Using the Android Hyper-V Preview with Visual Studio 2013

   Happy New Year to you all! While I am anxiously waiting to know if I will be renewed today as an Microsoft MVP (btw being MVP is an awesome experience, the MVPSummit was a great experience even if I was expecting to see more new things so if you can get involved and try this experience). Still planning to do the post on BLE background agents but there are so many things to write that I have to find time to write it. Hopefully this will happen soon.
    So this small post is all about running the Android Hyper-V Preview Emulator that comes with the Visual Studio 2015 Preview as a stand-alone emulator and use it with your production machine running Visual Studio 2013 and the Xamarin tools. Even if the emulator is still in preview if you are doing Android and Windows Phone development on the same machine you won't have to reboot your machine without Hyper-V support in order to have a decent Android emulator. Strangely Microsoft decided for this preview that the emulator can install only if you have the preview of Visual Studio 2015. In theory you could run the preview along with Visual Studio 2013 but things are not always perfect so many of you will keep two different instances for VS 2013 and the Preview. In oreder to get the emulator work you will still have to install the preview of Visual Studio 2015 on some virtual machine or secondary machine and copy the needed files.
    The method is pretty simple. All you will need to do is to copy the folder "Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android" that is located inside Program Files (x86) [ %PROGRAMFILES(X86)%] folder to the machine you want to run the emulator on. At this point you have everything you need. Copy the folder at the same location on the other machine. We still need to take two steps before launching the emulator for the first time. Inside the folder that you've just copied there are two files vsemu.vhd and sdcard.vhd that will be used to "generate" the two virtual machines (phone and tablet). Here are the two steps that you have to take:

1.  Make sure that adb.exe is in your Path as it will be used by XDE.exe
2. Create a new folder called Android inside the folder "%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XDE" and copy the two vhd each of them two times with the following names:

     vsemu.vhd copied as: vsemulator.phone.android.vhd and vsemulator.tablet.android.vhd
     sdcard.vhd copied as vsemulator.phone.android.sdcard.vhd and vsemulator.tablet.android.sdcard.vhd

     Now we are ready to start the emulator. You won't be able to start the emulator from Visual Studio 2013 the way VS 2015 Preview does but you can start it manually and once you've started it and the adb automatically connects to the emulator you will see it in Visual Studio as a deployable device. Let's not mention that you can actually use the accelerometer, the location, battery simulation and the screenshot (awesome).

     Here are the two commands that you need to run (make a batch on your desktop):

Phone Android Emulator:
"%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android\1.0\XDE.exe" /name "VS Emulator Android - Phone" /vhd %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XDE\Android\vsemulator.phone.android.vhd /video "720x1280" /memsize 1024 /telemetrySession "14.0;eyJBcHBJZCI6MTAwMSwiRGVmYXVsdENvbnRleHRJZCI6ImJkNmMxNjk2LTQ5ZjUtNDI4My1iZTk2LWUzNGNjZWYwZTA4YSIsIkhvc3ROYW1lIjoiRGV2MTQiLCJJZCI6ImIyOWZlODMwLThhOWMtNDE1Yy04MWExLWFlNTFkNzFiYTUwNSIsIklzT3B0ZWRJbiI6dHJ1ZSwiUHJvY2Vzc1N0YXJ0VGltZSI6NjM1NTU2MTAxODUyMjI0MzA1fQ=="

Tablet Android Emulator:
"%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio Emulator for Android\1.0\XDE.exe" /name "VS Emulator Android - Tablet" /vhd %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\XDE\Android\vsemulator.tablet.android.vhd /video "1080x1920" /memsize 2048 /telemetrySession "14.0;eyJBcHBJZCI6MTAwMSwiRGVmYXVsdENvbnRleHRJZCI6ImJkNmMxNjk2LTQ5ZjUtNDI4My1iZTk2LWUzNGNjZWYwZTA4YSIsIkhvc3ROYW1lIjoiRGV2MTQiLCJJZCI6ImIyOWZlODMwLThhOWMtNDE1Yy04MWExLWFlNTFkNzFiYTUwNSIsIklzT3B0ZWRJbiI6dHJ1ZSwiUHJvY2Vzc1N0YXJ0VGltZSI6NjM1NTU2MTAxODUyMjI0MzA1fQ==" /noStart

You won't probably need the /telemetrySession but this way you could give back some feedback (I guess). Also the first time you run the emulator it will ask permission to configure the Internet on the device and of course you will have to accept.

