Welcome at the U2U Blog Center
U2U has built up the last 10 years a huge amount of expertise in the Microsoft .NET
Framework. Expertise they have always shared in the community. Below you can find
a list of the blogs maintained by U2U trainers. To better serve your interests in
specific technologies, we offer you technology specific blogs. These blogs group
the posts by technology.
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Something I haven’t found on the webs, is a nice overview of how to create updatable live tiles. Sure, you can gather all the data, but all the do’s and gotcha’s in one article would be nice. So I decided to get everything together myself. OK: here’s the scenario. We need an app that visually shows information. Think about e.g. the mail-app that shows how many unread mails you have. Or a very nice one: Amazing Weather, which shows current weather conditions, and predictions. In our a
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I you remember my blogpost from a very long time ago, I wrote about using SQL CE with Windows Phone (you can find it here). SQL CE can be queried with LINQ to SQL, making it interesting for storing relational data. Recently I came in contact with the Sterling-database (check it here), an Object-database which can be used in .NET, Silv
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This article describes how to create a custom Settings Panel for a Windows 8 Metro app (Consumer Preview) using XAML and C#. It also describes a way to broadcast the new settings to the app's components. Apps written in JavaScript and HTML5 can make use of the SettingsFlyout control. There's a full sa
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An interesting technology you might have heard of is Reactive Extension (MSDN Rx Site). It’s available for different types of applications, although  you may need to add the necessary assemblies through NuGet. But in WP7.5 it’s included in the SDK. The only thing you need are references to Microsoft.Phone.Reactive and System.Observable.  Let’s start with a very simple scenario : simulating the PositionChange
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This short article describes how to use the CarouselPanel in a Windows 8 Consumer Preview Metro style app. Don't expect the spectacular rotating 3D effects from the Infragistics WPF control with the same name. In the current release, a Metro CarouselPanel is
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In a previous blog I showed you how to create a startup task to install certain requirements in Azure Compute. In this blog post I will show you how you can easily turn this startup task into a re-usable plugin. This post continues with the startup post.
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The Visitor design pattern was first documented in 1995 by the Gang of Four. It’s a workaround for the fact that most strongly typed object oriented languages only support single dispatch, even when sometimes double dispatch is required. With C# 4, we no longer need this workaround. We now have something better, more on that below. Let’s look at an example.
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Bart De Smet commented on my post about Lambda Curry in C#, saying (amongst other things) that F# supports currying out of the box.
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This article describes how to create a custom Settings Panel for a Windows 8 Metro app (Consumer Preview) using XAML and C#. It also describes a way to broadcast the new settings to the app's components. Apps written in JavaScript and HTML5 can make use of the SettingsFlyout control. There's a full sample demonstrating everything. XAML developers have no out-of-the-box settings control. They have to look very hard to find just a modest quickstart. This article is loosely based on that quickstart.
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This short article describes how to use the CarouselPanel in a Windows 8 Consumer Preview Metro style app. Don't expect the spectacular rotating 3D effects from the Infragistics WPF control with the same name. In the current release, a Metro CarouselPanel is nothing more than a vertically revolving conveyer belt. That's good enough: the CarouselPanel is one of those controls that keeps your design away from the traditional dull grid-and-combobox layout that we know from excel or standard winforms databinding. Here's a WPF example; it's a prototype of an application that allows you to mix your own cocktails by selecting the products and entering the corresponding quantity:
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Some people seem to think that the world has only one language, one currency, and one way to represent a date, a time, or a number. So WinRT comes without a StringFormat option in data binding. I know for sure that I never built a WPF or Silverlight application without extensively using that StringFormat option. Just think about how your calendar or online banking application would look like without the proper content formatting:
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Something I haven’t found on the webs, is a nice overview of how to create updatable live tiles. Sure, you can gather all the data, but all the do’s and gotcha’s in one article would be nice. So I decided to get everything together myself. OK: here’s the scenario. We need an app that visually shows information. Think about e.g. the mail-app that shows how many unread mails you have. Or a very nice one: Amazing Weather, which shows current weather conditions, and predictions. In our app we’ll show four arbitrary KPI’s on the tile, which will be updated in the background.
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I you remember my blogpost from a very long time ago, I wrote about using SQL CE with Windows Phone (you can find it here). SQL CE can be queried with LINQ to SQL, making it interesting for storing relational data. Recently I came in contact with the Sterling-database (check it here), an Object-database which can be used in .NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone ! You can add “SterlingPhone” to your project by using NuGet. Just like SQL CE I can use Sterling for storing data in Isolated Storage.
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An interesting technology you might have heard of is Reactive Extension (MSDN Rx Site). It’s available for different types of applications, although  you may need to add the necessary assemblies through NuGet. But in WP7.5 it’s included in the SDK. The only thing you need are references to Microsoft.Phone.Reactive and System.Observable.  Let’s start with a very simple scenario : simulating the PositionChanged-event of the GeoCoordinateWatcher. I know that the Mango-emulator allows me to simulate Geographical position, but it’s a nice starting point.
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In a previous blog I showed you how to create a startup task to install certain requirements in Azure Compute. In this blog post I will show you how you can easily turn this startup task into a re-usable plugin. This post continues with the startup post.
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The Visitor design pattern was first documented in 1995 by the Gang of Four. It’s a workaround for the fact that most strongly typed object oriented languages only support single dispatch, even when sometimes double dispatch is required. With C# 4, we no longer need this workaround. We now have something better, more on that below. Let’s look at an example.
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Bart De Smet commented on my post about Lambda Curry in C#, saying (amongst other things) that F# supports currying out of the box.
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[BLOG] Creating updatable Live Tiles from A to Z (part 1) http://t.co/GwAvwuoX ^Michaël
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[BLOG] Using a Sterling-database in Windows Phone as alternative to SQL CE http://t.co/ZatjY1UU ^Michaël
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[BLOG] A XAML Settings Panel for Windows 8 Metro http://t.co/ef8zQLQ8 ^Diederik
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[BLOG] Using Reactive extensions for feeding test sensor-readings in Windows Phone http://t.co/TmRwmdXa ^Michaël
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[BLOG] Using the CarouselPanel in Windows 8 Metro http://t.co/DnCI3EYQ ^Diederik
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