Silverlight Zone

How to design a Windows8 Metro style app starting from an existing WP app – Part 2 - by Telerik

2012-05-23T19:45:00.000+05:30

Welcome to the second blog where we talk about the main similarities and differences between the design guidelines of the Windows 8 and the Windows Phone platforms and what this means to designers and developers. In the first blog post we covered.

Part 94 - WP - Background Agents - by @SumitDutta21

2012-05-23T19:43:00.003+05:30

In this article I will talk about background agents in Windows Phone. Background agents and scheduled tasks (PeriodicTask and ResourceIntensiveTask) executes the application in background.

Let's write code.

Part 93 - WP - Horizontal ScrollViewer - by @SumitDutta21

2012-05-23T19:43:00.000+05:30

In this articel I will talk about horizontal scroll menu in Windows Phone. This is simple but tricky and very usefule.

Let's write code.

Step 1: Create a Silverlight for Windows Phone project.

Step 2: Create a folder Images and add images in the folder as shown below. Change the Build Action type to Content of each folder.

Part 92 - WP - Gestures - by @SumitDutta21

2012-05-23T19:42:00.001+05:30

In this article I will talk about Touchpanel GestureSample implementation in Windows Phone which is available in Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input.Touch assembly.

File system places accessible through WinRT API - by @amarukovich

2012-05-23T19:41:00.003+05:30

In the previous posts I described the restrictions in file system access dictated by Windows 8 for WinRT apps. With user’s help and by using file and folder pickers your app can get an access to any file system object, but there is a limited number of folders accessible for the app via direct API calls. Here I want to summarize information about these folders.

Designing for PCs that boot faster than ever before - by Steven Sinofsky

2012-05-23T19:41:00.000+05:30

Windows 8 has a problem – it really can boot up too quickly.

So quickly, in fact, that there is no longer time for anything to interrupt boot. When you turn on a Windows 8 PC, there’s no longer long enough to detect keystrokes like F2 or F8, much less time to read a message such as “Press F2 for Setup.” For the first time in decades, you will no longer be able to interrupt boot and tell your PC to do anything different than what it was already expecting to do.

Fast booting is something we definitely want to preserve. Certainly no one would imagine intentionally slowing down boot to allow these functions to work as they did in the past. In this blog I’ll walk through how we’re addressing this “problem” with new solutions that will keep your PC booting as quickly as possible, while still letting you do all the things you expect.

Enhancing Windows8 for multiple monitors - by Steven Sinofsky

2012-05-23T19:40:00.002+05:30

Connecting multiple monitors to a PC is one of the easiest ways to enhance your Windows experience. Plug in a second monitor and you instantly double your working surface. I've had a multi-monitor setup for the past 10 years; once you start using multiple monitors, you’ll never want to go back to your old setup. A multi-monitor setup allows you to be more productive by having more windows across multiple screens. We’re very excited about the ease at which tablets in Windows 8 will be able to support large screen and high resolution monitors (often through HDMI connectors), as this opens up a broad range of exciting new scenarios.

54 Visual Studio LightSwitch Themes - by @ADefWebserver

2012-05-23T19:39:00.002+05:30

Today I had a email conversation with Kallon Delordson and he mentioned that between the Themes and Shells (in both versions of Visual Studio LightSwitch) he has 140 different LightSwitch products! This easily makes him the largest LightSwitch vender, no one else comes close.

His latest Theme Collection includes the JetFlow, JetStream, JetStreamBright, JetPack, Designer, Business, Enterprise, Expression and Shiny Theme sets all with 6 themes each. The collection includes some new sets, that I think includes some of his best designs yet.

Making a Level Preview in XNA - by Logan Nowak

2012-05-22T19:28:00.000+05:30

Ever wanted to draw a preview or a level for something like a level selection screen or the planning of a vacation? Now, you can. There are a few ways that I’ve been able to do this, but I’m going to show you the best way. Below is the final result. I’m going to be using my game, Cloud Blaster, but this will work just fine in any game where you load a level from a file.

Creating a fast and fluid app launch experience - by windowsappdev

2012-05-22T19:27:00.002+05:30

App launch is a principal part of the fast and fluid Windows 8 experience, so it’s important that you prioritize your app’s launch UX. A highly-polished launch flow is sure to improve the initial reception of any app. In this post, I’ll discuss how to craft a well-designed, responsive app launch experience and explain why app launch is a critical time to make a positive impression on users. I’ll introduce four app launch design patterns that can be applied to your apps and point out some key things to keep in mind as you continue building Metro style apps.

