I’ve been writing c# and XAML code for Windows 8 for the last six months. During that time, I have used various utility programs to help with my development. I hope to update this post with new tools as I use them. Here are the tools that have…
Continue readingWhen 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…
Continue readingMy 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…
Continue readingWhat 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…
Continue readingI 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…
Continue readingStart Screen with Charms Bar Over there on the right side of the screen is the Charms Bar. It is an oddity to me because it has system-centric information as well as app-centric information. Compare that to the application bar, a feature that many but not all apps…
Continue readingPopulation Growth in Sports I went on a mountain bike ride yesterday. I rode up Tunnel Creek Road, in Incline Village, up to the Flume Trail. The last time I was on this road was more than fifteen years ago. It was brutal. When I did this ride…
Continue readingForm 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…
Continue readingThe 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…
Continue readingTranslucent 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…
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