Also while digging to make this work I found out that the source code of the Android Preview Emulator is published here:  http://aka.ms/getsource . In the same place there is also the source code for the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter. It looks like it is running on Linux kernel with a pretty decent CPU and we might get some new features other than a simple Miracast adapter.

Until my next blog post: NAMASTE and again HAVE A GREAT NEW YEAR!

What Windows Phone Start screen should learn/inherit from Windows 8.1

    Last week I did a session on live tiles and it got me thinking on how Microsoft and the Windows Phone team could actually improve the Start screen experience and also the application list that, in my opinion, lacks design and more important it is not very practical to use. Please consider that i am not a designer and i did not have time to invest in doing the screenshots (did cut and paste using Paint.Net). I am doing this post just to illustrate my ideas.

    Let me start with the start screen. The live tiles are an awesome feature and really differentiate Windows and Windows Phone from their competitors.  I think that, for certain functionality,the Windows 8.1/8 start screen is better than the Windows Phone one. First of all (and the most important) the Scroll Direction. The windows phone have the start screen in vertical compared to Windows 8 which is horizontal. Horizontal scrolling would be better and here are some reasons why I think this:

• the main reason why you scroll is because you did not find what you were looking for so you would like to reach the part you are interested as fast as possible. All Windows Phone have the height > width in Pixels so scrolling horizontally you actually scroll MORE information than scrolling vertically 
• If scrolling would be horizontal it would be possible to implement grouping just like Windows 8 and enable a functionality similar to semantic zoom or jump list to easily reach the tile/tiles you need
• It would be also more familiar to people coming from other platforms (like Android or iOs) where the scrolling is horizontal
• Different from Windows 8 or tablet UI I think that this scroll should be Paged and not continuous similar to what you have on iOS e Android. This is because the user would be faster to search what he needs (if it is not on the page I see now better scroll a whole page and not a part of it). This won't minimize in any way the live tiles functionality but would give better speed in seeing all I am interested in. 
• If the user gives titles to the various pages then in the JumpList/SemanticZoom he would see those names otherwise he sees the number of pages and he can easily reach any page (even the last one) without scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

• The last page of the start screen that is not full would have the arrow orientated down just to give the hint to the user that the Application full list is "under" the start screen just like in Windows 8.1

Other aspect where Windows 8.1 start screen is better is the tile templates. Windows 8.1, in comparison with windows Phone, has much more templates that fit better the needs of the developers. In Windows Phone you can actually build your own images with everything on it but it would be better to have more standard templates. The current templates when used "as is" are pretty limited:

• The flip template is "slow" to change from one side to the other and this way not everything you need to see is right in front of you. You should actually put secondary informations on the back and expect that 70% of the time the user would not wait for the tile to flip
• The iconic template in small and medium sizes have the same informations so it is a "waste" of space to keep the iconic tiles in medium size when you could have them little 
• The cyclic template is more decorative then functional. Even if you build the images I am curious how many people will actually wait for the images to finish a cycle instead of launching the application. For something like photos app it is ok if the user just want to add decorative items to your start screen

If the Start Screen would be horizontal in this case the application list should be accessed by scrolling vertically just like in the Windows 8.1. The current design of the application list is not optimal it doesn't take advantage of the space it has and because of that you would have to scroll a lot. Even with the Jumplist it is a lot of scrolling. It would be actually better (in my opinion) a paged grid + Jumplist/semantic zoom to easily jump the pages+ Search to easily find an app. Grid design it would even scale better on higher resolutions as it could have more columns. Here is a small comparison (I repeat I am not a designer). Again paged scrolling would give you better speed than continuous scrolling.

Near the search there could actually be a button that enables the user to change the grouping  (alphabetical, most used, recently downloaded,...).

If you read this post and have observations (maybe I am missing something) or ideas please let me know. There is always room to improve the user experience and my only wish is that Windows Phone get better and better each year.

