Pavel's Blog

A UniformGrid for Silverlight/Windows Phone

pavely — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 20:00:08 GMT

The UniformGrid panel in WPF has some useful features, especially as an items panel in an ItemsControl . I blogged about the usefulness of the UniformGrid here . But what about Silverlight? It has no UniformGrid , but we can create one as a custom panel. This would be usable in Silverlight for the desktop and for Windows Phone, and would be a simple enough example to show in one post. The layout process In WPF/Silverlight, layout is a two step process. The first step is Measure: the panel asks each...(read more)

A New Android Game in Town (by my brother)

pavely — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:36:24 GMT

Anyone who has ever written a game knows it’s hard to get it done from start to finish. Sure, I can put on a demo of some game I’ve created in several hours. But creating all the graphics, sound, animation, levels, transitions, scoring, etc, from start to finish is quite a challenge, especially for a single developer. That’s why I’m very proud of my young brother, Yaniv , that has worked hard for the past 10 months (while maintaining a proper day job!) on an awesome fun game called Micro Wars , targeted...(read more)

Next Windows Devices User Group Meeting

pavely — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 20:19:43 GMT

The second meeting of the Windows Devices User Group will be held on February 28th, at 17:00, Microsoft Offices in Ra’anana. The registration link and detailed agenda is here: http://windowsphonenavandlifecycle.eventbrite.com/ In this meeting we’ll talk about page navigation and the application lifecycle, which got a bit more complicated (but performs better) in the “Mango” release. We’ll also hear a “real life story” of porting an application to Windows Phone. See you there!...(read more)

WPF Tip: Displaying Images in different Pixel formats

pavely — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:25:12 GMT

If we want to show an image in WPF, we typically use an Image element and connect its Source property to some image resource within our project: < Image Source ="Penguins.jpg" /> The Source property is not a string, it’s an ImageSource – an abstract type with several concrete implementations that provide a “real” image source. The above markup works thanks to the help of a type converter, that makes the source a BitmapImage – one of the simplest sources, that presents the image as...(read more)

From Enumerable to Observable

pavely — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:56:23 GMT

The IEnumerable<T> interface represents a collection of objects of type T, and is used heavily thanks to the C# foreach construct. Better yet, in the LINQ world, this is the interface that is “extended” via extension methods by the System.Linq.Enumerable class. This makes IEnumerable<T> both easy to use as well as powerful. But is it the best interface for getting data out of a possible collection? Recap: what is IEnumerable<T> ? IEnumerable<T> has only one method: GetEnumerator...(read more)

First Meeting of the Windows Devices Israel User Group

pavely — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:21:41 GMT

Yesterday evening we’ve held the first meeting of the new Windows Devices user group at Microsoft offices in Ra’anana. This first meeting was dedicated to Windows Phone 7. Elad and I had a lot of fun and we hope you guys had fun as well and learned something along the way. What we’ve done is talk about the Windows Phone platform in general, its capabilities, the tools used to write applications and games, while showing a few demos. We tried to answer as many general questions as we could, and those...(read more)

Chinese Hotel with no Tea?

pavely — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:25:29 GMT

I was in Shanghai, China this past week, teaching an advanced .NET class at a John Bryce customer’s site. The training went well, and is not the topic of this post. I was in China once before, some 7+ years ago for a non-work related activity – learning Tai Chi Chuan (old Chen style) for a few weeks with a well known master (Master Ma-Hong, 78 years old at the time, if that means anything to anyone. He learned the style from the 5th generation member of the Chen family that invented the style – no...(read more)

Using the Async CTP With Windows Phone

pavely — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 10:05:29 GMT

The Async CTP that exposes C# 5.0 features to be used with asynchronous programming is not just for the full .NET Framework. There are versions for Silverlight (4 and 5) and even Windows Phone (which can be viewed as Silverlight 4, but has a separate supporting assembly). To demonstrate, I’ve adapted my sample of the Mandelbrot set to Windows Phone, while taking advantage of the async features to keep the UI responsive. After creating the initial Silverlight for Windows Phone project, I’ve added...(read more)

The laptop’s new life with SSD

pavely — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:37:06 GMT

A few days ago I upgraded my hard drives in my laptop to SSD (Solid State Drive). This is one of those things that once you do it – there’s no turning back; you’ll never consider using a “regular” spinning hard disk. Hard disk speed is crucial to a developer – Visual Studio 2010 is a hungry I/O beast, and when various extensions are installed, things get worse. My laptop is no woos - it’s an Alienware m17x -R2, equipped with a Core-i7 processor, 8GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 5870 card (DirectX 11...(read more)

Calculating PI in .NET

pavely — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:31:41 GMT

I always loved mathematics. Although I’m certainly not a mathematician by profession, I’m always intrigued and inspired by math’s pureness and cleverness. One of the simplest and fascinating aspects of math is the number PI . Described simply as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, it’s a constant with infinite digits after the decimal point and most importantly, non repeating (at least as far as I know). There are many ways to calculate PI, as evident within the PI Wikipedia link...(read more)

Getting Device Information in Windows Phone 7

pavely — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:30:36 GMT

Windows Phone 7 mandates a set of minimum requirements from devices it runs on, such as camera resolution, hardware graphics support, the existence of sensors such as microphone, GPS, touch, etc. However, sometimes it’s useful to know the exact specifications of a particular device the application is running on, so the application can optimize. As a simple example, running on the emulator or a real device can make a huge difference – maybe the application has a way of doing things differently when...(read more)

My Sessions at the MobiWeb Conference

pavely — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 10:21:39 GMT

The MobiWeb Conference is scheduled for the 15-17 of January in the Daniel Hotel in Hertzliya (Israel). The sessions in the conference are “one day seminars”, each seminar covering some topic related to web development, mobile development, or both. I’ll be presenting two seminars at the conference. The fist, “Building Windows Phone 7 Apps with Silverlight” (on the 16th) will cover the development for the (relatively new) Windows Phone platform using Silverlight (and maybe some XNA if we have time...(read more)

Announcing the Israeli Windows Phone User Group

pavely — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 17:44:04 GMT

Although Windows Phone is not yet officially launched in Israel, it’s time for Israeli developers to start developing for the Windows Phone platform, even if most don’t have an actual device at hand. A new user group dedicated to development for Windows Phone has been created, managed by Tomer Shamam and yours truly. The first meeting will be held on December 27th at the Microsoft Offices in Ra’anana. Please use this link to register and view the agenda: http://introwindowsphone.eventbrite.com In...(read more)

WPF Tip: Binding to the Selected Item in a Master-Details View

pavely — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:00:36 GMT

Master-details is a common way to display data. A master view provides minimal data for a collection of objects (e.g. book names), and when selecting one such item, a details view provides more information for the selected item (e.g. a book’s name, author, publication date, etc.). In WPF, data binding (in XAML) is typically used to achieve the connection between an object and its details without using any code. Let’s see how we can achieve this. Let’s say we want to show a list of book names, and...(read more)

Parallel Programming Open House Session

pavely — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:34:52 GMT

Today I presented a half-day session on Multithreading & Parallel Programming at John Bryce center in Tel Aviv. Thank you all for attending! I certainly enjoyed presenting these fascinating topics. I’ve attached the demos I showed. The presentation will be sent to those who attended by email. Thank you! ParallelDemos...(read more)