Author Archives: Brandon

Windows 8’s GridView – Not meant for data entry!

Here’s an interesting experiment. Slap this in to a blank Windows Store app’s MainPage.xaml: Now run it in the simulator and flip to Touch-mode. Click the bottom-most textbox in the first column. See what happens? You can’t see the textbox you’re typing in to! The OS doesn’t handle the “auto-scrolling” of the page’s frame when you… Read More »

Windows 8’s ComboBox and the CarouselPanel

Something you may or may not have noticed in your Windows 8 development is that the ComboBox uses a pretty interesting control new to Windows 8, the CarouselPanel. What the CarouselPanel brings to us is the ability to, as the name suggests, roll continuously through the list of items, looping back to the beginning or… Read More »

Don’t get Scroogled. Migrate to Outlook.com calendar today

Ok so this feud between Microsoft and Google has gone far enough. Yesterday the core apps for Windows 8 were updated (People, Mail, Calendar, Messaging) and the capability to integrate with Google Calendars has gone away. You now only get Google Mail, via IMAP – and even that is flakey (I still can’t get sub-folders… Read More »

Cross-(Modern)-platform Federated Authentication

So in my previous post we discovered the joys of federated authentication using the sexy tools provided by the Windows Azure team. Now, let’s make the most of them. Something that is troubling developers more and more as Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 really stretch their legs in both the consumer and enterprise spaces… Read More »

Multi-service Authentication the easy way

I’m working on a new project that’ll be targeting both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. My hope is that this baby will end up being quite a big deal so I am actually giving Azure a good, hard, look. My first use case is that I’d like to have users log in to my… Read More »

Windows Phone 8 & the Nokia Lumia 822 – first impressions

Fast. Fluid. Flexible. Coming from my antiquated HTC Trophy, the 822 is amazing. If it was my first time Windows Phone, I would be crazy impressed. But remember, I’ve had my Trophy since it was available, and was developing (so experiencing WP7 via emulator) since day 1 of the Windows Phone SDK release. So I’m… Read More »

Update on WP8 Extensibility hooks

Last week I sent this to Windows Phone Dev Support: One of my Apps uses the Search Extensibility capability. After WP8 was released, the version I had on the market, which was supposed to have been recompiled by MS for WP8, doesn’t work on WP8. Likewise, after going through and building a WP8 version that… Read More »

Warning: Your WP7 app’s Extensibility hooks didn’t come forward to its WP8 version

I found out today, via an error report from the field no less, that one of my apps which uses some of the Extensibility hooks (aka App Connect) that were released as part of WP7 Mango doesn’t work on WP8. Upon investigating, it appears that when MS recompiled our apps to run on WP8 devices,… Read More »