May 2009 Entries
The ScatterViewItem is a very useful way to get the “surface feel” into your apps very quickly. However it is likely you will want to customize how your ScatterViewItem looks and reacts to user input. The following steps will help you customize it to your hearts content. This procedure could be applied generally to any other control as well. 1. Create a WPF application in Visual Studio, add a ScatterView and ScatterViewItem. Save the project. 2. Open project in Expression Blend. 3. Under Objects ......
When I first started learning Surface I quickly realized how to turn a WPF app into a surface app. Basically, I did a search and replace for each control in the WPF app that has a matching control in Surface such as Button and TextBox. By doing simple replacements I was able to get a surface app up and running quickly. However, I recently learned a way to really extend this method. All you need to do is edit the control template for the particular WPF control (that doesn’t have a surface twin) and ......
I tried my first attempt at running an application in user mode yesterday and learned a couple of things. You can find both of these things in the documentation, but who actually reads the docs? If you want to test out an application in user mode, but don’t feel like going through creating and copying the xml file to the proper folder, there is a way around this. I copied the exe file into the “T” users Documents folder (anywhere else would work to). Then I clicked on the “Enter User Mode” shortcut ......
Last week I needed to completely reset my surface unit back to factory settings due to erratic behavior (mostly in VS 2008). I followed the docs on the process Microsoft released in their SDK, but I had a couple of hiccups I thought I would share with you. 1. When you restart your surface you will want to hit your delete key once a second when the bios screen appears. Then when that screen changes you will want to hit F8. For some reason I had difficulty timing these key strokes. 2. you will need ......
I have found myself converting WPF apps to Surface apps quite often lately. Most of the necessary changes are fairly obvious, but I encountered one lately I thought I would share with you. In WPF apps there is functionality to capture the mouse cursor, but in Surface we have no mouse. So we need to perform the analogous catch of a finger (or whatever else you like) contact. Below is the first method I needed to change in a recent project: private void OnMouseDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs ......
After months of development I finally got around to packaging up my app for deployment in user mode on the Surface. I did run into a couple of minor hurdles at first which I will share with you, and tell you how I got around them. First of all, check out the documentation on the Microsoft Surface community site and the SDK. In your root app directory you will see a file like myapp.xml which is generated by visual studio for you. The following code example shows the default XML file. <?xml version="1.0" ......
I was working with identity tags and byte tags today, and the obvious short-comings of both became apparent to me. The identity tags have an enormous number of unique values possible, but there is no tool to create them right now. The byte tags can be created and printed now quite easily, however there is only 256 different possibilities when using a single byte tag.