A Floating Behavior for Windows 8 Store apps 06 March 2014 Diederik-Krols WinRT In my previous article I introduced a Floating Control for Windows Store apps, and hinted that it could be rewritten as a Behavior. Well, that’s exactly what I did. This article describes the Floating Behavior: it allows a ContentControl to be dragged around the screen through mouse or touch, while ... [More]
A Floating Control for Windows 8 Store apps 23 February 2014 Diederik-Krols WinRT Windows 8 Store apps need to run on a huge number of screen resolutions. That makes positioning your controls not always an easy task. So why not let the end user decide where a control should be placed? This article describes how to build a XAML and C# ContentControl that can be dragged around (and... [More]
LexDB performance tuning in a Windows 8 Store app 09 February 2014 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article explains how to create fast queries against a LexDB database in a Windows 8 Store app, and how to keep these queries fast. LexDB is a lightweight, in-process object database engine. It is written in C# and can be used in .NET, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store, and Xamarin proje... [More]
Dynamics CRM 2013 and Power BI for Office 365 - Part 2 05 February 2014 Jurgen-Postelmans In the first part of this blog post we used Power Query to create the following Data Model in Excel. As you can see the relationship between the 2 tables is still missing and we would also like to define a Hierarchy in QueryFromContact. And although we could have done this in Power Query itself we w... [More]
Dynamics CRM 2013 and Power BI for Office 365 - Part 1 05 February 2014 Jurgen-Postelmans In this blog post we will have a look at how you can use Power Query to create a Power Pivot data model in Excel and publish it to a Power BI site in Office 365. Once the Excel file with the Power Pivot data model is in Power BI for Office 365 we can query it with Power Q&A. If you have... [More]
SQLite performance tuning in a Windows 8 Store app 03 February 2014 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article explains how to monitor and optimize a SQLite query in a Windows 8 Store app by adding indexes and/or rewriting the query. I’ll be using the WinRT SQLite wrapper from the Visual Studio Gallery. I assume that you know how to install and use it, but feel free to check a previous blog post... [More]
Power BI Training: Business Intelligence with Excel 29 January 2014 Nico-Jacobs Business Intelligence, Excel Power BI allows business users to solve certain business intelligence problems without the need of IT specialists. Since 2010 Power Pivot allows Excel users to create their own data models and do advanced analytics on this. Excel 2013 out of the box contains Power View as well, allowing people to cr... [More]
Choosing the right serialization engine for your Windows Store app 19 January 2014 Diederik-Krols Most Windows 8 Store apps spend a significant time in the saving and retrieving of local data. The local file system is often used as main storage. But even the apps that come with server side storage, often need to use local storage: to host a cache for when there’s no network available or whilst t... [More]
Using the Windows 8.1 Hub as an ItemsControl 06 January 2014 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article presents a Windows 8.1 Hub control with ItemsSource and ItemTemplate properties, making it easily bindable and more MVVM-friendly. The Hub control has become the main host on the startup screen of many Windows Store apps: it’s flexible but still presents a standard look-and-feel w... [More]
First time MVP 02 January 2014 Diederik-Krols It is with great pride that I announce that I was presented with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the very first time. For the next 12 months, I’m an MVP in the Client Development category, which has an impressively strong Belgian representation. I would like to thank M... [More]