UPDATE: And the most important when implementing horizontal scrolling, new templates apart from better functionality is better transition and familiarity (don't really find the right word) between desktop and phone

NAMASTE

Add side menus to an Windows Phone application (similar to the Facebook app)

     It is been a while since my last post, but I have a good reason (on the 20th of July - so tired that the first time I've mistaken the date by one month -  my son Mattia was born and between work and my duties and no sleep there is not much time left for writing on my blog even if I have a lot of posts that I want to do).  

     I will get right to the subject (the title is not one of the best chosen). A few days ago I was talking with my friend Alessandro Scardova about the possibility of implementing side menus inside an Windows Phone application (similar to the ones in the Facebook application). Even if not 100%"Modern UI" design it is a good approach for applications that have multiple options that need to be accessed quickly (also the approach can be applied cross-platform). So I took it as a challange and tried to implement it.

     My initial thought was that I might be able to implement it using an templated panorama or pivot, but after some tests I was not able to get the desired behaviour:

• when we start the application we will have the selected ViewPort selected
• swiping left or right we can open/close the side menus
• also using the buttons on the upper left and on the right corners we can also close and open the side menus
• the side menus have a width smaller than 480 this way, when opened, we can still see a part of main viewport (including the upper button)
• when opening the menus the ApplicationBar is not visible

     The solution I have implemented (doesn't use MVVM pattern) it is more a proof of concept on how to implement the functionality. The approach is pretty simple. We have the whole view that we move inside a canvas using manipulations and animations. Initially I thought that I can use only  grid without the canvas and animate the margin of the grid but, as Windows Phone doesn't have ThicknessAnimation, my animations for opening and closing the menus were not very smooth. Also I've tried implementing the swipe behaviour using the Touch.FrameReported event but the results I got were not very good.

     So how does my implementation work:

• I have a canvas/grid that has a width of 1320 and the height stretches to the whole available height that contains my whole view
• The view is inserted in a canvas with initial Canvas.Left position set to -420 this way we see the main view port (component)
• The "stable" positions inside the canvas are:  0: left menu opened, -420: main view and -840:right menu opened
• When pressing the buttons we will use a resource Storyboard with a  DoubleAnimation to set the the Canvas.Left position inside the canvas to 0,-420 or -840:

  <Canvas.Resources>  
       <Storyboard x:Name="moveAnimation">  
         <DoubleAnimation Duration="0:0:0.2" To="0" Storyboard.TargetProperty="(Canvas.Left)" Storyboard.TargetName="LayoutRoot" d:IsOptimized="True" />  
       </Storyboard>  
     </Canvas.Resources>  

Use the animation to open/close the menus:

  void MoveViewWindow(double left)  
     {  
       _viewMoved = true;  
       if (left==-420)  
         ApplicationBar.IsVisible = true;  
       else  
         ApplicationBar.IsVisible = false;  
       ((Storyboard)canvas.Resources["moveAnimation"]).SkipToFill();  
       ((DoubleAnimation)((Storyboard)canvas.Resources["moveAnimation"]).Children[0]).To = left;  
       ((Storyboard)canvas.Resources["moveAnimation"]).Begin();  
     }  

• To implement the swipe I use the ManipulationStarted, ManipulationDelta and ManipulationEnded on the canvas container. On delta we set the Canvas.Left value directly (no need for animations) between a maximum of 0 and a minimum of -840.

  private void canvas_ManipulationDelta(object sender, ManipulationDeltaEventArgs e)  
     {  
       if (e.DeltaManipulation.Translation.X != 0)  
         Canvas.SetLeft(LayoutRoot, Math.Min(Math.Max(-840, Canvas.GetLeft(LayoutRoot) + e.DeltaManipulation.Translation.X), 0));  
     }  

• when swiping we also memorize the initial Canvas.Left position. If substracting the final Canvas.Left and the initial one the absolute value is lower then 100 (not a long swipe) we bounce back to the initial position. Otherwise we move to the next position.

  private void canvas_ManipulationCompleted(object sender, ManipulationCompletedEventArgs e)  
     {  
       var left = Canvas.GetLeft(LayoutRoot);  
       if (_viewMoved)  
         return;  
       if (Math.Abs(initialPosition - left) < 100)  
       {  
         //bouncing back  
         MoveViewWindow(initialPosition);  
         return;  
       }  
       //change of state  
       if (initialPosition - left > 0)  
       {  
         //slide to the left  
         if (initialPosition > -420)  
            MoveViewWindow(-420);  
         else  
           MoveViewWindow(-840);  
       }  
       else  
       {  
         //slide to the right  
         if (initialPosition< -420)  
            MoveViewWindow(-420);  
         else  
           MoveViewWindow(0);  
       }  
     }  

• _viewMoved is used to see if the view was already moved by another event since our manipulation started (like a button was pressed)

   Here are some screenshots from the sample that you can download and play with:

   Hope you will find it useful.

