Author Archives: Brandon

Removing Ads with an IAP – the Declarative way

Microsoft’s XAML provides a way for us to define our UI in a declarative manner. Combined with databinding it means you should – in almost every case – never have to directly reference a UI control to accomplish some work. Add the MVVM design pattern in to the mix and I find myself “rethinking” any… Read More »

Programmatically changing UI language in Windows Phone

If you’ve done globally-focused development on Windows Phone, you already know that to change the display language, you have to do so in the Settings area of the phone, then reboot the emulator (or physical device) for the change to take effect. What a pain. Wouldn’t it be better to change the UI language on-demand?… Read More »

Testing disk space exceptions with CopyToAsync

I got an error report from the field in Upload to YouTube where the user was getting an unhandled exception when I copied their Camera Roll video to temporary storage to hand off to Movie Maker for editing. Great catch, now to shore up the UX when this happens. Only problem is, I need to… Read More »

Windows Phone 8, Family Safety, and your kids

Amazon recently had a sale on the Lumia 520 “GoPhone” from AT&T. It was down to only $40 out the door, and I also had $10 in Amazon gift card credit in my account. So why not. Free shipping, to my door, and I have a new test device for my Windows Phone app development.… Read More »

Multilingual App Toolkit – Give your app some global appeal

Sure, you’re a good dev and you know that you should be putting all your strings in a RESX file if for no other reason than to centralize them so you only have to update them in one place. And maybe you do get some translations to other languages (good for you!). But what if… Read More »

SSH Tunnel setup–for Windows users

“What’s an SSH tunnel?” you ask? In layman’s terms, it’s a way for you to take one PC, and pipe all its network traffic through another PC before it gets out to the internet. So what this means is that if, oh, somewhere were to say, monitor the traffic from your PC all they’d see… Read More »

TPL in a Unit Test? GENIUS!

How often have you created a unit test that you knew was long running (test all ___ overnight), only to find that eventually you hit a time when it never stopped, and horked up the rest of the test run? It’s happened to the best of us, I’m sure. However, thanks to .Net’s beautiful TPL,… Read More »