Streaming MP3 player in WP7 - by @Nokia

2012-05-22T19:26:00.005+05:30

This article show how to create a streaming MP3 music player in Windows Phone 7. All the music files are stored in the server and are streamed to Windows Phone. Application first loads all the albums data from server with JSON data. In server side there are PHP script which loads ID3 tags from all the MP3 files and generates JSON string, which is returned to Windows Phone. After that application deserializes JSON string to dynamic objects and the albums data is displayed in the Panorama page (image 3). Selected album songs will be displayed in the new Songs Page (image 5).

Fixing the certifications issues for the Windows8 App Store and #mvvmlight - by @LBugnion

2012-05-22T19:26:00.002+05:30

If you used the latest MVVM Light version for Windows 8, you may have noticed that a couple of issues cause your app to fail the Windows App Certification Kit. It is really quite simple: By mistake, I published the debug version of the assemblies instead of the release version. This causes the certification to fail.

Windows8: Top 10 Reasons why Metro development smokes Windows Desktop development - by @jerrynixon

2012-05-22T19:25:00.000+05:30

Windows 7 had one application scenario – desktop apps. Windows 8 has two application scenarios – desktop and Metro. Metro is the start menu, but also a shell in which app containers execute.

Note: Metro developers can build native apps in JavaScript, C#, VB, and C++. They can leverage HTML, XAML, and Direct3D, respectively. They uniformly access system devices and services through the Windows Runtime (WinRT).

Telerik WP Controls Roadmap - what is coming in our next release - by Valentin Stoychev

2012-05-21T21:49:00.000+05:30

The next release of RadControls for WindowsPhone is near and I would like to shed some light on what we have been working on in the last three months. In this blog post I'll just highlight the new goodies, more details will be available later as we approach to release.

The first thing that I want to share is the work that we did to improve the total experience in creating applications with our tools. Matching the Metro design guidelines and designing your application to the highest Metro standards sometimes is hard and we decided to give you a major help in this direction.

Porting a simple Silverlight game loop to Windows8 Metro style - by Jim Blizzard

2012-05-21T21:47:00.002+05:30

Yesterday evening I went on the hunt for a XAML/C#-based example of a game loop. I ran into a couple of OLD blog posts by Mike Snow. Naturally it caught my eye, simply because of his last name.

In his posts he described game loop based on Silverlight 2. OK. Silverlight uses XAML, and the code was C#. XAML/C# are first-class citizens in the Windows 8 Metro style app world, so I figured, why not see what it takes to make this work on Windows 8?

Metro: Implement a parallactic scrolling for your GridView - by @aboschin

2012-05-21T21:46:00.003+05:30

A customer of mine asked me about how to create a "parallactic scrolling" for the background of a GridView. For people that do not know what it is, parallactic scrolling is when you have a background image scrolling slower than the foreground content. This tecnique is mostly used in games to give the impression of depth of field with the overlapping of a number of elements that moves slower when they apper to be far from the observer.

Retrieve System Information in Silverlight - by Paul Sheriff

2012-05-21T21:46:00.000+05:30

In a Silverlight application we are building for a client, they wanted an About screen that would display system information such as the current URL, the operating system name and version, the product name and various other information. In the same application, we built a logging system to gather this same information and write that information to a file to help developers troubleshoot issues. We decided to create a Silverlight class that would gather the information shown in Figure 1.

24 Weeks of WP Metro Design | #6 Information Architecture for a WP7 App - by @arturat

2012-05-21T21:45:00.000+05:30

This blog post might not make justice to the depth and expertise that the discipline of Information Architecture deserves (although the definition of Information Architecture is still in flux) so I’m providing links at the end of this post to other websites that can take you much deeper into Information Architecture.

Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control - by Stephen Walther

2012-05-21T21:44:00.000+05:30

The purpose of this blog entry is to explain how you can group list items when displaying the items in a WinJS ListView control. In particular, you learn how to group a list of products by product category.

How to Debug a Windows 8 Metro Secondary Tile - by @JeremyLikness

2012-05-21T21:43:00.000+05:30

I've been working on Chapter 7 of my upcoming book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML. This chapter focuses on tiles and toast notifications. In the Windows 8 runtime, it is incredibly easy to prompt the user to pin a secondary tile. This is a tile that has a deep link for content. For example, my reference application contains blogs and blog posts from several Wintellect employees. You can pin a specific blog or even a specific item within a blog. The application bar provides the icon to click to Pin to Start.