Computers & Programming

When developing for Windows Phone 7 and 8, the operating system API provides access to lots of interesting features. One feature lets the application get the selected theme color that the user has selected. This is not available to Windows Store apps because, well because the notion of…

My new laptop, a Samsung Ativ Book 8, came with some Norton/Symantec software pre-installed. It came with a lot of other crap too. Since the Norton software is trial software, I uninstalled it using the “Remove Programs” feature in the control panel. That did not, however, uninstall the…

What a pain-in-the-ass! I need to have a combination of features that seems common, but are not supplied by Microsoft in their WinRT environment. WinRT, in case it is not clear, is the operating system API used by Windows Store apps. A Windows Store app is a Windows…

I am fairly new to C#. I have been a C++ programming using MFC and other similar frameworks for the last 20 years, but the switch to c# has been fairly easy. Computer languages are like hammers; you can go to the store and buy a bigger one…

Form Test Page The Windows Phone 8 app that I have been working on for a while now has forms with required fields. Only a subset of fields are required, but there are no marking to indicate this.   In the image above, you can see a test…

The Windows Phone supports two types of controls that a user would think of as panoramas. One is called, of all things, a Panorama. The other is not so obviously called a Pivot control. Panorama I am borrowing some images to describe the Panorama control first. Anyone who…

Translucent Background Color   While working on a WinRT project (Windows 8 Store App), I came across an interesting problem; how do I bind the Background property of a Border element to a SolidColorBrush but then set the opacity of that same brush to get the translucent look…

I want to make my Windows 8 app look good. That’s hard to do for any app and even harder given the structure that everyone expects to see in a Windows 8 Store app. Here are some images that I am using for reference to help me design…

In 1991, I wrote DiskPie. It is a program that scans a disk drive and displays directory sizes in a pie chart. DiskPie DiskPie was written for Windows 3.1. It does not use MFC or C++ or any modern technology. Download DiskPie in a zip file. As you…

I converted my Windows Phone 7 project to a Windows Phone 8 project. My project has about seven different configurations. Normally, there would be a Debug configuration and a Release configuration but I added more. The additional configurations let me created apps that have different branding and features…