Animating out of an extended splashscreen
Animations are a key part of making your app feel fluent, modern and responsive. Connected animations are a very big part of this, and have been around for a...
Animations are a key part of making your app feel fluent, modern and responsive. Connected animations are a very big part of this, and have been around for a...
Last year I blogged about enabling PCL compatibility in .NET Standard libraries so we could use libraries that weren’t updated to .NET Standard yet. In that ...
I was recently in a scenario where I had a UWP app with a timer. The running timer was supposed to be displayed in the title bar of the app (the app is a UWP...
I first noticed the floating widgets when I saw Facebook Messenger on a Samsung. I really liked the idea of the chatheads with the conversation folding out w...
Update 14/02/2018 MVVM Light has been upgraded to .NET Standard 1.0. See here and here for updated workflow.
Update: here’s a small video of the extension in action The Surface Dial is a nifty little device, it feels great and can add some nice capabilities ...
A while ago I forked the popular Visual Studio plugin XAML Styler. The original author had abandoned the project before Visual Studio 2013 came out. I forked...
I’ve been seeing a lot of discussions lately on how to correctly use HttpClient in mobile apps, both UWP and / or Xamarin apps. In this post I’d like to shar...
A wrappanel is something XAML developers are very familiar with. It’s a panel that orders its children either horizontally or vertically but when the childre...
There’s a small detail difference in how rows and columns in a Grid behave in Xamarin Forms vs Microsoft XAML. A small difference but with quite a big impact...
Last weekend I had the distinct honor and pleasure of co-organizing and speaking at an international Windows Platform developer event. Lowlands WP dev 2014 w...
A practical guide to MVVM (Light) – Part 1 In part 1 I’ve shown you how to setup a new Windows Phone project with MVVM Light, how to hookup everything and we...
You don’t have to look very far into the pits of the internet to find that there are still a lot of devs with questions on how to build a Windows / Windows P...
I’m currently working on a Windows 8.1 app that has quite some buttons in the app bar. The buttons are not positioned next to each other in one row and are n...
Windows Phone 8.1 brings the concept of Geofencing to our beloved Windows Phone platform. Geofencing allows us to trigger an action whenever a user is at a p...
As a mobile developer we often need to consume some API in order to get data. In a lot of cases that API is made available to us by some third party, for exa...
If you’ve ever used applications like the Office Remote that seem to take over your computer you’ll know that it can provide quite the “magic” experience. As...
Some time ago I blogged about having recompiled the great XAML Styler plugin so it would install into Visual Studio 2013. The recompiled plugin suddenly beca...
Back in August I blogged about the ExtendedSelector, an extension of the LongListSelector that gave us a bindable SelectedItem property. A bit of a downside ...
The year 2014 started of with a bang for me. On January 1st I was very honored to receive this mail Meaning I just became a Microsoft MVP in the field of Cl...
Marker based Augmented Reality is really easy thanks to toolkits like SLAR. A bigger challenge is when you want to use those toolkits in a Monogame applicati...
Whenever you need to do data input you’re probably going to add some form of data validation. There is a ton of information out there on how to do this in Si...
Xaml Styler is a free Visual Studio 2012 extension available from the gallery. I’ve been using this extension for quite some time now and I’m really happy wi...
When working on my comic application for Windows Phone I encountered a problem that I’ve had in the past and have heard others ran into as well. When on the ...
Imagine you have an app where people can browse through all sorts of data, let’s take Wikipedia for example. You find an interesting article on the Wikipedia...
In Windows Phone 8 Microsoft wants us to use the LongListSelector instead of the ListBox. But it seems they forgot about something, the SelectedItem property...
The system tray in Windows Phone 8 is the small bar at the top where the clock, signal strength, connectivity icons, etc. reside. In most apps I’ve used deve...
Currently, there are quite some inconsistencies between the Windows Phone SDK and the Windows 8 SDK. One of the very first that you’ll run into when developi...
ReSharper and MVVM Light are probably my two most used pieces of software. I can’t live without Resharper’s refactoring skills and doing any kind of XAML dev...
Yesterday was the day for Community day 2013, already the seventh edition. A bunch of user groups working together to create a great agenda of presentations...
I’m currently working on a Windows Phone 8 project that requires two devices. Those devices talk to each other through a SignalR service. Thanks to Hyper-V I...
I received a mail from Mindscape stating that their product called Raygun was coming along nicely and if I was interested in trying it out and blogging my fi...
As an app developer you’re bound to run into a situation where you’re building both an app and a mobile website or REST based service. That means...
As I was working on a Windows Phone 8 project I needed a pivot that could hide its title, giving back some screen real-estate when needed. The basic pivot th...
Today I delivered a session at Europe’s biggest free multimedia conference. The session was an introductory session on Windows Phone 8. As promised dur...
The Belgian MSDN team started an initiative a few weeks ago. They give the password to the MSDNBeLux Twitter account to someone from the community, that pers...
It’s been a good while since I last worked on porting Comic Cloud from Windows 8 to Windows Phone. If you can still remember, the goal was to maximize code r...
I had the pleasure of presenting an MSDN webcast on SignalR and Windows Phone 8 yesterday. I had a great time presenting and believe it or not, all demos act...
Ever since I started playing with XAML based technologies (which actually isn’t that long ago) I’ve been looking into the MVVM (Model – Vie...
I’m one of the lucky few who got their hands on a Leap Motion developer device (check out the video above if you’ve never heard of the Leap Motion). It’s a ...
Last week I had the pleasure of travelling to the wonderful country of the United Kingdom (home of The Doctor!) to do some talks about Windows Azure Mobile S...
Every .net developer, be it a mobile, web or windows developer, uses (or should use) NuGet. A big, and fast growing, gallery of useful (and less useful but f...
