Another day another occasion to share a tip which comes with the development of my todo-list app 2Day. This time, I share a small PowerShell script I use in order to build the application. Of course the script will not work out of the box for you but it could be useful if you’re thinking about automating the generation of your application.

Background: managing multiple versions

Since release 1.5.0 there are two versions of 2Day: the lite version (free) and the standard version (paid). I switch from one configuration to another using two Build Configurations. When I want to build the Lite version I build using the Release Lite configuration while for the standard version I build in Release. The difference between the two is a conditional symbol.

Read Jeremy's entire article here.

A while ago I posted a Photoshop color swatch with the accent colors of Windows Phone 7. I’m currently working on the design of a few apps that will be released for Windows Phone 8 too. So I created a new set of colors.

You can download the set here: WindowsPhone8Accent.

Read Timmy's entire article here.

While refactoring MvvmStack for WinJS code i noticed that I did not show how to persist the state of the services when the app get suspended, so i checked in a new version that persist the data contained inside imageService.js (in a real world app, the data will probably come from a remote server).

The strategy I use is to let the services that need to keep their state add themselves to a services collection exposed by applicationControllerBase object that is passed to each service instance.

Read Corrado's entire article here.

While working on my todo-list application 2Day, I encountered a situation where Rx came to the rescue. Rx (Reactive Extension) is a framework which is available for a couple of years now. It is possible to use it the phone very easily. In this blog post, I share a piece of code which use Rx to implement a specific feature in 2Day.

2Day’s users have been requested a search feature. The idea is simple: give the user a new page where he can type text which then filters his tasks. Here is the feature in action in 2Day:

Even though is seems very basic, I wanted to add an extra feature: perform the search a couple of milliseconds after the user actually stop typing. This prevents the search result to blink while the user types.

Read Jeremy's entire article here.

At recent Community Days 2013 conference I had a talk about WinJS development where, at the end, i introduced a demo about MVVM development in HTML 5/Windows Store app, since i found near to zero documentation about this, I decided to share some personal experience.

I’m not going to explain what MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) is, there is a lot of documentation in Internet, if you need a starting point have a look Laurent Bugnion’s article here, but, as seasoned XAML developer, i admit that I can no longer create production apps without it.

In this first post I’m going to describe what you get when you download the code from http://mvvmstack.codeplex.com.

Read Corrado's entire article here.

CodePlus is an application that I wrote because I wanted a better coding experience on the Windows 8 RT devices since I could not run Visual Studio. Here is a description of CodePlus:

CodePlus – is an editor to allow developers to program in C, C++, C#, CoffeeScript, CSS, HTML, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, PowerShell, Python, VB.NET, and many more. It supports undo/redo and syntax highlighting. As a developer, you can point to a folder and work on any files in that file.

Read Matt's entire article here.

Another simple but fun application that I wrote for my boys. DoodlePad is yet another paint-like clone that is touch enabled. I wanted to provide a simple means for my boys to play around and make me some cool drawings.

Like my games, this application relies heavily on HTML5 canvas to get its job done. I also want to provide a link to a pure JavaScript color picker I used in the app in case any of you are looking for one.

Read Matt's entire article here.

In this post, I wanted to describe Tank Commander and talk about some of the logic that went into building it.

Here is the description of the game:

Tank Commander is a game that teaches you programming logic. You get one chance to write your program and destroy the base. You can play any level but your real skill comes when you can write all the programs without a single error!

Read Matt's entire article here.

I recently was working on an application where I wanted to use a simple color picker and then make the button that I used to launch the color picker display the color chosen. The library that I ended up using can be found here. I selected it because I didn’t want any dependencies on jQuery or other libraries and just use a lightweight JavaScript approach.

As you can see, I am using the built-in AppBar/NavBar features of Windows 8 to help keep the UI clean.

One problem I ran into while testing my code was that when I picked either a background or brush color that was white, I could no longer see the icon and text on my command bar.

Read Matt's entire article here.

Developing applications for Windows 8 has been so much fun now that we can use HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.  I have been inspired to write some simple applications for the Windows 8 App Store.  This has been a very fun experience and I find that the more that I try and push myself, the more I end up learning.

I recently just released a new application for drawing called, “DoodlePad“.  This simple application allows you to draw on the canvas and change your brush color, size, and background of your canvas.  It also allows you to save your drawing, create a new one, or open an existing image.  One of the tricky parts that I ran into when developing this application was trying to provide a good user experience by allowing them to have a background color.

This wasn’t as easy as I had first imagined since the Canvas is transparent by default.  At first I thought I could simply create a fill style and then fill the Canvas rectangle with whatever color a user chose.  However this didn’t work out very well when I was testing because as soon as I would start drawing and then want to change the background, all of my art work up till then would be covered with the new background.

Here is what I came up with, I decided to use a wrapping DIV that I would set the “background-color” property using JavaScript whenever the user selected a different color.  This turned out to work perfectly well due to the Canvas being transparent out of the box.

Now comes the problem, when I want to dump all the beautiful work that the user has done create a masterpiece, the canvas no longer has any information concerning the background.

Read Matt's entire article here.