In The Hand Ltd

Windows Store

  • 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

  • Rating control for Windows Phone 8.1 Apps

    In Silverlight 8.x you can use the Toolkit Rating control to provide standard star rating functionality in your app. If you’re moving to a Windows Phone 8.1 App project you can’t use the Silverlight based toolkit and there isn’t a… Continue reading

  • //publish/ Event Manchester

    If you haven’t already heard, we are running a developer event for Windows app developers in Manchester on the 16th and 17th May as part of the global //publish/ event. Pete has more details on his blog post here so… Continue reading

  • Linking to your other apps

    Using the Windows Phone SDK the only method to return a list of your other published apps (e.g. for your About page) is to use the MarketplaceSearchTask and specify your company name in the search criteria. The problem with this… Continue reading

  • Launching System Features From Windows Store Apps

    In Windows Phone we have a number of Launchers and Choosers for interacting with system features. For the most part the approach used in Windows Store is to use special URI schemes to achieve the same end result and launch… Continue reading

  • Detect When Running on Windows Simulator

    The Windows Simulator is a deployment target for Visual Studio which allows you to run your Windows Store apps in a simulated device. This allows you to test touch interaction and different screen sizes and orientations on your development machine.… Continue reading

  • Windows Store Apps: Application Tile Colour Within an App

    When you define your package manifest for a Windows Store app you can specify the background colour used for your tile. Chances are this is a brand colour which you want to use throughout your app. You could specify it… Continue reading

  • Installing Windows 8.1 Preview onto a UK Surface RT

    It soon became clear that the Preview update package supports only a small subset of languages and while US English is of course supported the update would refuse to install on a device running UK English. I first followed these… Continue reading

  • Bluetooth Development with Windows 8.1

    Unless you’ve been stuck under a rock (in which case what are you doing reading this?) you’ll know that Microsoft announced a preview release of Windows 8.1 at Build yesterday. While I haven’t got a development machine up and running… Continue reading

  • NFC Text tags on WinRT

    To follow the last post I thought I would quickly round it off by looking at the code required to listen for tags on a Windows 8/RT device. Devices with NFC built in are like hens teeth but one such… Continue reading