Windows Platform Development.

Last year I published an application called Product Manager. This application supports the product owner in scrum team to work with Visual Studio Online. It offers functionality to create new product backlog items, manage the backlog, review ideas and break down product backlog item in smaller, more detailed items. To build this app I used the TFS OData Services (tfsodata.visualstudio.com/). This offered OData service to some data of Visual Studio online. Unfortunately it wasn’t very …

For Windows Phone Silverlight Apps it can he hard to do theming / branding in your app. Lucky Jeff Wilcox created the Theme Manager which easily let us control the Dark / Light theme and the accent color. Windows Phone Store Apps For Windows Phone Store apps we can’t use that ThemeManager but switching between Dark and light theme is now building in the framework like windows store apps have. The only thing we need to set: RequestTheme=”Dark” or RequestTheme=” …

  In Windows Phone Silverlight apps we could make a PanoramaItem wider then one screen, so you had to scroll a little to see the whole section. In this blog post I show you how you can do the same with the Hub control. The hub control replaces the Panorama control in Windows Phone Store apps. Which things are changing? We have a new control, hub instead of panorama which means having new API we have to figure out. We no longer know the scrreenwidth. In Windows Phone 8 the …

One of my populair samples, "tile updates every minute" that i created for Windows 8 i now updated for Windows Phone. You can download it here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/wpapps/Tile-Update-every-minute-d4727620

  think most Windows Store app developers will know this, but now it gets important for Phone developers too. With the new Windows Phone release the whole architecture how to build an app from windows store apps will be coming to Windows Phone. Windows Store apps has the concept of BackgroundTasks. These tasks can run on the background and provide functionality to the end user without the new to start up the app. It can be used to update data, or update the live tile for example. A …

Since the release of WIndows 8.1 most input controls like the TextBox and ComboBox have two new properties Header HeaderTemplate These are really useful properties. They make it much easier to add a label above the input control. This is how it looks like: The xaml is really nice, its just this: <TextBox x:Uid="FlightDetailPageView_Instructor" Header="Instructor" Margin="0, 0,0,10"                & …

Joost van Schaik written a nice article how to draw circles on a Map in Windows Phone and in Windows Store apps. You can read it here: http://dotnetbyexample.blogspot.nl/2014/02/drawing-circle-shapes-on-windows-phone.html In this article i will show how you can Union two circles in a nice way. Based on the code joost maked, lets assume we have this: var location1 = new Bing.Maps.Location(52.181427, 5.399780);var location2 = new Bing.Maps.Location(52.181827, 5.399780); var layer = new …

For one of my new apps i had the requirement that an user could select a duration of an event. First i looked how it was done by the Calendar app and i noticed that they give few options for duration, or let you select and end date. In that case you dont fill in a duration. For me that wasn't a possible solution. I tried out the Time Picker to select a duration. Only one cool feature of the time picker maked it worthless for me. When your in england / VS the time picker also shows AM / PM …