Timmy Kokke

Extending Blend for Visual Studio

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, I wrote a couple of tutorials on how to write extensions for Expression Blend. Today there’s still not much information available on how to write your own extensions. But it is still possible to extend Blend for Visual Studio. The way to do this is slightly [...]

storyboarding apps in PowerPoint

I recently gave a workshop about developing and designing Windows Store and Windows Phone applications. A small part of that was about storyboarding applications in Microsoft PowerPoint. The Storyboard extension is available for users of Visual Studio Ultimate, Premium and Test Professional. To view PowerPoint presentations containing these storyboards you don’t need any of those, [...]

Windows Phone 8 theme colors for Photoshop

A while ago I posted a Photoshop color swatch with the accent colors of Windows Phone 7. I’m currently working on the design of a few apps that will be released for Windows Phone 8 too. So I created a new set of colors. You can download the set here: WindowsPhone8Accent.

setting view states in HTML windows store apps using Blend

Intro From developing XAML applications I got used to working with the visual state manager to set various states of my applications and controls. In Windows Store apps that are build using XAML use the visual state manager to change various properties when the view state of the app changes. The app can be ran [...]

50 design templates for Windows Store apps

I recently tweeted about some upcoming new design templates. At that time these templates were not released yet. Today I stumbled on them again. And it turns out that they are available for free on codeplex. You can see them all here. It’s not recommended to uses these templates as is. They’re provided as Visual [...]

Telerik Accelerator Challenge

Just wanted to share this challenge my good friends over at Telerik are holding at the moment. Telerik is looking for awesome Windows Store app ideas. If you are a startup and have a great idea for a Windows 8 app this might be a great opportunity for you. You’ll have to enter your idea [...]

Wp7nl utilities Contribution

When building apps for Windows Phone I use my own library. I’m a “lazy” developer and don’t like writing code twice. So I place a lot of code that can be reused, like behaviors, converters and extension methods, in my library. For I while I’ve been thinking about sharing the library as an open source [...]

Windows Phone Emulator Hyper-V Error

I recently reinstalled my laptop with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 to be able to develop Windows Phone 8 application on that. I thought every thing was fine until I ran the first application in the emulator. I immediate got an error: “Something happened while creating a switch: Xde couldn’t find an IPv4 address [...]

Customized Sample data

Intro When working on Windows Phone or Silverlight applications I use the sample data feature of Blend a lot. I like to see what I’m working on. The only downside of this sample data is that it rarely mirrors the data (unless I’m working on the chair application for a company called Lorem Ipsum). I’d [...]

SQLite for WinRT

Intro Often you need to store some data from the application you are building. One option for Windows Store apps is a local database in the file system, SQLite. It’s pretty easy to setup and to use. SQLite is self-contained serverless database engine and is available for free for many platforms ranging from Linux to [...]