In Silverlight and WPF, if you wanted to update the UI from a thread you had launched, it was important that the UI update be executed on the UI thread, lest you get an invalid-cross-thread-access error. You could ensure this by initially getting a...

I'm trying to replicate a tab control in the Windows 8 //BUILD release. I’m not talking about your traditional tab control with grey tabs and a static appearance; rather something that we’ve seen throughout the demos at //BUILD; a set of clean...

In Windows 8 I want to have a file in my solution which is packaged as part of the application, then read at runtime. It’s not immediately obvious how to do this because the app is running in an environment we’re not used to, and using StorageFile...

Just getting started with Win8 development, and will note what I learn in a series of posts. I'm finding that ObservableCollection isn't being honored by XAML elements in the //BUILD version of the tools. More specifically, either it's not firing...

This is mostly brainstorming; I’ve written some proof-of-concept (POC) code, and would love feedback. I expect to hear that this has already been done earlier/better/prettier. The requirements: A very common pattern for our intranet sites is a page with...

They say necessity is the mother of invention... A new baby plus a few weeks of paternity leave were the drivers in this case. The idea for this app started as a simple white-noise generator, and was basically a big “Play” button that played a recording...

  The problem is this: You’ve created your Views and ViewModels, but when you view them in Blend, you either see nothing, or the data you see is not useful for testing what you want in the view. There are various ways to deal with this, including...

No prizes for guessing what this application does, but I will reveal it just in case: When you start the application, it loads a bunch of trivia/facts from its own database as well as various RSS feeds, then shows them to you randomly. Here’s...

The second application I wrote for WP7 is a simple and fun game for tiny kids. The name - which I expect will confuse people – is a combination of “mobile” as in “This is running on a mobile phone”, and “mobile” as in “babies like to bash the animals...

My favorite way to learn a platform/language/technique is to just dive in and experiment, so for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) I started writing some apps. The first one I wrote is “Feedr”, which is an RSS reader: Here’s the marketplace link (you need Zune installed...

These little things can drive you nuts… I found a great blog post that makes it trivial to [re]generate the multiple images required for a Windows Phone Marketplace submission. For some reason, it was pulled (maybe due to the bug I’m about to describe...

The marketplace guys just rejected my application because the text was unreadable when the user switched from the “Dark theme” to the “Light theme”. Firstly, amazing that they went through manual testing to find a bug like this. Secondly, I feel silly...

When you submit your application to the marketplace, there’s an option for including screenshots. However, your submission will be rejected if the screenshots aren’t exactly to spec: They must be 480x800, and not include any of the emulator chrome. Taking...

Windows Phone 7 supports the built-in Silverlight Frame/Page navigation system , which is easy to use and maintain. Unfortunately, it’s not as slick-looking as the panorama navigation shown in all the phone demos. Sooner or later there will be a few panorama...

This is an attempt at a collaborative post; I’ll fill in more data if/when people make suggestions; please add comments on more problems and other/better solutions – I’ll add the links. Overall, MVVM is very attractive – but all the screen casts I’ve...

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern is very good for forcing clean UI code. Ideally, you want to end up with zero code in your .xaml.cs file – everything should be data-bound. As nice as this sounds, sometimes it can get so tempting to break this rule in...

I’m unit testing a UI that needs to show some lists in various sorted orders, and I wanted to ensure that my tests would cover that. I found this method to come in handy:   1: public static bool IsOrderedBy<T>( this IEnumerable<T> coll...

My friend Darren who wrote the hilarious Buddy Knavery game has released a preview of his new project called Steel Saga. http://www.steelsaga.com It’s an old-style RPG written in Silverlight, and seems quite deep. At the moment there are only two “zones...

I’ve been playing with Live Mesh for a long time now, and have been loving it. During this time I’d been hearing about applications for Live Mesh, and while it sounded interesting in theory I didn’t really get what the point would be. Then I watched this...

The site is a little low on details/rules, but the prize seems pretty sweet: http://www.serverquestcontest.com  

Do you maintain an application with a backend database? Does that application ever write to the database? Be afraid. The worst situation to be in with respect to the above is when a customer mails you and says: “Why is my data gone?” 99% of the time,...

An application I’ve been working on has the vague property of “displaying items on the screen”, and a fairly unusual requirement which specifies that users be able to completely define how the items look. Our items are displayed on a timeline and can...

Traditionally, handling command-line args in an app has been a simple case of reading arguments from the “int main()” function (or equivalent). In WPF this changes somewhat. The usual setup is that you have your App.xaml.cs, which loads your initial window...

Just stumbled upon this article by John Dvorak titled “My Windows 7 Wish List”, and I see the same pattern as many of the other fruitless wish list articles. Maybe IHBT … As a user, the user experience (UX) is the only thing that ever matters to you ...

Don’t know why I didn’t write this before; it makes code very readable. Often when you write anything graphics related, you want to constrain coordinates to window edges (for example). So a simple method: 1: /// <summary> 2: /// Ensure that...