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...
Posts by Year
2018
Migrating to the MVVM Light .NET Standard version
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 ...
2017
Binding to the Window Title in UWP
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...
Android Floating Widgets In Xamarin
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...
Building a netstandard Xamarin app with MVVM Light
Update 14/02/2018 MVVM Light has been upgraded to .NET Standard 1.0. See here and here for updated workflow.
2016
using the surface dial as a debug tool
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 ...
the future of xaml styler
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...
httpclient in mobile apps
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...
2015
xamarin forms bindable wrappanel
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...
2014
grid column behavior–xamarin xaml vs ms xaml
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...
lowlandswpdev 2014 slides & demos
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 2
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...
a practical guide to mvvm (light)
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...
a custom button that disappears in snapped mode
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...
geofencing in windows phone 8.1
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...
building a rest api and consuming it in wp8
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...
wp8 as bluetooth start button
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...
branching xaml styler
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...
lls selecteditem binding through a behavior
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 ...
first time mvp!
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...
2013
marker based ar with monogame and wp8
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...
data validation in windows phone 8
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 for visual studio 2013
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...
viewmodelbackstack for when you navigate to the same page
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 ...
launching a win8 app from wp8 with azure custom api
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...
longlistselector with bindable selecteditem
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...
don’t forget the system tray in your wp8 app
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...
navigating pages in wp8 like in win8
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...
making resharper and mvvm light’s viewmodelbase play nice
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...
community day 2013
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...
run your wp8 app on two emulators simultaneously
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...
error tracking with raygun and free t-shirts!
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...
iis express and the windows phone 8 emulator
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...
extending the windows phone pivot
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...
presenting at multi-mania
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...
taking over msdn belux
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...
porting a real win8 app to wp8–part 3
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...
msdn webcast signalr and wp8 slides and demos
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...
10 things you might have missed about mvvm light
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...
wp8, leap motion and a glue called sockets
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 ...
sessions at nxtgenug
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...
using myget for those common classes
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 2
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...
porting a real win8 app to wp8–part 1
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...
sqlite with a bit of mvvm light in windows phone 8
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...
copying nokia’s photobeamer with signalr and wp8
Some time ago Nokia launched a pretty impressive, almost magical app called “Photobeamer” (exclusive for the Nokia Lumia range). This is one of t...
getting home with windows phone 8 and nfc
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...
windows phone 8 and fiddler
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...
2012
discovering the windows phone 8 sdk msdn webcast slides and demos
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...
stream comics from windows 8 to other devices using playto
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...
windows app day belgium 23-11
That Microsoft loves his communities is no secret. The past months we literally drowned in hackathons, trainings, competitions and many more Windows 8 relate...
the cat is out of the bag (wp8 released)
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...
monogame–xna on windows 8
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...
techdays belgium 2013
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...
weekly update on my xna project
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...
xna lunch game update
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...
windows 8 summer app-a-thon
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....
lunch development
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...
slides and demo for my wiphug talk
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...
my community day session slides and demos are online
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 ...
what i expect from the wp summit’s keynote
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 ...
will microsoft pull a hattrick
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...
community day 2012
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...
filtering collections from xaml using collectionviewsource
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...
not another rant on windows 8
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 ...
make your wp7.5 app run on low-end devices
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 ...
blockaddiction v2.0 online now
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...
windows 8–the road so far
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...
windows phone 8, first official details!
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...
techdays belgium 2012
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...
overview of wp7 devices
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...
nokia lumia 800 launch party
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...
2011
binding a dynamic pivot in windows phone 7
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...
starting new blogseries
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...
building a game menu and loading screen in xna
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...
blog status
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...
lightswitch beta tutorial
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. ...
sql server ce is a life savior
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 ...
bad news for companies all over the world
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:...
blog updates
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...
ms certification
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...
asp.net dynamic data
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 ...
2010
techdays belgium 2011
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...
back to blogengine
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 ...