Here is the SOURCE CODE

NAMASTE!

Embed YouTube videos into your Windows Phone/Windows 8 app

    That was quite a long time with no blog post, but I am coming back. Recently I had to investigate the possibility to embed youtube videos in an Windows Phone application. The easy way is to simply launch IE with the Uri of the video, but this way you have no control over the video as your app will get suspended. I then had a look at the Youtube client apps available in the Windows Phone Store and saw that some of them integrate the video directly into the app. So wanna know how they are doing this?

   Well there is a library availabe on codeplex called MyToolkit. This library has a class that is able to retreieve the Uri of the video stream directly from the YouTube video id. You can then download the stream for offline access or can directly play the video using the MediaPlayerLauncher. MyToolkit is also available as a nu-get component so you can directly add a reference to it.
     The MyToolkit library is really nice, but what if we could improve it a little bit more and have more control over the video? If we would be able to play the video inside our application page would give us the possibility, for example, to add advertising on top of the video (video apps have a good chance of monetizing using advertising as the user, just like in games, would probably stay longer on that page). For this task we can use Microsoft Player Framework that is available for both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8. Even more the Player Framework will handle the buffering depending on your connection speed, it is a control inside your page and also will give you full-control over the video playback. (the Player Framework is awesome and is expandible).
    So let's create a small test application. First download and install the Player Framework as it is not available on nu-get (yet). I have used the version 1.3 beta. Then create a new Windows Phone 8 project add reference to the Media Player Framework Windows Phone extension and then, from nu-get, get the MyToolkit.Extended library. For simplicity my MainPage looks like this :

   <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Transparent">  
     <mmppf:MediaPlayer x:Name="player">   
     </mmppf:MediaPlayer>  
   </Grid>  

where mmpf is:

 xmlns:mmppf="clr-namespace:Microsoft.PlayerFramework;assembly=Microsoft.PlayerFramework"  

    Now on Loaded event I use MyToolkit to retrieve the YouTube stream Uri and then pass it to the MediaPlayer:

 private async void PhoneApplicationPage_Loaded(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)  
     {  
       var videoUri = await MyToolkit.Multimedia.YouTube.GetVideoUriAsync("PQVlW4xbNuI", MyToolkit.Multimedia.YouTubeQuality.Quality480P, MyToolkit.Multimedia.YouTubeQuality.Quality480P);  
       if (videoUri != null)  
         player.Source = videoUri.Uri;  
     }  

    For convenience the page is set to landscape. I don't know if playing Youtube video using this method is 100% legal as it bypasses the advertising (it is what every other windows phone YouTube app is using including the one from Microsoft that was pulled out of the store).
    Also pay attention that there are some videos where the resulting stream is protected/encoded and cannot be played by the Player Framework. One of these videos is Girl on fire by Alicia Keys. Also Microsoft's Youtube app (if you still have it installed ) was not able to open this type of streams and just gives an error while MetroTube, after realizing that it cannot open the stream inside the app, it launches Internet Explorer with the "classic" link to the video.
    The same method and libraries can be used for your Windows 8 store application.

    Here is the Source Code. (the video I use is my own).

NAMASTE

Why setting a control Height and Width to 0 is not the brightest idea inside a Windows Phone project

I am doing this small post because I have battled the whole morning with this bug and finally got it and it might save you some time if you read it and have the same problem. 

Scenario: Pivot with two items and at some point the swipe on one of the items doesn't work anymore. Putting a button on the PivotItem that doesn't swipe I can still change the selected item and the second item still swipes correctly.

Cause: I was setting the Height=0 and Width=0 on a control inside the PivotItem (in my project I don't want my control to be collapsed). The problem presents itself if you set any of the controls inside a PivotItem to Height and Width = 0 when the PivotItem is selected. If on the other hand you set the Height and the Width to anything >1 the PivotItem continues to swipe correctly. Even more strange: if the PivotItem is not selected when  you set the Width and Height to 0 and swipe to the control's PivotItem everything will still work correctly. So pay attention better not use set Width and Height =0 on UI controls. 

