Blogs

One of the things I enjoy doing most is teaching developers how to write Windows Store apps using XAML and C#. I’ve been doing a lot of that lately, both for Microsoft and for other customers as well. But it has become clear to me as I teach these classes that in a typical class,…

On May 9th, I’ll be speaking at the South Sound .NET User Group in Olympia, WA on all about IntelliTrace. See location and signup info here. IntelliTrace is the first real Windows debugging technology since the hair band days of the 1980’s. This session will be PowerPoint free and nothing but demos and questions on…

I’ve spent a lot of time this spring learning about Near Field Communication (NFC) and the NFC networking API in WinRT. That part of WinRT is present both in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, which means it’s relatively easy to get tablets and phones talking to each peer-to-peer. One of the things I love…

I’ve become enamored with Silverlight behaviors lately because they provide a clean and easy-to-use mechanism for encapsulating complex behavioral logic and applying it to XAML elements. And I’m equally enamored with Silverlight pixel shaders, which allow similar encapsulation of complex visual effects implemented using Microsoft’s High-Level Shader Language, better known as HLSL. Last spring, I blogged about a technique…

Silverlight 4 shipped this week, and you can download it along with all the tools you need to develop for it from the Silverlight Web site. Silverlight 4 represents a milestone of sorts in that it adds the features you need to build line-of-business (LOB) apps that run inside or outside the browser. Among the…

I’m spending the bulk of my time these days writing applications for Windows phones using Silverlight for Windows Phone (and having a blast doing it, I might add). As I write, I think of lots of little tips that can save time, reduce aggravation, and help all of us build better applications. So I thought…

Here’s a quick one that’ll save you a lot of time and trouble if you’re not already aware of it. One of the coolest features of Visual Studio is that you can launch a debug run of a phone application on a phone rather than in the emulator. Since the emulator can’t emulate everything, sometimes…

One of the improvements you can look forward to in Silverlight 3 is element data binding, also known as element-to-element data binding. Silverlight 2’s {Binding} expression allowed you to specify the name of the property you were binding to, but not the element that owned the property. This typically meant you had to write a…