A Modern UI radial gauge control for Windows Phone 8 apps 05 November 2013 Diederik-Krols Windows Phone In this short article I proudly present the Windows Phone 8 version of the Modern UI Radial Gauge. This control was designed by Arturo Toledo during a UI Design Review of this Windows 8 Store app. I made a custom control of it, that I recently ported to Windows Phone 8. That went a lot easier t... [More]
An auto-hyperlinking RichTextBlock for Windows 8.1 Store apps 29 October 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article shows how to let a XAML RichTextBlock control detect URLs and email addresses in its raw text, and show these as hyperlinks. The code only applies to Windows 8.1 because I’m using the brand new Hyperlink control. Here’s a screenshot of the attached sample app. There’s ... [More]
An Image Cropper control for Windows 8 Store apps 11 October 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article presents a Windows 8 Store app XAML control that allows the user to select an area in a displayed image, and get a reference to that area as a writeable bitmap. [More]
Reusing Vector Graphics in Windows 8 Store Apps 26 August 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT The Flat Design paradigm and the related anti-skeumorphism movement make bitmap images less and less popular in today's apps and applications. Everywhere in the user interface, PNG's and JPG's are being replaced by crisp scalable light-weight vector graphics. In the XAML world these vector graphics ... [More]
Binding a Slider to an Enumeration in a Windows 8 Store app 22 July 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT Very often the values inside an enumeration type represent a sequence or a ranking, like small-medium-large or good-better-best. In a UI it would be appropriate to represent such a field through a slider control. This article explains how to build such a slider in XAML and C# and how to use it ... [More]
A Modern UI radial gauge control for Windows 8 Store apps 24 June 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT Recently I had the amazing opportunity to briefly work together with Arturo Toledo and his great team of designers from Toledo2. This article presents one of the artefacts of that cooperation. It’s a Modern UI radial gauge control for Windows 8 Store apps. Arturo Toledo did the hard work of de... [More]
Printing a XAML ItemsControl from a Windows 8 Store app 22 May 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article describes how to print the contents of an ItemsControl in a XAML and MVVM based Windows 8 Store app. The code is an evolution of the printing framework that I published a couple of months ago. In a nutshell, this framework wraps the pages to be printed inside a RichTextBlock c... [More]
Using the Documents Library as a database in Windows 8 Store apps 13 May 2013 Diederik-Krols Many Windows 8 Store apps require some amount of structured storage on the client. But in WinRT, local and roaming storage is limited in size, and a client-side relational database does not come out of the box yet. This article describes how to use a folder in the user’s Documents library to s... [More]
A convention-based data template selector for Windows 8 XAML Store apps 22 April 2013 Diederik-Krols This article describes how you can use naming conventions to hook a XAML Data Template to a ViewModel or a Model in a Windows 8 Store app. The last couple of years, convention-based coding became more and more popular in the .NET world. The MVC framework was one of the first managed environments whe... [More]
Creating touch-based rotation in Windows 8 XAML Store apps 28 March 2013 Diederik-Krols WinRT This article illustrates two ways of using touch or mouse input to rotate a UI element in a XAML-based Windows 8 Store app. I’m sharing this code because I believe that the corresponding official MSDN sample is too complex. Don't get me wrong: the Windows 8 gestures sample looks nice and ... [More]