If you want to test it yourself and maybe tell me what really happens I am attaching a small project created from a Windows Phone Pivot application where I've added a menu that will set the Height and Width of the list inside the first PivotItem to 0. I also set the background of the first PivotItem to green so you will see that it is still expanded. 

How to reproduce the problem: If you execute the menu command with the first PivotItem selected you will see that the pivot doesn't swipe anymore. If you change the values to 1, run the app again and execute the menu with the first PivotItem selected you will see that the pivot still swipes correctly. If, on the other hand, you let the values set to 0 but when executing the menu you have the second PivotItem selected you will see that the first item stil swipes correctly. Bug? Feature? Just pay attention to setting controls to Width and Height 0 because you might have problems with the UI and you won't know what is causing it.

SOURCE CODE

NAMASTE

Fix Panorama layout when upgrading your project to OS 8.0 SDK

  This will be a really short blog post but might save you some time if you have an OS 7.1 Panorama project and decide to upgrade the project to 8.0 SDK. After the upgrade you might see that the layout of your old page changed and you have less content available for the items and also the header looks different. Don't try to fix the problem by changing the margin of the control on the OS 8.0 SDK. The reason why this happens is because the Windows Phone SDK team decided to "tweak" a little bit the default style for the Panorama control, to be more precise the TitleLayer part of the style.

  On Windows Phone OS 7.1 projects the TitleLayer looks like this:

 <controlsPrimitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CacheMode="BitmapCache" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="187" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-76,0,9" Grid.Row="0"/>  

while on OS 8.0 we have:

 <Primitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CharacterSpacing="-35" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="170" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-34,0,0" Grid.Row="0"/>  

You can see that not only the margin have changed (the reason why on OS 8.0 version we have less space in the content -44px ), but also the font size changed from 187 to 170 producing these visual differences:

The solution to this problem is pretty simple: extract the old style of the Panorama control (the easiest way is using Blend) and apply to both WP7.1 and OS 8.0 versions of your project. This way the UI will be consistent between the two versions of the app. If you don't want to use Blend I am attaching the default OS 7.1 style so you can directly copy/paste it in your project and apply it to your Panorama control.

 <Style x:Key="PanoramaStyleWP71" TargetType="controls:Panorama">  
                <Setter Property="ItemsPanel">  
                     <Setter.Value>  
                          <ItemsPanelTemplate>  
                               <controlsPrimitives:PanoramaPanel x:Name="panel"/>  
                          </ItemsPanelTemplate>  
                     </Setter.Value>  
                </Setter>  
                <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"/>  
                <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"/>  
                <Setter Property="Template">  
                     <Setter.Value>  
                          <ControlTemplate TargetType="controls:Panorama">  
                               <Grid>  
                                    <Grid.RowDefinitions>  
                                         <RowDefinition Height="auto"/>  
                                         <RowDefinition Height="*"/>  
                                    </Grid.RowDefinitions>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningBackgroundLayer x:Name="BackgroundLayer" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Grid.RowSpan="2">  
                                         <Border x:Name="background" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" CacheMode="BitmapCache"/>  
                                    </controlsPrimitives:PanningBackgroundLayer>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CacheMode="BitmapCache" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="187" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-76,0,9" Grid.Row="0"/>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningLayer x:Name="ItemsLayer" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Grid.Row="1">  
                                         <ItemsPresenter x:Name="items"/>  
                                    </controlsPrimitives:PanningLayer>  
                               </Grid>  
                          </ControlTemplate>  
                     </Setter.Value>  
                </Setter>  
           </Style>  

NAMASTE

Type forwarding and XAML sharing between WP OS 7.1 and 8.0 projects

    This post is about a new feature available in Windows Phone OS 8.0 SDK called Type Forwarding.

    Have you ever wondered how does the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK handles the fact that the Panorama, Pivot controls changed the namespace and the assembly from OS 7.1 SDK to OS 8.0 SDK? (80% that you haven't :) ). I recently had to migrate an OS 7.1 project to OS 8.0, but also keep the old one (duplicated the old project and upgrade the duplicated one).

