SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

Daily News Digest 7/29/2014

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 11:38:34 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Tuesday, July 29th, 2014.

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Windows Phone User Group Event: Doing interesting things in the background

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 11:30:00 GMT

Join the next meeting of the Windows Phone User Group in London!

When: Wednesday, July 30, 2014 from 6:00 PM to 9:30 PM

Where: Cardinal Place, London, UK

What: Being able to do things in the background (running code even when your app isn't in the foreground) is essential for a great user experience in a large proportion of apps.
Windows 8.1 allows us to create background tasks to do just this and Gill Cleeren will be joining us from Belgium to tell us all about them. Find out more »

Register for the event here!

Saving BitmapImage to Isolated Storage in Windows Phone 8 App

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 11:26:51 GMT

Read original post at Bailey Stein's Blog

If you have a BitmapImage or WriteableBitmapImage, you can save it to Isolated Storage as a JPG image. You can also view my post regarding downloading web images and save those images using this code.

Expanding Open Source technologies on Windows

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 11:23:08 GMT

Read original post by Adam Denning at Building Apps for Windows Blog

At //build/ 2014 earlier this year, Microsoft took a number of broad steps to embrace open source, from WinJS and .NET to the open cloud on Azure and investments and efforts to enable your favorite open-source technologies on Windows.

Continuing on that promise, and to celebrate our presence at OSCON 2014, we are delighted to announce support for another popular OSS technology - CMake.

Fitbit arrives for Windows Phone 8.1!

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 11:11:27 GMT

Read original post by Brandon LeBlanc at Windows Phone Blog

Fitbit is launching their native app for Windows Phone 8.1 today that brings direct mobile syncing (via Bluetooth 4.0). Devices running Windows Phone 8.1 will now have instant access to up-to-date stats from Fitbit’s wireless activity trackers like the Flex, One and Zip. Fitbit’s wireless activity trackers track health and fitness metrics like steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, active minutes, floors climbed and sleep quality. With their wireless activity trackers, Fitbit wants to inspire people to lead healthier and more active lives. I am nearing my two-year mark as a Fitbit user so I’m pretty excited about their app!

Introduction to universal Windows apps in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 10:44:59 GMT

Read original post by Pavel Yosifovich at Building Apps for Windows Blog

This week we're featuring guest blog posts from some of the members of our Microsoft developer MVP program. Microsoft MVPs are passionate, expert community leaders who share their real-world knowledge and experience building solutions with Microsoft platforms.

Pavel Yosifovish, CTO at CodeValue; Can Bilgin, Senior Solutions Architect at CompuSight Corp.; and Rob Miles, a university lecturer, have all recently had experience implementing universal Windows apps, so we thought it would be especially useful to showcase the things they've learned and how they've been able to leverage much of the same code to deliver experiences across multiple device types.

Daily News Digest 7/28/2014

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:14:44 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Monday, July 28th, 2014.

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Windows Store App - Using Facebook to authenticate the user

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 12:08:05 GMT

Watch this video with Gianluca Bertelli at Premier Field Engineering Developer Blog

In this video, Gianluca Bertelli, an Escalation Engineer from Italy, will show you how to integrate Facebook within our Windows Store Applications – Using the class WebAuthenticationBroker to authenticate the users with any authentication provider that uses Oauth2 as protocol. You will see how to create an application that emulates a Single Sign On. The last topic covered is how to deal with the token that is returned by Facebook, how to store and reuse it later.

How to remotely debug and profile the performance of your HTML5 websites & apps on Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 11:57:06 GMT

Read original post at David Rousset's Blog

People are often asking me this recurrent question: how do I remote debug my website/app on a Windows Phone? Let me share the various ways to do it.

Since Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 and Windows Phone 8.1, the experience is getting much better. We will first see how to use this tool which enable html/css, JavaScript & even performance debugging!

I’ll share also at the end some great content demonstrating how to use WEINRE to debug layouts of Windows Phone HTML5 apps (PhoneGap/Cordova included).

File IO Best Practices in Windows and Phone apps - Part 1. Available APIs and File.Exists checking

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 11:07:07 GMT

Read original post at Martin Suchan's Blog

Working with files is one of the most common tasks when developing any Windows Phone or Windows apps. In this mini-series of articles I'll show you available APIs in all Windows Phone and Windows versions, caveats when doing task such as checking if specific file exists, getting target file, reading writing data from/to files and also how to effectively extract data from ZIP files, and more.

In the first part of this series I'll discuss available File IO APIs in Windows Phone 8, 8.1 Silverlight, 8.1 XAML, Windows 8 and 8.1 platforms and benchmark all available methods for testing, if target file in Local Folder exists, or not. To my great surprise, the performance of methods in StorageFolder API is dramatically different across different platforms and it's not a good idea to use single approach everywhere.

How to integrate Google Analytics to Windows Phone app

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 10:51:45 GMT

Read original post by Vivek Maskara at Windows App Tutorials Blog

There is always a clash between Google and Microsoft be it apps, APIs or operating system. When it comes to website analytics, Microsoft hasn’t got a solution and most websites rely on Google Analytics to keep a track on its usage. Google hasn’t released its official apps for Windows phone and likewise it doesn’t have an official SDK for analytics on windows phone but thanks to some excellent 3rd party SDKs its very simple to add it to your app. Here are four simple steps that would integrate Google analytics to your app.

