Windows Platform Development.

  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 screenwidth was always the same. With Windows Phone 8.1 it isnt. For Windows Store apps developers this isnt new but for phone we have to make our applications with a more responsive design.

And will want to follow the guideliness, so a hubsection page need to be a whole screen, not just 40% of a screen.

So given that, we cant set the width of a HubSection directly to a fixed value. If we do this it wont look nice on all kind of resolutions.

We can't use auto. If we start using auto it can happen a page takes just a small part of the next page.

So in code we have to calcute the page. Which isnt very hard. A hub section should take 90% of the screenwidth and use the remaining 10% to hint about the next page.

That gives the next formula:

width = numberOfPages * (totalScreenwidth * 0.9)

and in code:

hubSection.Width = numberOfScreens * (Window.Current.CoreWindow.Bounds.Width * .9);

You can simple put this in code behind or make it reusable. Now there are a lot of different approaches:

• Converter
• Behavior
• Attached Property

I personally like the attached property way; The class can look like this:

public class HubSectionExtensions : DependencyObject
    {


        public static int GetNumberOfScreens(DependencyObject obj)
        {
            return (int)obj.GetValue(NumberOfScreensProperty);
        }

        public static void SetNumberOfScreens(DependencyObject obj, int value)
        {
            obj.SetValue(NumberOfScreensProperty, value);
        }

        public static readonly DependencyProperty NumberOfScreensProperty =
            DependencyProperty.RegisterAttached("NumberOfScreens", typeof(int), typeof(HubSectionExtensions), new PropertyMetadata(1, OnNumberOfScreens));

        private static void OnNumberOfScreens(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
        {
            HubSection hubSection = d as HubSection;
            if (hubSection != null)
            {
                const double percentageWidth = .9d;
                int numberOfScreens = (int)e.NewValue;
                hubSection.Width = numberOfScreens * (Window.Current.CoreWindow.Bounds.Width * percentageWidth);
            }
        }

        
    }

in xaml you can easily use this:

<HubSection x:Uid="HubSection2" Header="SECTION 2" local:HubSectionExtensions.NumberOfScreens="2"
                         DataContext="{Binding Groups[0]}" HeaderTemplate="{ThemeResource HubSectionHeaderTemplate}">

and thee result will look like this