    Here is the story of what happens when you upgrade an OS 7.1 project that uses Panaroma or Pivot to OS 8.0:
    If you start a new Windows Phone Pivot App with the target OS 8.0 inside MainPage.xaml the prefix "phone" is used for the Pivot control where "phone" is:

 xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"  

    If, on the other hand, you create a new Windows Phone Pivot App with the target OS 7.1 inside MainPage.xaml the prefix "controls" is used for the Pivot/Panorama control where "controls" is:

 xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls"  

    The real "magic" happens when you upgrade the Windows Phone 7.1 project to OS 8.0. The MainPage.xaml page doesn't change (you will still see the "controls" tag is kept in order to be able to better share the code between the versions), but instead a reference to Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll is added to the OS 8.0 reference that is not used if you create a new project with target OS 8.0. If you wonder if by adding this reference you use the old version of the controls the answer is NO. What this assembly does is that is uses a really neat and new  feature of the .Net compiler called Type Forwarding. This feature can be used when you move a class from one namespace/dll (assembly) to another and you don't want to recompile the application to reference the new dll but you will only deploy the two dlls where the first one (the one that the application already knew uses the Type Forwarding to tell the application that a certain class/es moved to another assembly). In the case of Windows Phone OS 8.0 SDK the usage is even "cooler" as it enables you to use the same XAML for both OS 7.1 projects and OS 8.0 ones. Inside AssemblyInfo.cs of Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll OS 8.0 version we have all the declarations needed to forward the types to their new locations:

 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Panorama))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanoramaItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Pivot))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotItemEventArgs))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(AnimationDirection))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningBackgroundLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningTitleLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanoramaPanel))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotHeaderItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotHeadersControl))]  

I am attaching a small project called TypeForwarding that implements the same functionality as Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll OS 8.0 version.

Other usages that I can thing of:

• Flurry SDK changes the name of the namespace for the Api class for WP7SDK to WP8SDK (bad choice when you need code sharing). If you want to keep the same code for the OS 7.1 and the OS 8.0 version of the app you will have to use conditional compiling for every file where you use the Api class. Much easier would be to create an OS 8.0 library project with the default namespace WP7SDK and forward the Api class to the WP8SDK added as a reference to the library project. This way the old WP7SDK will continue to work as it was on the OS 8.0 using the OS 8.0 version of the Flurry SDK.
• MVVM Light. If you use inside your XAML the EventToCommand this is not xaml shareable between OS 7.1 and OS 8.0 because the assemblies changes from GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Extras.WP71.dll to GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Extras.WP8.dll. The easiest approach in this case (an open source) would be to recompile the dll and use the same name for both versions of the dll. But if you don't have access to the source code of the dll you could use type forwarding.  Also a third approach would be to derive your on class like MyEventToCommand and use this inside the xaml.

Keep in mind this neat feature because you might need it. I would also love to see, in the next version of the SDK, the possibility to use MarkupExtension this way we could conditionally compile parts of the XAML depending on the version of the SDK the app is running on. Have a look at this blog post that explains how it works on WPF projects.

SOURCE CODE

Till next post NAMASTE and have fun coding for Windows Phone!

Detect the screen resolution for Windows Phone OS 7.1 applications

    As you probably know Windows Phone 7.1 applications run perfectly on Windows Phone 8 devices. This means that your application/s could run on multiple display resolutions (which are the resolutions supported by Windows Phone 8 devices). If you want to take advantage of the new resolutions (for example downloading higher quality images for higher resolutions devices, fix some minor UI anomalies on higher resolutions) you will need to know the ScaleFactor of the device. The property is only available in the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, but the good news is that you can access it using reflection.

Solution:

We retrieve the Get method of the ScaleFactor property and invoke it only if the application is running on an Windows Phone 8 device.

Here is the source code:

  public static Size DisplayResolution  
     {  
       get  
       {  
         if (Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major<8)  
           return new Size(480,800);  
         int scaleFactor=(int) GetProperty(Application.Current.Host.Content, "ScaleFactor");  
         switch (scaleFactor)  
         {  
           case 100:  
             return new Size(480, 800);  
           case 150:  
             return new Size(720, 1280);  
           case 160:  
             return new Size(768, 1280);  
         }  
         return new Size(480, 800);  
       }  
     }  
     private static object GetProperty(object instance, string name)  
     {  
       var getMethod= instance.GetType().GetProperty(name).GetGetMethod();  
       return getMethod.Invoke(instance, null);  
     }  

I am also attaching a small sample Windows Phone OS 7.1 test project.

