WindowsPhoneGeek

Your app sucks and now I know what to do about it

2012-05-21T19:18:18.0000000+03:00

source: Matt Lacey`s blog

The Windows Phone marketplace is a semi curated environment. This is both a good and a bad thing. It makes the app submission process fairly reliable and keeps the very buggy and inappropriate apps out. It does, however, require a human element in the certification process that can be subject to inconsistency and error.

Sometimes apps pass certification which shouldn't have. This is separate from any quality judgement, I'm referring here to apps breaking the marketplace rules and certification requirements

Fortunately, there is a place to report such occurrence: Reporting a Concern about an App in the Marketplace

Streaming MP3 player in WP7

2012-05-21T19:15:31.0000000+03:00

source: Nokia

This article explains how to create a streaming MP3 music player in Windows Phone 7.

Introduction

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).

User can add favorite songs to Favorite list (image 2) from Latest or Album songs. Selected song is played in Player Page (image 6) when user selects song from song lists. All the selected songs will be added to Latest played songs (image 1). In Player page user can see album cover art, title of the song, album name and playing time of the song. User can skip to previous or next song in this selected list which music is now playing and seek the position of the song. All the list can be reset from the Setting section (image 4) of the Panorama page.

Metro: Grouping Items in a ListView Control

2012-05-21T19:12:34.0000000+03:00

source: stephenwalther.com

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.

Displaying a grouped list of items in a ListView control requires completing the following steps:

Create a Grouped data source from a List data source
Create a Grouped Header Template
Declare the ListView control so it groups the list items

WP7 Images in Secondary Tiles do not appear: Solution

2012-05-21T12:36:45.0000000+03:00

source: www.mjfnet.com

Problem: Background Images in secondary tiles do not appear if using remote images.

Solution:

<wp:BackgroundImage> and <wp:BackBackgroundImage> can use remote URLs, however, the domains need to be included in the Approved URLS list. For example:

// Lists domains that can send tile updates and so forth as push notifications.
// Only these authorized domains will be allowed by the shell to push new tiles to the phone

var ListOfAllowedDomains = new Collection<Uri> {
new Uri(@"http://i. contoso.com"), new Uri(@"http://i-staging.contoso.com") // e.g. if you published a webservice at http://foo.com/service1.svc -- put "http://foo.com" here.
};
pushChannel.BindToShellTile(ListOfAllowedDomains);

How to Debug a Windows 8 Metro Secondary Tile

2012-05-21T11:18:57.0000000+03:00

source: csharperimage.jeremylikness.com

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:

The code simply grabs the current "group" that represents a blog, then formats a unique id for the tile, a title, and a special set of arguments that are passed when the tile is tapped:

 var group = DefaultViewModel["Group"] as BlogGroup;
    var title = string.Format("Blog: {0}", group.Title);            
    ((App)Application.Current).PinToStart(this,
        string.Format("Wintellog.{0}", group.Id.GetHashCode()),
        title,
        title,
        string.Format("Group={0}", group.Id));

Show ratings with stars in WinRT XAML

2012-05-21T11:10:54.0000000+03:00

source: igrali.wordpress.com

When you try to build an app that displays ratings of some kind, it’s often interesting to show them using stars “notation”. Unfortunately, there is no native rating control to be used with WinRT and XAML, but on the bright side there are many open source projects available for Silverlight and WPF that can be ported relatively easy. I did that for one of my projects and I’ll show you about it more in this blog article.

If you search for rating controls, you’ll find many interesting options. Some of them even offer that you can actually rate things by clicking on the stars. I only needed a control which renders filled stars according to rating value. I found a few that suited my needs, but the problem with those is that they only fill full star of half of the star. It’s done by using a drawing of the whole star, and then two more drawings of half of the stars, because they can be split into 2 same parts.

Mimic the Game Hub Application Bar with a Behavior on the BindableApplicationBar

2012-05-21T11:07:35.0000000+03:00

source: mark.mymonster.nl

A couple of days ago Sébastien Lachance wrote an excellent article about mimicking the application bar of the game hub. Really interesting for one of my applications which makes use of a minimal applicationbar that's also transparant. However quite often the texts of the menu are difficult to read when they don't have a solid backgroud. That's exactly what is solved in the game hub: a transparant applicationbar, but when expanded to view the menu it has a solid background. And Sébastien also found a solution how to fix this in our own applications.

However Sébastien is using the ApplicationBar, I'm using the wrapper around the ApplicationBar, called BindableApplicationBar that's part of the Phone7.Fx project. So how to solve this?

The ApplicationBar and BindableApplicationBar both implement the IApplicationBar interface which prescribes the StateChanged event that is used by Sébastien in his solution. So it looks like we can use the same event, let's look a little bit closer.

Seems that the code inside the BindableApplicationBar never fires the StateChanged event, so let's fix this with a little bit of code in the BindableApplicationBar. Please be aware that you need to use the source version of the BindableApplicationBar to be able to fix this. So let's subscribe the underlying ApplicationBar first, we do this in t he constructor of the BindableApplicationBar by adding one line.

Defining Layout in a Windows 8 Metro Style App using CSS3, HTML and JavaScript

2012-05-21T11:04:32.0000000+03:00

dsource: DaveDev`s blog

Overview

I have been coding a Windows 8 Metro Style App using the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview bits and Visual Studio 11 Express. The app is going to be a retro shooter that takes advantage of HTML5 Canvas for the main game engine along with several Windows 8 Metro Style App Features. This post is going to cover how to layout the elements of your game interface on the screen.

My game’s Layout is made up of two screens: a Main Menu (which is the default screen upon loading for first time) and then an actual Game Screen where gameplay takes place. I used CSS3 to align my Player Score, Name, Level and other screen elementals. Let’s dive into how each screen is set up.

Main Menu

The Main Menu displays current game version number, game title and a button to begin game play. It also includes an AppBar Menu (not shown in the screenshots below) that can be accessed at any time. Here is what the Main Menu looks like:

Delivering reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps

2012-05-21T11:00:47.0000000+03:00

source: blogs.msdn

One of our core principles in the development of the Windows 8 Metro style app platform was to ensure that users would have confidence in their apps. This is a mission we’re in together; in this post, I explain our vision for app confidence and reliability and help you build confidence by design into your apps.

Let me start by explaining what we mean by confidence. Picture a customer browsing the Windows Store looking at a Metro style app; we want them to be thinking only about the app and whether or not it is right for them. We want them to assume—in fact be confident—that the app will behave the way they expect and thus will perform well on their system, will use only the data and information they authorize, and will harmoniously co-exist with their other applications.

Daily WP7 Development News 18 May 2012

2012-05-18T20:01:27.0000000+03:00

by WindowsPhoneGeek

Daily WP7 Development News 18 May 2012:

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