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 (but not all) will get an update to Windows 10. A lot of clients are […]
Category: Windows Phone
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 sizes and scaling behaviour across platforms. When Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 were later […]
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 omission which will lead to a build error – #6 tells you to remove the […]
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 to have your app in the foreground to receive connections limits the usage somewhat. In […]
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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 on the new Lumia 640 series. It’s very easy to setup a Bluetooth Keyboard with […]
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 was no direct equivalent of this. I discovered however that because there are differences with […]
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 deferral and keeps running handling the event generated by the sensor device until it is explicitly […]
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:- 1) It has wireless charging so just pop the phone in, no fiddling with USB […]
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 the flexibility of the control by allowing you to override the Foreground colour of the […]
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 get the manual settings and now the phone is working as expected. However I thought […]
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