SOURCE CODE

P.S. I think Telerik could use this method to fix this RadToolTip visual anomaly (the 1 pixel width lines that I have filled with blue for contrast) :

NAMASTE

Smooth scrolling content on Windows Phone

     Gotta say that I am not 100% satisfied about the title of this blog post, but since I haven't found a better one I will use this one (don't get it wrong windows phone has smooth scrolling implemented). This post is focusing on how to smooth scroll the content of a ScrollViewer. If you are using the ScrollViewer you know that it already has the method ScrollToVerticalOffset that can be used to manually scroll the content but this method doesn't have any animation implemented so you will see only a fast redraw of the new content without getting the "feeling" that the content scrolled to the new position. The easiest way to achieve this task would be using a StoryBoard with an Animation on the property VerticalOffset of the ScrollViewer, but VerticalOffset is a read-only property so it cannot be set and therefore cannot be used for animation.

     The solution I found was to build a custom control and add a custom property that can be used as a target for a DoubleAnimation. The attached sample (see the link at the end of the post) is using a ListBox as the content of my Custom Control but you can use anything else inside the control (a better approach for the ListBox would be to create a custom control derived directly from ListBox and use the built-in ScrollViewer). 

      Let's start from the XAML part of the User Control:

  <ScrollViewer x:Name="scroller">  
     <ContentPresenter Content="{Binding ContentArea, ElementName=userControl}"/>  
  </ScrollViewer>  

    So we have a ScrollViewer which inside has a ContentPreseter that has its content binded to the control's property ContentArea. Now let us have a look at the .cs code.

 public static readonly DependencyProperty VerticalOffsetProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("VerticalOffset",  
       typeof(double), typeof(SmoothScroller), new PropertyMetadata(VerticalOffsetPropertyChanged));  
     public double VerticalOffset  
     {  
       get { return (double)this.GetValue(VerticalOffsetProperty); }  
       set { this.SetValue(VerticalOffsetProperty, value); }  
     }  
     private static void VerticalOffsetPropertyChanged(object sender, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs args)  
     {  
       SmoothScroller cThis = sender as SmoothScroller;  
       cThis.scroller.ScrollToVerticalOffset((double)args.NewValue);  
     }  
     public static readonly DependencyProperty ContentAreaProperty = DependencyProperty.Register("ContentArea", typeof(object), typeof(SmoothScroller), null);  
     public object ContentArea  
     {  
       get { return (object)GetValue(ContentAreaProperty); }  
       set { SetValue(ContentAreaProperty, value); }  
     }  

     The property that we will use for animation is the VerticalOffset that uses the method VerticalOffsetPropertyChanged to scroll to a vertical offset inside the control's scroller. The property VerticalOffset can be animated and we will use it to smooth scroll the ListBox content.
     Here is the content of the MainPage.xaml

  <uc:SmoothScroller x:Name="smoothScroller">  
         <uc:SmoothScroller.ContentArea>  
         <ListBox x:Name="lstItems" ItemsSource="{Binding Items}" ScrollViewer.VerticalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled" ScrollViewer.HorizontalScrollBarVisibility="Disabled" ItemTemplate="{StaticResource DataTemplate}" >  
           <ListBox.ItemContainerStyle>  
             <Style TargetType="ListBoxItem">  
               <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch"></Setter>  
             </Style>  
           </ListBox.ItemContainerStyle>  
         </ListBox>  
         </uc:SmoothScroller.ContentArea>  
       </uc:SmoothScroller>  

