Microsoft's hosted TFS (http://tfs.visualstudio.com/) provides a cloud hosted TFS project collection which is free for small teams. It works neatly with VS2012 which is fine for Windows Store and Windows Phone project types but for .NET Compact Framework development we are still stuck with using Visual Studio 2008. Luckily with a few patches ...

In Windows Phone 8 the Windows.System.Launcher class allows you to open files with apps which are registered to handle them. On Windows Phone you have built in support for Office documents and audio and video formats. Lets say you want to open a PDF either remotely or downloaded by your app. There isn't a built-in PDF viewer but there are ...

When directly integrating video capture in your Windows Store app you can use the MediaCapture class. There are a number of methods which affect the video but not all will be supported on all devices. One of these is ...

I recently needed to create a prototype for a Windows Phone application and having recently discovered it I decided to use Indigo Studio to build it. The application is not particularly designed for Windows Phone however it has enough standard UI controls and customisations to make it easy to create phone mockups. They say a picture says a ...

In my previous post I discovered a limitation with using the Share... extension point in the Photos app. The good news is that from within your own app you can open .png files. For this you can use the PhotoChooserTask which has been available since Windows Phone 7. This presents the user with essentially the same UI as the Photos app and you can ...

On Windows Phone 8 it is possible to register your app with the Share... extension point on the photo viewer. This allows your app to receive an image file and process it whether that is sending it to an online service or manipulating it on the device. I found recently an odd quirk with the feature. I setup the extension following the MSDN ...

With the recent announcement of Windows Embedded Handheld 8 it seems fitting to discuss something related to industrial and line-of-business applications which you can develop now on the Windows Phone platform. I've released the first drop of 32feet.NET for Windows Phone 8 to our CodePlex site and NuGet. Because the programming model on ...

The Bluetooth API on Windows Phone 8 is based around some customisations to the Proximity APIs which are part of the Windows API introduced with Windows 8. When you "discover" devices you can retrieve a collection of device identifiers for paired devices. The first time you perform a task you will want to use this mechanism to select the ...

iCalendar files are based on the set of data exchange specifications which also includes vCards. You may come across them either in emails or from a website. For example some sites which sell travel tickets allow you to download your itinerary in an iCalendar file. While Windows Phone has always supported vCards for contact information it ...

I have ported René Schulte's excellent WriteableBitmapEx project to run on Windows Embedded Compact 7. The original library supports drawing across various XAML user interfaces - Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF and Windows 8 Apps. Because XAML In The Hand exposes an object model which matches Silverlight there was very little work ...