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by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/29/2012 12:00:31 PM
The built-in resources in Windows Phone 7 help a lot with automatically reflecting the selected theme of the phone. (See my earlier blog post: Being theme aware in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight apps). However, sometimes you want to be theme aware, but need more than the predefined resources. For example, you may want to have a generally blue background color, but want it to be a dark blue for the dark theme, and a light blue for the light theme. I created a little Behavior that allows you to ...
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by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/20/2012 10:17:29 AM
Getting a new designer into Metro is always a challenge. They ask me to show them really good Metro implementations in WP7 apps to learn from. So, I turned to the wisdom of my Twitter followers, and asked them: “What Windows Phone 7 apps should I show an aspiring designer who wants to see examples of “Metro done right”? I received a dozen or so answers – so here is what my tweeps recommended, in no particular order: Birdsong recommended by @chton 4th & Mayor recommended by @ ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 10/5/2011 9:34:13 AM
Less than two weeks from now, the Baltic TechDay 2011 conference will be happening in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - and I am honored of being a speaker to all three conferences, as per the invitation of Microsoft. Three days, three cities, three countries – and a total of six airplane takeoffs and landings. Baltic TechDays 2011 is a premium 1-day technology conference for IT Professionals and Developers, that spans though three Baltic countries - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. TechDays 201 ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 9/29/2011 11:09:18 PM
It’s been a while since we released a new SurfCube version. The reason is simple – we have been working hard on our biggest update yet – SurfCube 4! Today, I would like to invite you – no, ask you – to help testing this up and coming new version. SurfCube 4 will only run on Mango devices, but if you have one, and interested in what the future of web browsing brings for Windows Phone 7, then please apply! Here is a quick what’s new for SurfCube V4: Mango Features New browser engine – SurfC ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 9/29/2011 10:54:05 PM
In SurfCube, we have had the “send email feedback” feature since V1. Needless to stay, we have received tons of feedback. Actually, this feedback is what drove the development of the app – they helped us identify pain points, missing features and even told us when something was done right, and users loved what they saw. The about screen of SurfCube 4 Beta 1 with the Send feedback button. So, now with the first public Beta of SurfCube approaching, naturally we want to let those people know a ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 7/19/2011 7:18:21 PM
I am proud to announce that my first ever e-book is now available! If you are a Silverlight developer wanting to jump onto the Windows Phone 7 bandwagon, the book introduces key Windows Phone 7 concepts and quickly puts you in the right mindset for phone development. The e-book can be bought from Silverlight Show. There are two sample excerpts available: Input on the Phone Portrait and Landscape & Themes Dave Campbell, the “Silverlight Cream” guy and Silverlight MVP of the year s ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 5/10/2011 9:18:37 PM
Note: If you don’t want to read this much, just jump to the end of the article, where you can find a video of the application with all the gestures. As I said in my introductory post, with the Kinect Maps solution we wanted to discover a new set of gestures to control the map. We had pretty ambitious goals that – as far as we know – no other solution has solved yet: Focus on an exhibition setting instead of a productivity scenario – so, a gesture set that makes people tired is not a problem ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 5/9/2011 12:18:50 PM
We have these fancy new 3D maps, like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. (It is actually so new that it is already being phased out…) We have the fancy new Kinect controller, which is the best selling consumer device – ever. What happens when the two are put together? The first step on this road was taken by Joshua Blake. This blog post is about how my company, Response tackled the same problem. Note: we are building on Josh’s code. His code allowed us to display the Bing Maps 3D control in a WPF appli ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 3/31/2011 10:34:45 AM
About a year ago, I wrote an article for SilverlightShow, titled “A Designer-friendly Approach to MVVM”. The article introduced VSMChangerBehavior which allows tying enums in the ViewModel to Visual States in the View. Another Action shown off there is the CallDataContextMethodAction, which calls a method in the DataContext with a twist – if such a method is not found, it can travel up the visual tree, and call the methods there. We have used both the VSMChangerBehavior and the CallDataContext ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 3/29/2011 7:26:55 PM
