Published on Friday, September 27, 2013 3:00:00 AM UTC in
Announcements
& Philosophical
Some people need to be taught the hard way. Once again these days, I was one of them. As some of you may have noticed, strange things happened to my blog and several others of my sites recently. From being completely offline through returning 500s to posts that disappear and come back randomly. Hopefully by now everything is back to normal, as you are currently reading the redesigned blog on my new domain www.mistergoodcat.com. So what happened?
Published on Thursday, September 12, 2013 1:00:00 PM UTC in
Programming
A short while ago the .NET team released a portal library that supports compression streams as well as zip archives on a various set of platforms, including .NET, Windows Phone 8 and .NET for Windows Store apps. The library is named Microsoft.Bcl.Compression and if you're not familiar with it you can find more information about it in the official blog. I was eager to try it out, and today I finally came around doing so – and instantly hit a bug that I think is worth talking about so you don't have to spend hours working around it, like I did.
Published on Monday, August 19, 2013 3:00:00 AM UTC in
Tools
You've probably heard and read a lot about Nokia's new flagship Windows Phone model, the Lumia 1020. After using it for a while, I feel like I need to add some of my own comments to this, and as always I'm trying to add some small pieces of informaton that you might not have read elsewhere. The following is not claiming to be a comprehensive device or camera review, just some impressions from a hobby fotographer and Windows Phone fan. Also, I'm obviously not going into the basics of Windows Phone, as I imagine if you're reading this blog you are quite familiar with the system :).
Published on Tuesday, August 6, 2013 8:00:00 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
In my previous post I briefly talked about the possibility to download the generated code of your App Studio apps to extend it with your own ideas and customizations. There are already some posts showing up demonstrating how easy this is, for example this one by Joost van Schaik using Expression Blend and Visual Studio. As someone who likes clean code a lot, in this post I rather want to focus on the structure and technical details of the generated solutions, and give you a quick example of how to put that to good use.
Published on Tuesday, August 6, 2013 7:00:00 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
Today the Windows Phone team has publicly announced the beta of App Studio, a new tool to enable everyone to build apps, regardless of their experience. App Studio focuses on the content and lets you quickly transform an idea into a finished app without having to care about all the involved technical details. A guided experience leads you through the basic setup, customizing your content and adding final touches to a result that can be published to the Windows Phone Store.
Published on Monday, August 5, 2013 5:00:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Every now and then I want my text boxes in a Windows Phone project to show validation errors by using the magic that is provided by the binding engine and supporting interfaces like INotifyDataErrorInfo. When you try to do that as you would in e.g. WPF or Silverlight, the visual result is simply – nothing. Luckily, this irritating behavior is just caused by the involved default control template of the control on Windows Phone. All the infrastructure and the required logic in the control code are there, it' just that nothing is displayed because the required visual states are missing (for performance reasons).
Published on Monday, July 1, 2013 9:00:00 PM UTC in
Personal
& Programming
For a long time, a quote by John Quincy Adams has been a part of my web site's front page: "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." In fact, over the last years mentoring, in one way or another, has become a great part of my life, both at work and in my free time. I enjoyed and continue to enjoy posting in forums, writing articles and blog posts, contributing to open source projects and local events, or making appearances in podcasts or at conference events, as well as coaching developers in person. If you want to learn more about some of my work, take a look at the projects page; if you are interested in more about me, read the author's page.
Published on Thursday, June 6, 2013 6:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
Thanks to everybody who attended my session on Windows Phone 8 Enterprise Development in Karlsruhe yesterday. It was a lot of fun. I'm glad Windows Phone development is picking up speed in the business world too. Also thanks to all who filled out their evaluations, and the great and overwhelmingly positive feedback! Very much appreciated!
Published on Friday, May 31, 2013 12:45:07 PM UTC in
Announcements
& Programming
Next week Software Developers Conference "Entwicklertag 2013" is about to start once again, in Karlsruhe. As last year, I'll be there talking about Windows Phone. This time, I'll present and discuss our project experiences with using Windows Phone 8 for Enterprise Applications, and of course I'll also give a general overview of what's in the box for enterprises with Microsoft's mobile platform. You can find more information on the Conference's web site:
Published on Sunday, April 21, 2013 10:24:49 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
After a short period of testing and use in a project, I released version 1.2 of YLOD (on NuGet) today. It adds support for passwords, a feature requested by Brecht over on CodePlex. I was a bit amazed that I didn't ran into this earlier, as having passwords in your app's options seems like an obvious use case. It once again shows the value of feedback from others – thanks for that.
