Thy Phone uses the NavigationView control to provide a pop out navigation pane to provide a similar UI to Your Phone. I was contacted this week by a user indicating problems with the app for blind users – it doesn’t play well with screen readers and the keyboard navigation is not clear. My first investigation […]
Category: Windows
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We Don’t Talk About IrDA
We take for granted that every mobile phone, tablet and laptop has Bluetooth built in, and probably use it all the time for headphones, mice etc without even thinking about developing software for it. There was a time long ago when phones and laptops had IrDA built in and it could be used for exchanging […]
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Back to the Future With C++/WinRT
Recently I was asked to investigate a scenario for a desktop C++ application. It was something I’d done before with C# and used a number of WinRT APIs. This meant I had to refresh myself in C++ which has changed again since the last time I used it! I started with the latest C++/WinRT template […]
It’s still early days for Windows 11 but pre-release API documentation is available on Microsoft Docs and it gives some hints of new functionality for developers:- BluetoothLEDevice gains functionality to request preferred connection parameters. These include minimum and maximum connection interval, latency and link timeout. If these seem a bit complex to set individually there […]
I only just found out about this but Microsoft released a packet sniffer for Bluetooth on Windows 10 back in February. This is incredibly useful for debugging and is something I’ve been craving for some time. Previously I’ve been able to analyse packets from Android using Wireshark and now we can view activity between Windows […]
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New Windows Phone App
Okay, now I’ve drawn you in with a click-bait headline I need to clarify a little! For some time now Windows 10 has had a tightly integrated app called Phone Link (previously Your Phone) which allows you to interact with your phone from the desktop. However, it doesn’t cater for the 50-odd percent of users […]
I’ve noticed an odd behaviour when creating a BluetoothLEDevice from a found device id. I’m not doing anything special, just retrieving paired devices and then trying to access the relevant BluetoothLEDevice. In common with all Windows device searches (whether by Picker or programmatically with DeviceInformation.FindAllAsync) you receive a DeviceInformation which contains the name and unique […]
I was thinking about a comment on a Gist I wrote some time ago and thought I’d written a blog post on the topic, but when I couldn’t find any sign of it I decided to start from scratch as I’d have probably needed to update it anyway.The Bluetooth stack in Windows has supported virtual […]
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WPF Activity in Xamarin Forms
I’ve recently been working on extending an existing product written in Xamarin Forms to Windows desktop and this has meant learning a lot more about the WPF implementation. Originally Xamarin Forms was created for mobile platforms such as Android and iOS (and Windows Phone – more on that later) but has since expanded to desktop […]
I’ve been working away on the Bluetooth code for some time. I’d been meaning to modernise the code and build with .NET Standard and NuGet in mind and ideally support more platforms. However the project has stopped and started a few times and gone down a few dead ends. I had planned to rework the […]
In The Hand Ltd 