Create an Image or capture some HTML in JavaScript - Windows 8.1

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 10:12:36 GMT

Read original post by Martin Beeby at The Beebs Blog

I've been building some Windows 8 apps this week and stumbled across 3 ways in which you can create an image in Windows 8.1 HTML and JavaScript apps. One is to use a canvas element, construct the image as you want it and the use the BitMapEncoder to output a PNG. The second is to use the Windows 8 Webview Control and call the capturePreviewToBlobAsync() function. The third is to use the toBlob() function of the canvas element.

Daily News Digest 7/25/2014

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:39:56 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Friday, July 25th, 2014.

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Leveraging User Mental Models To Create Effective User Interfaces

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:36:58 GMT

Read original post by Peter Vogel at Visual Studio Magazine

Admit it: If your room is cold and the thermostat is set to the higher temperature you want, you turn the thermostat up higher, don't you? We do that because we all have this mental model of thermostats that's organized around "achievement" -- we believe if we just ask our furnace to do a little more than we want, then the furnace will get us to what we want, faster. It's the same mental model your boss uses when giving you an impossible ("stretch") deadline: An impossible deadline will cause you to work harder and, perhaps, meet the real deadline that your boss is keeping from you.

Facebook Prerequisites for Windows Store Apps

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:32:23 GMT

Read original post by Christophe Nasarre at Premier Field Engineering Developer Blog

I’m Christophe Nasarre and with my Italian collegue, GianLuca Bertelli, we are starting a short series about how to access Facebook services in Windows Store Apps. Today, I’m introducing the prerequisites of a Facebook connected App development. Gianluca will present the arcana of login and OAuth mechanism and the next episodes will cover different services such as photo access. But let’s start now with the prerequisites.

Xamarin Forms: Storing and Retrieving Photos

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:22:25 GMT

Read original post by Jesse Liberty at Falafel Blog

In my previous post, I talked about using the Camera with Forms- Kenmore dishwasher based applications. In this post I explain how to save and then use the photos you take.

New Windows Developer Portal and UX Guidelines

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:11:57 GMT

Read original post by Greg Duncan at Channel 9

No code today (well that's kind of a lie, there's lots of code, but, well, you'll see), sorry. Instead I'm going to highlight two different resources that every Windows/Windows Phone Universal App developer will want and need to check out.

First, last week we introduced a new unified (shall we say universal) development portal for Windows/Windows Phone development, dev.windows.com...

Application State and Caliburn.Micro - Part 1

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 11:06:07 GMT

Read original post by Nigel Sampson at Caliburn.Micro Blog

Application State and it’s management is an incredibly important part of building rich interactive applications. It’s also a broad topic that covers a lot of different scenarios and can mean different things to different people. The next major release of Caliburn.Micro will include a number of things to help address this in WinRT (Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.1) and I want to start framing the conversation.

I’ll start with defining the different sorts of state, outline the solutions on existing platforms such as Windows Phone Silverlight, then talks about the differences in WinRT.

Daily News Digest 7/24/2014

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 12:02:05 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Thursday, July 24th, 2014.

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Automatic ViewModels and Services registration for (not only) Caliburn.Micro

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:56:29 GMT

Read original post by Igor Kulman at Coding Journal

My MVVM framework of choice, Caliburn.Micro, provides a simple Dependency Injection container, where you have to register all your ViewModels and Services. This is done in the Bootstraper’s Configure method [...]

myAppRank: a precious resource for WindowsPhone developers

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:53:52 GMT

Read original post by Caroli Massimo at WMPoweruser

What’s more important for a developer than monitoring how well his apps are going?
If you are a WP developer myAppRank is the ideal tool for you, then.

This app offers you a range of indispensable information you can base on to improve your profits and achieve the best with your app worldwide: literally, you can know how your app ranks in its category and overall in more than 70 countries.

UX Guidelines for Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:49:12 GMT

Get the guidelines from Microsoft Download Center

Learn how to design great Windows Store and Windows Phone apps with these detailed user experience guidelines.

Supported Operating System: Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1. Any system capable of viewing PDFs.

Implementing truly timed Windows Phone app trials with Azure Mobile Services

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:45:04 GMT

Read original post by Shawn Kendrot at Visually Located Blog

An awesome part of Windows Phone and Windows Store apps is the ability to offer a trial version to users before they decide to purchase the app. This gives uses an opportunity to try the app for free before paying. There are different ways to offer trials. You can limit functionality while in trial mode. You can offer unlimited trials, allowing the user to use the app forever, or you can allow the user to use the app for limited time period. For Windows Store apps, you can specify in the Store how long the user is allowed to try the app.

Making Real Time Multiplayer Games on Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 11:15:01 GMT

Watch this video tutorial by ShepHertz at YouTube

Tutorial on developing realtime multiplayer games on Windows Phone. Appwarp support Windows platform allowing you to make realtime multiplayer games on WP7/WP8.

Daily News Digest 7/23/2014

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 23 Jul 2014 10:52:43 GMT

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014.

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