If I say the next few weeks are going to be exciting, that is a huge understatement. Like saying the Empire State is kinda big. If you are following me on Twitter, you probably know that me and my friend, Bálint Orosz have been voted to present at Mix’11. This is quite an achievement – there were 200 sessions to vote for, and even more that didn’t make the first round. We are honored by each and every vote we received – THANK YOU! The Mix session will be about the lessons learned while desi ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 3/8/2011 3:14:22 PM
It is pretty well known that an app can be notified of the phone’s orientation changes via the PhoneApplicationFrame.OrientationChanged event. However, if you are as serious about sharing the work between the designer and the developer as I am, you will not be happy with this – the changing of the layout should be the responsibility of the designer, not the developer. Of course, the best way to achieve the different layouts is via Visual States. You can define two states like this in Blend: & ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/23/2011 2:49:55 AM
While trying to reduce the loading time for our SurfCube 3D Browser app, I realized that loading a 100 or so history items to a ViewModel property directly bound to the UI may not be the best idea. It takes up a long time (like 0.5 seconds) to render the items in the list, and the user may never see the history during his / her session. The solution is obviously to load the items only when needed. In the upcoming version of SurfCube, we will have a Pivot for choosing between Favorites and Histo ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/7/2011 11:38:41 PM
Encouraging the users of your WP7 app to rate or buy your application, view other apps by you or just send a feedback email can make or break an app. However, the MarketPlace API can be a little confusing, and takes a little time to figure out which method does what. You can’t even try and see for yourself, because most MarketPlace actions don’t work until you actually have the app published. In this blog post I am going to share the code we use in our SurfCube 3D Browser for the above tasks. ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 12/17/2010 8:26:44 AM
Foreword This article discusses how basic Facebook features (such as logging in, posting to a user’s wall) can be accessed from within your Silverlight application. Since we will be discussing the topic of integrating Facebook with Silverlight, understanding the article requires that you have some basic knowledge of the two. Note: this is a guest article, written by a co-worker, Balázs Cseh. It uses an older version of the Facebook API. The Goal - Harnessing the power of social networks Soci ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 11/16/2010 11:40:16 AM
I was asked by Code Project to present at the Mobile Development Virtual Tech Summit about Windows Phone 7 development. Unfortunately, there is not much information at their own web page, so I am putting my session summary here on my blog. The event itself is online (virtual), and will take place on November 17th. After that, the sessions will still be available on-demand. My session is titled “Transferring Your Silverlight Knowledge to Windows Phone 7 Development.”. It is an introductory lev ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 9/14/2010 5:29:00 PM
Windows Phone 7 users can customize their phones by choosing between a dark and a light background, and tons of accent colors. The Windows Phone 7 UI Design and Interaction Guide tells us, that it is good to be theme-aware. For example, if the user selects a light background with red accent color, the application should also display its content on a light background with a red accent color. Built-in Controls The built-in Silverlight colors do a good job of reflecting the phone theme out o ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 8/24/2010 2:00:47 PM
Microsoft has been saying that the Music and Video Hub will be extendable on Windows Phone 7. But so far, it has been fairly unknown what this extension means and how one would go around to implement it. I was lead to the right path by reading the new Windows Phone Marketplace policies document. It has an entire section dedicated to policies regarding a Music + Video Hub application, and states, that “An Application that calls the Microsoft.Devices.MediaHistory or Microsoft.Devices.MediaHistor ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 7/4/2010 3:34:00 PM
I am honored to announce, that I have been re-awarded as a Silverlight MVP for another year! Receiving the congratulatory email always feels a little bit like birthday, and puts a huge grin on my face for days. I can say “always” as this is my third MVP award, and the second in the Silverlight Expertise. This last year was pretty busy for me community-wise. I started the Hungarian Silverlight User Group (Silverlight Klub), and presented at almost all of the meetings. I had 18 speaki ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 5/24/2010 10:43:49 PM
Last week I gave a 3 hour “What’s new in Silverlight 4” talk to the Hungarian Silverlight UG, the Silverlight Klub. I had a LOT of demos, – most of which I prepared, and some I borrowed. The aim of the demos was to give a small code sample to most new features in Silverlight 4, without going deep. In this blog post, I am making those demos available for the general public in one big download. The demos: ClipboadTest: shows off basic Clipboard programmability CollViewSourceGrouping: Datagrind ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 3/12/2010 2:54:08 PM
