Building Custom Controls for Windows 8 Store apps 06 December 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article explains how to build custom controls for Windows Store apps, using XAML and C#. Custom controls are the most powerful controls in the XAML department. Once you know how to design and build these, you’ll have no problems with their alternatives: user controls, derived controls, an... [More]
Building User Controls for Windows 8 Store apps 07 November 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes how to build user controls for XAML-based Windows 8 Store apps. User controls –or composite controls- are the easiest controls that you can roll yourself, since they're defined in plain XAML and come with design-time support in Visual Studio. Basically&nbs... [More]
Using Behaviors in Windows 8 Store Apps 28 October 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This short article explains how to write and use behaviors in Windows 8 Store apps. Behaviors were introduced a couple of yahren ago, in Blend for Silverlight 3. Later on they also found their way to WPF and WP7. Technically, behaviors are nothing but an implementa... [More]
Input Validation in Windows 8 Store apps 09 October 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article is an introduction to input validation in Windows Store apps. That sounds ambitious. On one hand, some apps really need decent data entry validation. On the other hand, the Store app runtime does not come with Data Annotations, and it does not come with the IDataErrorInfo... [More]
Enhancing the Win8 Slider experience 27 September 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes a way to enhance the user friendliness of a standard slider control in a Windows 8 Store App. Problem In a touch oriented application, we often allow -or force- the user to set the value for an integer or an enumeration through a slider control. In most cases this is more co... [More]
Creating updatable Live Tile from A to Z (part 2) 28 August 2012 Michael-Van-Wesemael Windows Phone At last, part 2 of this blogpost. In part 1, we created an updatable Live Tile. We still need to update it with a Background task. We start by adding a Windows Phone Scheduled Task Agent, which is a projecttype added with the devtools for the Mango-version. This type allows you to ask tasks to be pe... [More]
A C#/XAML FlipView Context Indicator for Windows 8 24 August 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article presents a FlipView context indicator control for Windows 8 UI Style apps. FlipView is a Windows 8 items control that displays one item at a time. It allows traversing its collection of items through a horizontal flick gesture. There are some limitations in its usage. In an app, the max... [More]
Transforming SVG graphics to XAML Metro Icons 27 July 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This short article shows how to pimp your Windows 8 Metro apps with native XAML icons that are created from W3C Scalable Vector Graphics. SVG graphics are XML documents, and hence should be easily translatable into an other XML schema, such as XPS (the te... [More]
The taming of the Metro GridView 10 July 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes how to restyle the Metro GridView to host a single page app like the sample Weather and Finance apps. I'll show you how to get rid of the default disco effects of this control - like the swiping behavior and the pressed animation. For this article... [More]
Modal Dialogs in Windows 8 Metro 13 June 2012 Diederik-Krols Metro, WinRT This article describes how to create modal dialogs in a Windows 8 MVVM Metro-style app. Here's the use case: a main page opens a dialog and provides it with some information. The dialog is displayed in the center of the screen, and collects some information. As long as the dialog is o... [More]