In The Hand Ltd

Windows Phone

  • Interactive Toasts and Windows Phone 8.1

    Windows 10 brings a whole range of new APIs and functionality for building apps. However in the phone space it’s important to be mindful that there are a lot more Windows Phone 8.1 devices in use than Windows 10. Many… Continue reading

  • WinRT specific properties in Xamarin Forms XAML

    Xamarin Forms originally supported iOS, Android and Windows Phone Silverlight applications. The OnPlatform<T> class provides a mechanism for putting values directly into your XAML which are dependent on the host platform. This is often necessary to cope with different screen… Continue reading

  • Windows Phone 8.1 Support in Xamarin Forms

    Recently Xamarin Forms has been expanded to support Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1. There are instructions online for adding a Windows Phone 8.1 app to your solution and plugging it all together here:- http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/windows/getting-started/phone/ However there is a small… Continue reading

  • Background Bluetooth Services on Windows Phone 8.1

    Added in Windows Phone 8.1 was a new RfcommConnectionTrigger which allows you to host a Bluetooth service on the device and have your background task triggered when an incoming connection is established. This makes a lot of sense as having… Continue reading

  • Bluetooth HID on Windows Phones

    Microsoft have already announced that Bluetooth HID (keyboard) support is finally coming in Windows 10, but it was quietly added in Windows Phone 8.1 GDR2. The problem is this update won’t be circulated to most phones. It is however present… Continue reading

  • Background GPS in a Windows Phone 8.1 Windows Runtime App

    In Silverlight 8.0 there was a capability to run an application for a period of time after the user switched away to perform continuous GPS tracking for up to a few hours. With the switch to the Windows Runtime there… Continue reading

  • WinRT Background Task Processes

    I’ve been working on a Windows Phone 8.1 project which has several background tasks. One of these uses the device’s sensors – using a DeviceUseTrigger. This is different to how a regular periodic task works because the task implementation creates a… Continue reading

  • Nokia CR-201 Car Charger with Lumia 930 Review

    I recently got a Lumia 930 and was looking for a simple car holder/charger for it. I saw the CR-201 (which is updated from the CR-200 and advertised as compatible with the 930) and thought it would be perfect because:-… Continue reading

  • ProgressRing for Windows Phone updated

    Last month I posted the latest “charming” helper for Windows development which is a Windows Phone (8.0 or Silverlight 8.1) ProgressRing with the same appearance as its big Windows counterpart. Today I’ve just pushed an update to NuGet which improves… Continue reading

  • Data Settings for Nokia Lumia 930 O2 UK (Pay Monthly)

    When I first setup this phone and swapped my account over to a new nano-SIM I received a message from O2 that my data and picture messaging settings couldn’t be automatically setup (don’t you just love progress). I had to… Continue reading