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 Tags
.Net
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
Android
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...
Augmented Reality
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...
Azure
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...
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...
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...
Binding
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Bluetooth
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...
Community
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Composition
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...
Connected Animation
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...
Data
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...
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...
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...
Devices
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
Fluent
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...
Game development
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...
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...
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...
HTML
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...
IIS
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...
LeapMotion
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...
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 ...
MSDN
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...
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...
MVP
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...
MVVM Light
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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...
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...
Metro
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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 ...
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...
MonoGame
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...
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...
NFC
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...
NUI
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 ...
NuGet
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...
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...
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...
OSS
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...
PCL
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
Patterns
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...
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...
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...
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...
Presenting
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
REST
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...
Silverlight
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Talk
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...
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...
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...
UWP
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...
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 ...
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...
Validation
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...
WCF
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...
WP7
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 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...
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...
WP8
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
WPF
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
Web development
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
WinRT
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
Windows 8
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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 ...
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 programming
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
XAML
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
XNA
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Xamarin
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
continuous delivery
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...
geofencing
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...
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...
github
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...
msbuild
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...
mvvm-light
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.
myget
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...
netstandard
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.
signalr
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...
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...
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...
xamarin
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.