My new article, “A Designer-friendly Approach to MVVM” is up at Silverlight Show. Here is the intro: “If you work with Silverlight or WPF, you have probably met the phrase “MVVM”. Almost everyone who is anyone in the WPF / Silverlight scene has their own MVVM framework, and their own way of explaining and teaching MVVM. Scary terms like IoC, Dependency Injection, Commanding Frameworks, Event Aggregators, Unit Testing, etc just roll off the tongue of the MVVM experts. This is one of the reasons ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 2/11/2010 10:41:24 PM
I have begun new series of screencasts on SilverlightShow.net. Here is the expert: “As I promised earlier on Silverlight Show, this screencast series will show how to create the showcase application shown on www.response.hu (you may want to read the interview to get some background information on the project). The screencast series shows a real life example of how designers can add value to a project, and how a developer can support this effort by creating small, reusable behaviors that allow ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/16/2010 1:51:11 PM
SilverlightShow recently published an interview with me. They asked about how the showcase app at www.response.hu came to be, and asked me to talk about two of my company’s award winning projects: The Muvesz WPF application (Architecture Journal article is here), and Zoomery, our Silverlight deep zoom framework. In the interview, I also revealed that I will be doing a series of articles / screencasts on how the www.response.hu showcase app was built. The focus will be on using Blend with tips ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 1/11/2010 11:54:20 PM
John Papa asked me (and other Silverlight MVPs) what was the one BIG thing we did around Silverlight in 2009. Here is what I had to say: As a few of you may know, although I have technical background, I am really in love with Silverlight (and WPF) for the user experience it makes possible. I think my BIG thing was that I spread the love on tons of Silverlight and related topics during 2009. I had a 4 hour talk about UX, sketching and Sketchflow at the Architecture Forum; 4 hour talk about Silve ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 12/24/2009 12:06:00 AM
An old problem with Silverlight TextBox is that it only updates its binding when the TextBox loses focus. This can cause a lot of problems, especially for LOB applications. Following a short discussion on Twitter with Rob Eisenberg (@EisenbergEffect), I tried to create a proof-of-concept behavior that can help ease this pain, at least until Silverlight gets an UpdateSourceTrigger that can handle the PropertyChanged value. (You can read more about the problem Rob had on Connect). The behavior its ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 11/18/2009 9:24:00 PM
Today, at the PDC in Los Angeles, Scott Guthrie revealed Silverlight 4 in his keynote. The painful silence enforced by the NDA is now over, and I can talk about all the cool new stuff on Silverlight 4! To me, the most amazing thing is how much the Silverlight team has been listening to the community. Just take a look at the Top 10 most requested SL4 features at: http://silverlight.uservoice.com/pages/4325-feature-suggestions, and compare it with the whatsnew document - 8 out of the top 10 ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 9/28/2009 2:49:00 PM
Maybe some of you know, that originally Silverlight was called WPF/E, or WPF Everywhere. This meant that it would be a cross-platform, cross-device little brother of WPF. You could see a few videos years ago on Channel9, showing off some working Silverlight Mobile applications (they were pretty slow though). But no questions regarding when this would be available was answered – until now. During the Silverlight Firestarter event, we could hear Brad Abrams say that Microsoft’s goal wa ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 9/8/2009 2:58:27 PM
In July, I gave a talk about Silverlight 3, and even though the entire session was 3 hours (and two bottles of mineral water) long, I only had 5 minutes for RIA Services. So, my only goal was to shed some light on the topic, and scratch the surface of the surface… Let me sum that part up here. Disclaimer: this is just a quick blog post answering a forum question, by no way a proper RIA Services intro. The official “What is .Net RIA Services” summary from the download page: “Microsoft .NET RIA ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 8/11/2009 8:58:39 PM
As you probably know, Silverlight 3 was released exactly a month ago. So, is it safe now to work with the new Silverlight 3 features or should you stay with Silverlight 2 for a while to make sure that people with Silverlight installed can view your site without having to upgrade first to SL3? There is one website that I know of that provides independent data on Flash, Java and Silverlight plugin penetration – it is www.riastats.com. I know it is objective or at least definitely not pro-Microsof ...
by vbandi via VBandi's blog on 7/30/2009 7:44:00 AM
The next part of my Discovering Silverlight 3 series is up on Dotnetslackers: Discovering Silverlight 3 – Deep Dive into GPU Acceleration “GPU Acceleration in Silverlight 3 is one of its most touted features – but it only helps in certain situations. This article will help you understand how GPU acceleration works, and when you should or should not use it. “ Unfortunately, the demo application can not yet be run online, but I’ll try to get it working with the edito ...
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