Microsoft BUILD 2012
Published by on 26.07.2012 at 01:48

There is one event that I recommend folks interested in Windows 8 (phone and device), attending this year.

The Microsoft BUILD 2012 event which will be run at the Microsoft Redmond Campus in Seattle USA, as announced by Tim O’Brien on the Channel 9 Blog a few short hours ago.

Channel9 Blog announcement

Channel 9 announces BUILD 2012

The event will run from October 30th to November the 2nd and registration opens on the 8th of August.

Add an outlook calendar reminder here

 

It was a fantastic event last year as those attendees who walked away with Samsung slates will testify.

No doubt registration will be filled quick, so don’t mess about.

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Jose creates 9 new samples for Windows 8
Published by on 24.07.2012 at 12:23

I came across a new post from Jose Fajardo this morning showing the following video of some samples that he has been working on.

Jose is an a very active member in the community and what I like most about his stuff is that he is showing how as a designer, he has managed to transition into the development world and tackle projects that involve technologies like Direct X and going deep with WinRT.


Take a look at the whole post here.

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Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook
Published by on 22.07.2012 at 17:10

I wanted to continue on reviewing books related to Silverlight 5 and development.  Microsoft Silverlight 5 Data and Services Cookbook states that it has over 100 practical recipes for creating rich, data-driven, business applications in Silverlight 5.  As with my last review, I will go over each chapter and add any gut reactions towards the content it provides. The book is broken down into 13 chapters as well as an appendix.  On the whole, the book has a lot of content to absorb.  It is broken down into a collection of tips and tricks and common scenarios for using Silverlight in building line of business applications.  I like the concept and idea behind the approach to this book but I find that a lot of corners were cut in getting the book out the door.  I wish that the book had a better quality of code snippets as well as accompanying images as the code samples lack syntax highlighting of any sort and the images are very poor in quality.     Read the full post

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WinJS Custom Controls
Published by on 21.07.2012 at 11:00

Controls are the basic blocks of any application, you use controls everywhere and also HTML Metro apps are part of the game, you add a control inside a HTML Metro page just placing a <div> with a special “data-win-control” attribute in it:
here’s an example:
<div data-win-control="WinJS.UI.SemanticZoom" >
</div>
if you have pages (even in different applications) that need some special kind of functionality paired with some custom UI, custom controls allows you to reach the “write once, use everywhere” paradigm (unless you like reinventing the wheel of course…)Let’s see how you can create your own custom control and use it inside a HTML Metro application, simulating a simple custom countdown control.Step1: Design the user interfaceWhile not strictly a requirement I personally like to start from the appeareance of my control, so I fire up Expression Blend and start design it: 
image
image-1I’ve highlighted the HTML representing my control’s UI and, on right side, associated CSS, question now is: how do we turn it in a WinJS custom control? 

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Running User Code in the XAML Designer:  Blend and VS 2012

				Published by  on 06.07.2012 at 21:41

				The XAML designer in Blend & VS is a projection of a running application (see Mysteries of XDesProc–Revealed!), but unlike a full-fledged app, usage of certain programming constructs and resources might cause the designer to crash or behave in an unexpected manner.

Note: This post and the examples shown are written in the context of the XAML Metro style app designer, but some of them apply to Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, and Windows Phone designers as well.

First, a quick overview of what code runs in the designer and what doesn’t.

    
	
  • The code-behind of the instances of user controls and custom controls in the active XAML page are run in the designer.
    • 
	
  • WINRT or CLR types that you declare in XAML as resources are instantiated in the designer process.
    • 
	
  • Events dependent on CoreWindow and Input events will not be fired in the designer.
    • 


Keeping the above statements in mind, let’s review some things that might cause the designer to crash or behave unexpectedly.

Using [DependencyObject].Dispatcher

As the designer process is basically a WPF Application that hosts XAML runtime components, types like CoreWindow and CoreDispatcher are unavailable. CoreDispatcher is generally used to marshal an operation from a non-UI thread to the UI thread or schedule it for later execution on the UI thread. Since there is no CoreWindow in the designer process, CoreDispatcher objects in the designer will always evaluate to NULL. Hence, any user controls and custom controls that use this construct in their code-behind might not work correctly in the designer.

When we detect that an instance of a user control or custom type cannot be created, we catch all resulting exceptions and wrap them in an error report linked to that specific instance, and continue creating the rest of the document.

XAML control error on the design surface

 

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Keeping it focused

				Published by  on 05.07.2012 at 20:28

				Well, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged, as I’ve been a busy little bee working on CodeStash. I feel guilty about this, so I’d like to take the chance to pass on the solution to a problem that was posted on Code Project today. The scenario goes like this:

You have a ViewModel with some text that you want to be updated, and you do all the usual binding work with some TextBox elements. The thing is, you want to update your ViewModel properties when the TextBox loses focus. OK, so that’s easily achieved – in fact, it’s the default behaviour of the TextBox. However, you have a button with IsDefault set on it, so pressing Enter in the TextBox triggers the button click – but as the TextBox hasn’t lost focus, the property you are binding to doesn’t get updated. This is, of course, a problem. Fortunately, there’s an easy little trick that you can deploy to update the property, and it’s easily achieved using an attached behavior.

 

 

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Getting started with Metro, JS and blend

				Published by  on 02.07.2012 at 21:15

				
Intro

In this first tutorial in a series about building a Windows 8 application with JavaScript, HMTL and CSS using Expression Blend 5, we’re going to make a start on a very simple game. In this game the player has to guess a random number between 1 and 10. The player wins if the guess is correct, and looses if it’s wrong. In future parts of the series this game will be extended to include various features of WinJS and Windows 8.

File-New

I’ve started with a new “Blank App” from the HTML list. I added a few HTML elements to start from. You can add HTML elements by typing them in the source panel. Or you can drag’n’drop them from Assets pane to Live DOM pane or design area.

File-New

 

 

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