.NET
While looking for a free alternative to Sketchflow I landed on the Cacoo web site. Any developer who decides to use the free Visual Studio tools may find themselves doing the same search. The base functionality of Cacoo is free although there are certain features that have fees attached to them such as extended stencils and templates. Cacoo doesn’t seem to have a template for WP7. It does have templates for iOS and Android development so I started with the Android template and started modidfying...
Posted On Monday, November 21, 2011 4:21 PM | Feedback (0)
If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get. One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade. What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file. This is of course...
Posted On Thursday, November 10, 2011 6:56 AM | Feedback (0)
It was another engaging presentation at this month’s CITAG meeting as Joe Hummel presented functional programming and its implementation using F#. Some times it is fun to attack a mind bending problem and this was one of those times. Leaning about functional programming caused about the same brain cramps as moving from procedural to object oriented for the first time. Of course when you start to get it the effect is almost euphoric. I would suggest that if you haven’t looked into functional programming...
Posted On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:48 AM | Feedback (0)
I have seen a lot of articles about gestures but they require third party libraries or complex coding approaches. What I am going to present here isn’t strictly elegant or necessarily the best approach, but this is the way we would catch this type of event when we were still dealing with message loops. For the app that I have been working on I need to take action on the double-tap of a list item. The first question you have to ask your self is what a double-tap really is. It is in simplest terms...
Posted On Friday, October 07, 2011 12:22 AM | Feedback (1)
A listbox can be a very boring display surface, but it doesn’t have to be. Ok, so it may never be exciting. At least we can create a more flexible output. The first element you need to learn about his the ItemTemplate which is in turn composed of a DataTemplate. As this combo implies it is bound to each item/data row. We will start organizing your base layout with a Grid control. Within the Grid you can add a RowDefintions group. A RowDefinition helps when you want components to be stacked for a...
Posted On Friday, September 02, 2011 12:24 AM | Feedback (0)
If you are developing you WCF service for web service deployment under IIS and coding with the Visual Studio web server you are in for a rude awakening when it comes time to deploy your solution. Ok, so that is a little over dramatic, but there are a few steps and precautions you need to know about. Below are the main steps to deploying your application to IIS assuming WCF is already installed and registered. The first step is to create an application pool. Make sure that for your .NET 3.5 WCF service...
Posted On Monday, August 29, 2011 6:03 AM | Feedback (0)
There are many reasons that you may want to add email capability to your Windows Phone 7 application. There are a number of ways you can communicate information out from an application. The mechanism for sending email from your WP7 application is the EmailComposeTask API. The difference between this API and the one that you would use for an ASP.NET application is that it opens a screen to allow the user to select an account to use and then creates a message which the user then has to send. This makes...
Posted On Monday, August 22, 2011 3:31 PM | Feedback (0)
One of the things that is important to learn when you are developing any application is how it will interact with the environment it lives in. I’m not talking about simply interacting with files or database but with major resources. With WP7 there are a number of things such as the photos, browser, maps and the phone itself that your application may be concerned with. The WP7 development API includes a number of access points to give your application greater reach. These APIs can be found here. They...
Posted On Friday, August 19, 2011 9:04 AM | Feedback (0)
Part of the fun of being a consultant is that the technology you use changes from day to day. Recently it is WCF which, while knowing the concepts of since it came out I haven’t used up until now. The nice thing is that it really isn’t any harder to develop for than a normal ASP.NET web service. A couple of the attributes change and which project type you start with is different, but it is still message based services. Just like the method of a web service needs a Webmethod attribute a method in...
Posted On Thursday, August 18, 2011 2:44 AM | Feedback (0)
I originally started looking for how to make a TextBox have autocomplete capability. Strangely all the articles said that it couldn’t be done. The last thing you want is for your applications to make your users struggle entering information when every other application gives them a quicker entry method. So what is the solution? The TextBox tag has an InputScope property which if you set it to Text it builds a dictionary list as the user types. For the other InputScope types it mainly changes the...
Posted On Wednesday, August 17, 2011 3:16 PM | Feedback (0)
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