     So we have the SmoothScroller control which inside its ContentArea has a ListBox (the ListBox has it's scrollviewer disabled). What the sample does is it is changing the selected item every second (incrementing the selectedindex) and scrolls the content so that the newly SelectedItem is centered in the ScrollViewer. Here is the code used for scrolling:

  void dt_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)  
     {  
       ((ListBox)smoothScroller.ContentArea).SelectedIndex = idx;  
       var container = ((ListBox)smoothScroller.ContentArea).ItemContainerGenerator.ContainerFromIndex(idx) as FrameworkElement;  
       var transform = container.TransformToVisual(smoothScroller.scroller);  
       var elementLocation = transform.Transform(new Point(0, 0));  
       double newVerticalOffset = elementLocation.Y + smoothScroller.scroller.VerticalOffset - smoothScroller.scroller.ActualHeight / 2 ;  
       //Animate transition  
       DoubleAnimation verticalAnimation = new DoubleAnimation();  
       verticalAnimation.From = smoothScroller.scroller.VerticalOffset;  
       verticalAnimation.To = newVerticalOffset;  
       verticalAnimation.Duration = new Duration(TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds(500));  
       var sb = new Storyboard();  
       sb.Children.Add(verticalAnimation);  
       Storyboard.SetTarget(verticalAnimation, smoothScroller);  
       Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(verticalAnimation, new PropertyPath(SmoothScroller.VerticalOffsetProperty));  
       sb.Begin();  
       idx++;  
       if (idx >= 56)  
         dt.Stop();  
     }  

     Pretty basic: select the new index in the ListBox, calculate the new VerticalOffset so that the newly selected item is centered in our scrollviewer and create and start a 500ms animation for the SmoothScroller.VerticalOffsetProperty. Anyway I am sure that you will better understand how it works when you will try the sample code.
     The sample is far from perfect (before starting a new animation I should check if the old one finished, should not automatically scroll when the user is manipulating the list,...).
     Here is a screenshot from the sample:

As usual let me know if you need help. The code works on both Windows Phone 7.1 and Windows Phone 8 SDK.

SOURCE CODE

WP7 Series - Phone Interface

Back in February I was really upset when they didn't show the phone interface of the new WP7. For me it is still the most important part of a Phone. Today, when I saw the videos published on Engadget I understood why... Not only that it looks unfinished, but it's like they didn't really start developing that part. Why did they invest a lot of work in the XBox Live hub (avatar movements with the accelerometer) and they didn't developed a decent CTP phone interface ? (it could be my impression but they focused too much on Zune aspects - Joe Belfiore was on the Zune team right? - I once said that it looks more like iPod Touch for the iPhone instead of the iPhone itself). Don't understand me wrong... I like a lot the new WP7 but it lacks so many things that it seems a step backward. I was disappointed when Microsoft launched WM 6.5 from a developer point of view (a year after the release of 6.1 there were not many new things added) but I always thought that they were investing everything on WM7. I think a lot of developers hoped for more as they are investing time and resources developing on Microsoft mobile platform (I don't think Microsoft can afford loosing developers on the mobile platform)

But let's go back to the phone interface. I always thought that Microsoft will learn from the mistakes he made and will get a decent phone interface. Let's start with Windows Mobile 6.1:

It is a really ugly phone interface (useless to say that it was released after WM 5 phone interface which was the same). Really small buttons that usually you will have to use the pen to dial a number, a lot of space used without being optimized, informations missing.
HTC understood that this interface was a real problem for selling massmarket devices so they rewrote the interface:

they used bigger buttons, better phone dial-pad, but still a lot of space was not optimized (also because of the OS that didn't let them to)
After they saw the "decent" phone interface developed by HTC Microsoft didn't learned too much and released in 6.5 a better interface than the standard in 6.1 but worse than the one created by HTC

Why don't they learn from the iPhone or even Android? In my opinion the phone interface of the iPhone is the most usable one.


Really nice big buttons that you can press easily, essential information (I can always see the clock cause I want to know if it's not too late when I am dialing someone, or if someone calls me), the battery power and also the power of my radio signal. Nice modern UI. Anyway I think both iPhone and Android interface could be improved.

Let's see a little the WP 7 Phone interface as it is today:

The button size is ridiculous, a lot of unused space, essentially information missing. The only thing that I like is the dial-pad buttons. Remember that your potential client is buying a phone and after that everything that comes with it. If it isn't a decent phone he won't buy it.

I hope someone from Microsoft will read this post and start treating the phone interface as one of the most important pieces of the device (especially now that the OEM will not be able to personalize it). You got the background right (with silverlight you can develop awesome UI), so don't ruin it. We, developers, need that you get WP7 right as some of our work depend on it.

P.S. Going home to watch episode 8 from Lost - The final season Simplified by Windows 7 :)