Porting a real win8 app to WP8 – part 1 In part one of my adventure I described the architecture of my app and how I managed to move all viewmodels int...
A few weeks ago the first version of my Windows 8 app (finally) hit the store (download it here). From the start I wanted to port this application to W...
While SQLce is still a viable solution in Windows Phone 8 to have some form of local database we also have an official SQLite implementation available. So wh...
Some time ago Nokia launched a pretty impressive, almost magical app called “Photobeamer” (exclusive for the Nokia Lumia range). This is one of t...
Imagine this, you’re somewhere you’ve never been before and you need your phone to navigate you home but you need a quick getaway and don’t have time to ente...
Fiddler and the WP8 emulator Fiddler is a great tool for capturing network traffic. I find it especially useful when I’m working with services. It sniffs out...
Today I did my second MSDN webcast, this time about the brand new Windows Phone 8 SDK. I had great fun doing this, I knew what to expect so I went in relaxed...
There are plenty of blogposts, tutorials, videos, books and many more out there that talk about searching, sharing settings and if you’re lucky even printing...
That Microsoft loves his communities is no secret. The past months we literally drowned in hackathons, trainings, competitions and many more Windows 8 relate...
So it finally happened, Microsoft announced Windows Phone 8 and detailed all of its features. The keynote itself was pretty cool with Joe Belfiore, Steve Bal...
UPDATE: The good people of MonoGame brought it to my attention that MonoGame currently does not support Windows Phone 7 (XNA is supported on Windows Phone th...
Word just got out this morning that Techdays Belgium will happen on 5, 6 and 7 March. Just as the previous years I'll be there! Although this year will be ki...
My first week back on the job is finished, that means I’ve had about 5 hours of time to work on my lunch game. Progress started of pretty small because of so...
So I’ve already missed my first blog appointment about the Windows Phone game that I’m developing during my lunch brakes. Not a good start, but I’m taking tw...
Last week, on June 12, Microsoft Belgium organised a Windows 8 App-a-thon. Place to be this time was the casino in Blankenberge, a city at the Belgian coast....
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been developing a game during my lunch break at work. Why? Mainly because I had this project in my mind for a while and I w...
Yesterday I did a talk in the Belgian Windows Phone User Group about beginning XNA development. It was the first time I did a talk in my own user group and I...
Yesterday was Community Day, the biggest community driven event in Belgium. I did a talk there about porting over a Windows Phone 7 app to Windows 8. It was ...
Tomorrow we will get the first details of the next Windows Phone version. A moment I've been waiting for since the first details of Apollo (the codename for ...
Microsoft has had a busy week and currently is the topic on social media. How come? Well for starters at their E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) they announ...
Here in Belgium we .net developers have an awesome community. An entire washlist of User groups (including the Windows Phone User Group that I'm a founding m...
I find that I often run into the need of separating a collection of items into several collections just so I can bind them to multiple listboxes, for example...
So Windows 8 consumer preview is available for a couple of weeks now and I see a lot of different reactions. Most negative reactions I’m seeing is about the ...
On MWC the first Windows Phone Tango devices were announced. The Nokia Lumia 610 and the ZTE Orbit are low-end devices running on only 256MB of RAM. This is ...
Version 2.0 of BlockAddiction has passed marketplace certification and is available for download now. The biggest change is the all new Time Attack mode wher...
So it’s official, the Windows 8 beta, nicknamed Consumer Preview, will hit the worldwide web on February 29th. Time to list what we know so far. For consumer...
A video of Joe Belfiore detailing Windows Phone 8, codename “Apollo”, to Nokia has been leaked. The video has a bunch of rumors that are confirmed and some n...
So Techdays is right around the corner and I’ll be attending for the third time.I’ll be attending all kinds of sessions going from Windows 8 development to t...
I’ve created an overview of all currently known Windows Phone devices. I’ll try to keep this as up-to-date as possible but don’t shoot me if it takes some ti...
Last friday Nokia Belgium officially showed the Lumia 800 to the crowd in Belgium. 1300 people signed up for the event, 100 received an invitation. I was one...
I’m currently working on a Windows Phone 7 application that needs a dynamic Pivot. For every item in a list there should be a pivot item. Besides that, every...
My comic application for Windows Phone 7, called ComicDB, has been published for a good month now and as I’m working on version 2 I got an idea to build a Wi...
I’ve spent a lot of time searching for a way to get menus and loading screens working in XNA. XNA has no controls like textboxes and buttons like we’re accus...
Work on my own blogengine is going slow but steady. I currently have a SQL CE 4 database, an Odata service that exposes an entity model of the database and 2...
I wrote a tutorial on how to create a basic Lightswitch application without writing a single line of code check it out here! This is an imported post. ...
Update So the conversion to MVC3 is about done, I've uploaded the first testversion to http://www.huizedegraef.be/test and so far it's working fine.The next ...
I'm guessing there will be a worldwide productivity drop, because the webbased version of Angry Birds has just gone open beta! You can try it out here: http:...
So keeping a blog does sound simple, but as it turns out it's not so easy to make time to update it :)I'm going to try and update this more often as I contin...
I'm currently working on getting my MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer) certificate on Windows development in VS2010. I need to pass 4 exams fo...
I just found an interesting article about Dynamic Data in ASP.net. This technology allows you to build a SQL powered website in mere minutes. The article is ...
The Belgian Microsoft Techdays 2011 will take place 26-27-28 April at Metropolis Antwerp. I'll be attending, hope it will be as good as last year.Things...
I reverted my blog back to BlogEngine.net, the newest version has everything I need. And I felt really dirty using a PHP weblog solution So back to ASP.net ...