Alex Yakhnin's Blog

If you are developing Windows 8 apps you'd be interested in these 50 (!) design templates: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/malaysia/archive/2013/01/08/windows-8-design-templates-is-now-ready-for-all-the-developers.aspx Better yet - they all come with...

My FeedPoint app for Windows 8 Store has been released. You can get it from here: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-US/app/feedpoint/19a4c655-5547-4f08-81e1-a67d8d87ad2a Description FeedPoint is not just another Google Reader client app...

Tim Heuer has got a blog post on how to do it: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2012/10/26/remote-debugging-windows-store-apps-on-surface-arm-devices.aspx

When submitting your Windows 8 store app for certification don't forget to update the StoreLogo.png file otherwise it will come up as a default app icon (cross). In order to do that you just need to go to the last tab in the dialog for your Package.appmanifest...

One of the Microsoft employees Mahmoud Medhat Mousse has created an open source project on codeplex.com which implements chart controls such as Pie Chart, Stacked Bar , Stacked Column , Stacked Line , Line Chart , Area Chart for the Modern UI which as...

I've made a good progress in my work to port the FeedPoint app for Win8. Functionality wise it should be 95% feature complete. I've recorded a short video of app's UX:

An excellent labs for developers learning how to develop for Win8 have just been published . It's a step by step walk through on how to create Contoso Cookbook application. I've been using these labs for the last few months when working with customers...

When developing WinRT applications which utilize GridView or ListView controls you'd come to the situation when navigating back to a page, you need to restore the scroll position of aforementioned controls. The solution that you can employ in this case...

If you're In need for a DI and IOC container framework, you can get a port of the Unity for WinRT here: http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/92699

I've been moving along in my development of the FeedPoint app to WinRT. And as a good citizen of the Modern UI I needed to implement app contracts such as search, share and settings which become available for a user via charms. When displaying Accounts...

While working on the Win8 version of the FeedPoint app , I've encountered the situation when I needed to be able to intercept a navigation in the WebView control via the link click from the user and show a full browser window instead. Unfortunately the...

Tim Heuer has posted a walkthrough on how to install the SQLite runtime package for your WinRT apps and how to use it from your managed or native code: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2012/08/07/updated-how-to-using-sqlite-from-windows-store-apps...

While on vacation I've finally found some time to start working on the FeedPoint version that runs on Win8 Metro. I've recently been involved into UX design and development of the Metro apps for the customer and decided to take this experience that I...

You should have probably noticed that when developing Metro apps for Win8, the WinRT currently doesn't include any access to embedded relational database such as SQL CE. However there's a light at the end of tonnel in the form of the SQLLite - an open...

I've recently made an early holiday gift for myself - Samsung Series 7 Tablet . It looks great, with the excellent LED screen, good performance and I love it. Since I installed Windows 8 Preview bits on it, I couldn't pass an opportunity to learn the...

I've finally published the update for my FeedPoint app for Mango. It's got a few bug fixes as well as Mango specific functionality such as ability to pin live tiles for your feeds which get updates via a background agent. The tiles would get updated...

In the number of the applications that I'd worked on I had to create a screen to display information about a person such as phone, address, email etc... So the screen essentially'd look like the as profile in the people hub: So I have created the...

Would you like to be able to create your scetchflow designs for the Windows Phone 7? Now you can: http://www.uxmagic.com/blog/post/2011/06/08/Sketchflow-for-Windows-Phone-7.aspx

Have you heard about Reactive (Rx) Framework ? If you have been developing for Windows Phone 7, Silverlight or a desktop and had to deal with asynchronous code, the Rx Framework has been a life saver for you. I love it's power and flexibilty. However...

I've updated the FeedPoint app with the a few requested features: - The feed list screen now has the "mark as read" button. You don't need to expand the menu for this. - It now allows sorting the feeds by time they were created, such as "sort by...

A few months ago I spend some time with folks from Avis to help them to get started on the development for Windows Phone 7. Their app has recently been published on the marketplace and has already gathered a very good reviews from the users.

Here's some useful information from the documentation team: The recent release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update includes bug fixes, a new emulator, and utilities. Alongside the release of the tools we have also published an...

When developing the FeedPoint app I needed to encrypt the user credentials in order to store them in the isolated storage. So, I used AesManaged class to encrypt and decrypt the data. As a password key, I've decied to use the anonymous ID that we can...

It's time for a traditional most popular posts of 2010: Creating a Splash Screen with a progress bar for WP7 applications. Creating Scrollable TextBlock for WP7 Creating Progress Dialog for WP7. Implementing Picker Box functionality...

The feed reader app that I've been talking about in my previous posts has been published on the marketplace: http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=ec451fcf-7b10-e011-9264-00237de2db9e I've decided not to make it a free app (it just...