When designing a Windows 8 app, you need a way to preserve the state of various items as you navigate from page to page. Windows allows this using the pageState dictionary - a dictionary that can contain any serializable object. If you're a web programmer, you can think of this as similar to using a session variable. Today I'll add this to the cascading ......

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When you're dealing with hierarchical data (a tree-like data format such as folders that have sub-folders that have subfolders, etc.) you have to come up with an organized way of displaying it. You could create a tree view, similar to how Windows Explorer displays folders, but I wanted to try something different in Windows 8 - cascading ListBoxes. The ......

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Previously I wrote a post on how to get the eBay category list using their .Net SDK. I wanted to try doing the same thing in a Windows Store App for Windows 8 using Visual Studio 2012, but quickly ran into compatibility problems since the DLLs are compiled for .Net 2.0. I could have either changed the targetted framework, or attempted to re-write the ......

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I recently upgraded to a new development machine, which means the certificate used to sign my applications during debug changed. Under most circumstances you’ll never notice a difference, but if you’re developing apps using Google’s Maps API you’ll find that your old API key no longer works with the new certificate fingerprint. Google's instructions ......

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Packt Publishing is celebrating the release of its 1000th title by offering web site members their choice of free eBook. They are also opening their online library for a week for free to members, to allow you to research your choice. If you’re not already a member, signing up is free, but you have to do so by September 30th to get the free eBook. To ......

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Say that you have an incoming BizTalk message with many repeating nodes, and you want to process each one the same. The easiest thing to do would be to use the envelope to split the single message into multiple messages, then have multiple instances of your orchestration handle each one (similar to how the HIPAA “multiple” message schemas work). But ......

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eBay offers a .Net SDK for its Trading API - this post will show you the basics of making an API call and retrieving a list of current categories. You'll need the category ID(s) for any apps that post or search eBay. To start, download the latest SDK from https://www.x.com/developer... and create a new console app ......

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Even though this may be a relatively common task for many people, I’ve had to show it to enough new developers that I figured I’d immortalize it… MSDN says “Events enable a class or object to notify other classes or objects when something of interest occurs. The class that sends (or raises) the event is called the publisher and the classes that receive ......

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Nomad is a Visual Studio extension that allows you build apps for both Android and iOS platforms in Visual Studio using HTML5. There is no need to switch between .Net, Java and Objective-C to target different platforms - write your code once in HTML5 and build for all common mobile platforms and tablets. You have access to the native hardware functions ......

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In a previous post I demonstrated how to use the Flat File Mapping Wizard to map a NACHA financial file, and at the end I said I’d follow up with a post on setting up the pipeline and preserving the header information. Well, I totally forgot about that until someone asked where the post was, so here it is… Begin by creating the three schemas as shown ......

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