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 […]
Category: Windows Store
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 native control to replace it. If you’ve worked with Windows Store apps you’re probably familiar […]
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 I urge you to take a look and then Register
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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 is that it doesn’t return the actual publisher list but does a keyword search so […]
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 platform features. I’ve collated together a list below of some known ones. Some like maps […]
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. The way this works is that it creates a Remote Desktop session into your PC. […]
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 twice – once in the manifest and once in a XAML resource. However imagine the […]
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 instructions to install the update package:- http://www.intowindows.com/the-update-is-not-applicable-to-your-computer/ This worked and enabled the Store item to […]
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 yet (No easy upgrade if your device is UK English) I’ve been looking at the […]
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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 RT device exists in the Asus VivoTab RT. Because it’s an RT device that means […]
In The Hand Ltd 