Lightswitch: custom ribbon button

Two weeks ago, on July 26th, Visual Studio Lightswitch 2011 was released. I ‘d seen a couple of videos what you can do with Lightswitch so I though I’d put it to the test by developing a replacement for a tool I use at one of my clients. Lightswitch is really easy to use and I believe I can actually teach my wife to create data-centric application using it. Until you reach the limits though, because than it becomes more difficult really fast.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011 Read

Windows Phone 7 Mango features

A lot has been said and written about Windows Phone 7 Mango. The eagerly awaited update to Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform is said to sport 500 new features, bringing it up to par with its competition. While 500 features sound a lot, it may well be achieved if you count every little detail. Many of the bigger features can be found all over the web, especially in the much detailed Engadget in-depth preview.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011 Read

MIX11: Day 3

It’s a wrap, MIX11 is over. Yesterday was the last day of MIX and many people have already returned to their homes. There was not much news to be shared, but here are my findings anyway. Designer and Developer: A Case for the Hybrid (Jeff Croft) In this talk Jeff Croft talks about what makes good designers and developers. His statement is that designers should know how to program and developers should know how to design.

Friday, April 15, 2011 Read

MIX11: Day 2

Today was a really interesting day, with lots of new stuff being announced and sessions packed with interesting information. These are my findings of this day. Keynote (Joe Belfiore, Scott Guthrie) The keynote started off with an inspiring viral video. It appears a fan of Windows Phone created it by request of Microsoft after he created his own viral out of love of the phone. If the viral gets over 200k of views on YouTube, it is turned into a real commercial.

Thursday, April 14, 2011 Read

MIX11: Day 1

Today was the first conference day and my second day at MIX11. The day began with a keynote and after that a couple of sessions. These are my findings of today. Keynote (Dean Hachamovitch, Scott Guthrie) Dean started off with looking back at the development of IE9 and how successful is has been so far. Then he announced that they’re already three weeks into development of IE10, which didn’t come as a surprise looking at the shirt he was wearing with a bit TEN on it with the ‘E’ being the IE logo.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Read

MIX11: Boot Camps

Today was the preconference day at MIX11, which means boot camps for everyone that applied for them. There were options for the morning and afternoon boot camps and I chose the Silverlight and SharePoint & Silverlight boot camps. This is a brief summary of what I think were things of interest. Silverlight boot camp I didn’t came to this boot camp to improve my knowledge on Silverlight, but more because of the speakers: John Papa and Mike Taulty.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Read

Advanced MVVM: Doing visual states properly

An important plus of rich internet applications is the potential user experience you can achieve by applying UX patterns. A part of this is the visual states and their transitions. A visual state determines what the user interface looks like at a certain point in time and the transitions describe how the application moves from one visual state to the other, many times using animations to enhance the experience. The most obvious way when you’re unfamiliar with XAML is to change the visual state of an application by writing code to show or hide controls when events occur, like e.

Monday, March 14, 2011 Read

Using the Sync Framework on Windows Phone 7

For a mobile platform, like Windows Phone 7, you may be required to allow an application to work even when there’s no data connection available. Doing so is not that easy. You need to manage state locally, synchronize changed data (one-way or duplex) and maybe even handle conflicts. Luckily Microsoft offers the Sync Framework which makes it easier for you to accomplish this by taking much of the required plumbing out of your hands completely.

Friday, January 21, 2011 Read