchronous than WPF, remember the discussions around the lack of synchronous web requests in Silverlight? (Read more...)

In the categories   '.NET; Expression Blend; MVVM; Phone; Silverlight; Silverlight 5; Technical stuff; UX; Windows Phone 7 "Mango"; Windows Phone 7 wp7dev; Work'
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Solving the ObservableCollection bug on Windows 8
Published by on 19.02.2012 at 17:11

If you tried to build applications for Windows 8 with XAML/C#, you may have noticed an annoying issue: If you have a list controls (for example a GridView) and you bind the ItemsSource property to a property of type ObservableCollection<Something> on your ViewModel, the GridView is not updated when the collection’s content changes. The CollectionChanged event is raised properly, but it is not honored by the binding system. Thankfully, this is a temporary bug, and it should be solved in the Consumer Preview version of Windows 8, due for release end of February. In the meantime, however, it is easy to circumvent this bug. To find a solution, I researched the web and found a class named ObservableVector, for which changes are honored by the binding system. However this class had a major flaw: it forces the original ObservableCollection to be <object> instead of being strongly typed. This is of course super annoying when you are trying to share code with Silverlight/WPF/Windows Phone. So I took a good look at it, and I came up with what I think is a better implementation.

In the categories   '.NET; MVVM; Technical stuff; Work'
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How far will Microsoft go with HTML ?!
Published by on 19.02.2012 at 13:20

Let’s face it people, if you can deliver your product in HTML without compromising on UI/UX then … you should !!! HTML is the ultimate cross platform technology, and that’s the sad truth. I still do believe that Silverlight has … Continue reading →

In the categories   'Uncategorized'
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Windows Metro Experts Group on Linkedin!
Published by on 18.02.2012 at 12:15

Are you interested in keeping up to date and discussing topics about Windows 8, WinRT, Metro?

Don’t forget to join the new “Windows Metro Experts” Group on Linkedin and start creating awesome applications for this great platform!



In the categories   'Metro; News; WinRT - Metro'
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Prism 4.1 – February 2012 available for download
Published by on 18.02.2012 at 12:06

Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy to maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications and Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Windows Phone 7.1 (“Mango”) applications.

The new version 4.1 released on February 2012 is available for download here.

Read the official announcement by Blaine Wastell: Prism for Silverlight 5 Ships.



In the categories   '.NET Programming; News; Patterns; Programming; Rich Internet Applications; Silverlight; WPF'
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The XAML Project is live!
Published by on 18.02.2012 at 11:58

A new project has been recently announced in the “Silverlight Experts” group on Linkedin by fellow group-member Laith Alasad:

The XAML Project contains “Free vector design resources for XAML-based technologies such as Silverlight, Metro, WP7, and WPF. Search and download pure XAML graphics for your web, desktop, and/or mobile applications.“

It’s a very useful resource, I’ve already inserted it in my favorites!

Happy XAMLing everyone ;)



In the categories   '.NET Programming; Metro; News; Programming; Rich Internet Applications; Silverlight; UX - Design; WinRT - Metro; WPF; Xaml'
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jQuery Tip #3 – Using the data() Function
Published by on 17.02.2012 at 07:06

Previous Tips: Over the years of building Web applications I've often run into scenarios where I need to associate data with a div or table row so that I can easily retrieve it without going back to the server. For example, you might have a table full of customer rows and want to store address, city, customer ID and other data that may not be shown in the table. As the user clicks a row you can then pull the data stored with the row and show it in a dialog or another area of the page.     Read the full post

In the categories   '.NET; JavaScript; JSON'
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Master WPF on your iPhone
Published by on 17.02.2012 at 00:18

After being obsessed with WPF for so many years, I can’t just forget about it. Even though my focus is now on iOS development, I still think that WPF is an awesome platform. That’s why I wrote an iPhone app named Master WPF. It contains 500 questions, spread across 28 topics, that I painstakingly wrote, organized, and proofread until my eyes bled. The questions will help any WPF developer sharpen their skills.

Read the full post



In the categories   'Announcements; General Info; iOS; iPhone; iPod; MVVM; Reading Material; WPF'
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Screenshots of my #mvvm demo at #techdaysbe
Published by on 15.02.2012 at 22:52

Today I gave a talk in TechDays in Belgium about MVVM in Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. This was the first time I gave that particular talk, and in addition keep in mind this is a developer preview, meaning that it is not finished, and not always stable. I had a few surprises with this build. For example from time to time, the new “Metro style applications” just cannot be launched anymore. Nothing that a simple reboot cannot fix… but I’ll come back to that in a moment. A couple of hours before my session started, I was notified by Windows 8 that it wanted to install updates. I even joked about it on Twitter. No way was I going to install updates just before a talk! (Read more...)

In the categories   '.NET; Expression Blend; MVVM; Phone; Silverlight; Silverlight 5; Technical stuff; UX; Windows Phone 7 "Mango"; Windows Phone 7 wp7dev; Work'
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Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards
Published by on 15.02.2012 at 12:50

I am very happy to announce that the book that I co-authored has been published and is now available for purchase on Amazon! Here is a link to my publisher: PactPub Here is the link on Amazon: Amazon I have been busy these past several months but it has been worth it!

In the categories   'Author; book; Dashboards; English; Silverlight'
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