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.

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.

Last week, my app "Physamajig" was a featured app for Windows 8. This means that it had a dedicated tile on the main Store hub which looked like this:

The app had real estate on the Games category like this for 5 days, from 2/8 through 2/12, and I received an email from Microsoft about a week before giving me a heads up that my app was going to be featured at that time. As you can imagine, having a featured app is a huge impact to the number of downloads and visibility of your app.

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While working (again) on 2Day, I encountered small issues with voice recognition. The next version of 2Day will bring support for both speech recognition (use your voice to set the title of a task) and voice commands (speak to your phone to perform operations, for example: “2Day add a reminder tomorrow at 9PM”).

While developing those new features I used two distinct API for voice recognition:

• SpeechRecognizer
• SpeechRecognizerUI

The first one provides no UI while the second one includes a default GUI which is uniform across apps and utilities:

Issue 1: stop music playback automatically

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Despite what anyone might tell you, the Windows Runtime API is not a clean break from the past. Like .NET before it, WinRT includes a backdoor without which it would be practically useless. The Common Language Runtime’s backdoor was called Platform Invocation Services or P/Invoke for short. It was amazingly powerful, but also complex and troublesome. WinRT’s backdoor is a lot simpler. It’s called reinterpret_cast.

As I’ve already illustrated in The Road to Windows 8 and Windows 8, where’d you put my HWND?!, WinRT is projected into C++ through a set of extensions that, among other things, allows the compiler to insert code to automatically manage reference counts as if a COM smart pointer class were used. For example, every WinRT application (or at least those that run within an app container) has a CoreWindow:

auto w = CoreWindow::GetForCurrentThread();

If you were feeling verbose, you might write:

CoreWindow ^ cw = CoreWindow::GetForCurrentThread();

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XAML Spy

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[TestClass]
public class TestClass1 : SilverlightTest
{
    [TestMethod]
    [Asynchronous]     public void Test1()
    {
        DispatcherTimer timer = new DispatcherTimer() { Interval = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(2) };
        timer.Tick += (a, b) =>
        {
            timer.Stop();
            base.TestComplete();
        };
        timer.Start();
    }
}

I was quite surprised when the veil of secrecy over the Windows Phone 8 SDK was finally lifted and it was revealed that its API had in fact very little in common with the Windows 8 API.

Windows 8 essentially provides two APIs for writing (Metro) apps. There’s the XAML API and then there’s Direct3D. Yes, you can incorporate them in various ways but that’s beside the point. The first revelation was that Windows Phone 8 does not share Windows 8’s XAML API. There are various political/marketing/technical reasons for this that I won’t go into here, but needless to say I was not pleased. What a missed opportunity. I can only hope they will correct this very soon. But fair enough it is what it is so moving on.

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