September 2012 Entries

Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 9:41 PM | Comments (1)

Adventures in Windows 8: Solving activation errors

Note: I tagged this article with “MVVM” because I got a few support requests for MVVM Light regarding this exact issue. In fact it is a Windows 8 issue and has nothing to do with MVVM Light per se… Sometimes when you work on a Windows 8 app, you will get a very annoying issue when starting the app. In that case, the app doesn’t not even start past the Splash screen. Putting a breakpoint in App.xaml.cs doesn’t help because the app doesn’t even reach that point! So what exactly is happening? Well when ...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, September 10, 2012 9:17 AM | Comments (0)

Adventures in Windows 8: Understanding and debugging design time data in Expression Blend

One of my favorite features in Expression Blend is the ability to attach a Visual Studio debugger to Blend. First let’s start by answering the question: why exactly do you want to do that? Note: If you are familiar with the creation and usage of design time data, feel free to scroll down to the paragraph titled “When design time data fails”. Creating design time data for your app When a designer works on an app, he needs to see something to design. For “static” UI such as buttons, backgrounds, etc, ...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, September 05, 2012 11:53 PM | Comments (10)

Adventures in Windows 8: Placing items in a GridView with a ColumnSpan or RowSpan

Currently working on a Windows 8 app for an important client, I will be writing about small issues, tips and tricks, ideas and whatever occurs to me during the development and the integration of this app. When working with a GridView, it is quite common to use a VariableSizedWrapGrid as the ItemsPanel. This creates a nice flowing layout which will auto-adapt for various resolutions. This is ideal when you want to build views like the Windows 8 start menu. However immediately we notice that the Start ...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, September 01, 2012 3:19 PM | Comments (8)

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