Mike Taulty's Blog

Free Visual Studio Lifecycle Tools Events

mtaulty — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:29:31 GMT

Application Lifecycle Management with Visual Studio 2012 Events The UK Visual team have added more dates for free events in May and June, heading out to new places like Cardiff, Nottingham and Glasgow. We have seen a real interest in our Visual studio...(read more)

Windows Phone 8–flickR searching demo from UK Dev Camps

mtaulty — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:37:26 GMT

We’re running some introductory style developer camps for Windows Phone 8 in the UK at the moment targeted at folks who have perhaps done some .NET in the past but haven’t built apps for the Phone yet and as part of those I work through some parts of a demo...(read more)

Annotating PDF Documents in a Windows 8 Store App

mtaulty — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:51:59 GMT

There’s a Windows 8 app that I have a minor involvement with that needs to be able to display PDF documents and also capture annotations (ideally ink) on those documents. I haven’t looked in great detail at how to display PDF documents (other than to launch...(read more)

Windows 8, Background Tasks and the ‘Noisy’ NetworkStatusChange Trigger

mtaulty — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:09:11 GMT

One of the ‘interesting’ things about a Windows Store application and the application lifecycle is that it forces architectural changes onto the way that you’d build an app. You can read the full details on the developer centre if you’ve not looked at this...(read more)

Windows 8–When Saving Isn’t Saving and Opening Isn’t Opening :-)

mtaulty — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:25:43 GMT

In a Windows 8 Store app, it’s pretty easy to put a dialog on the screen that allows the user of your app to save or open a file from/to somewhere. For example, here’s a simple piece of code which attempts to ask the user for a zip file and then will try and...(read more)

Windows 8 (or XAML generally): Loading Images with Progress/Fallback Content

mtaulty — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:35:58 GMT

I think I may have written something similar to this before but I got asked about loading images from the web and so I thought I’d write something down. It’s a pretty common scenario that you have an image control and you want that image control to display...(read more)

Azure Mobile Services: Pre-Release .NET Client Libraries with WP7.5 and PCL Support

mtaulty — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:37:30 GMT

If you’ve been along to one of my talks on Azure Mobile Services you’d have noticed that I’d been fairly careful in talking about Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 support in terms of the .NET class libraries for development on the client side which make working...(read more)

Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8–Application Lifecycles

mtaulty — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 16:20:45 GMT

Mobile devices like phones, slates need operating systems that try and get the best out of the battery power that the device has while providing a fast, responsive experience for the user. The operating system itself can do a tonne of work in this area but...(read more)

Windows Store XAML App–Adding a Privacy Page

mtaulty — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 11:54:21 GMT

A quick post to answer a question that I received from someone around adding a privacy page to a Windows Store app. Why would you need a privacy policy? If you take a look at the page; “Avoiding common certification failures (Windows)” You’ll find the section...(read more)

Analysing Blog Traffic

mtaulty — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:56:58 GMT

A few years ago, I had a manager who wanted to analyse how much traffic the members of my then team were getting to their blog sites and so he had us implement Google Analytics on our blogs. At the time, I wasn’t overly keen as I wasn’t sure that the measurements...(read more)

Windows 8–FlipViews, Data-Bound Items and Item 0

mtaulty — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:22:47 GMT

Hamish tweeted at me about a bug published on the Connect system; Now, naturally I’m sure that nothing is being ‘brushed off’ here but I thought that I recognised the scenario and the last time I looked at it I wasn’t at all sure that I’d figured out any way...(read more)

Windows 8–WinRT StorageFolder, Hidden Files, .NET, C++, AppContainers, Brokering

mtaulty — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 12:39:29 GMT

I was toying around with some code to sum up file and folder sizes on the disk from a Windows Store app and I hit what was, for me, a little bit of a snag. My first attempt (extracted into a smaller snippet) looked something like this; FolderPicker picker ...(read more)

UK App Rewards for Windows 8 and Windows Phone Developers

mtaulty — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 10:10:11 GMT

To flag the launch of the new Windows 8, Windows Phone App Rewards Programme here in the UK I have been publicly goaded on Twitter by my colleague Martin into giving some stuff away. Please note that this is only applicable to people who are resident in the...(read more)

Windows 8: London Meetup Group

mtaulty — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 14:28:51 GMT

As Russell has blogged about, I was down at the London Windows Store App Developer Group this week (Tuesday) talking about Windows Azure Mobile Services as a backend as a service for your mobile apps regardless of platform ( but with specific support for Windows...(read more)

I Just Want to Be Close To You– Initial Experiments with Proximity

mtaulty — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 12:45:28 GMT

Back in September, 2011 I went out to the BUILD conference where Microsoft first talked about Windows 8. At that conference (as I’m sure you know) the attendees got a Samsung Slate prototype device which is close to the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro . Being an...(read more)