Recently I wanted to offer my customers the opportunity to donate some money. No extra features, just a clean donation option. In-app purchases seemed to be the best option. The idea is to have a list of products which have a price and contain “donate” in their product ID (Fig. 1). In the app the list of products can be retrieved and shown when a donate button is tapped. If donations have been given can be checked by enumerating the existing licenses and looking for the “donate” term (Fig. 2). Reasonably simple right? Well the principle is simple, but in-app purchases are a bit tricky to develop, debug and get through certification. (It took me 7 submissions to get it right..) Those are the things that can result in certification failure: no internet connection -> exception store does not respond properly -> exception error message looks to much like a…
Tag: Metro
TCD.Controls
This is a summary and manual for all controls inside the TCD.Controls package. I’ll try to keep it updated. Windows 8 SilentTextBox – If AcceptsReturn=False and the user hits Enter normal TextBoxes make a ‘bling’ sound. SilentTextBox does not. HeaderedTextBox – A TextBox with a grey header above HeaderedTextBlock – A TextBlock with a grey header above; Automatically hides itself if the Text property is empty (unless AutoHide is set to False). LabeledProgressBar – a ProgressBar coupled with a TextBlock/Label; use it at the top of your page to indicate background progress (like the SystemTray.ProgressBar on Windows Phone) LayoutAwarePage – same as in all the samples Flyout – most recent post and how to use on Flyout SettingsContractWrapper – the easy way to integrate with the settings contract Windows Phone CustomMessageBox – Async CustomMessageBox on Windows Phone ReverseAutocompletePopup – Making a reverse Autocomplete-TextBox on Windows Phone
TCD.Controls – Flyouts for XAML/C#
Hey there, Let’s start with the most important news: TCD.Controls is now available on NuGet (click here if you don’t know how this works, or why you want to use it) From now on, I won’t link *.zip packages with the sources anymore, because NuGet really make life easier. If you want access to the source files, just drop me an email There’s been one more or less important change to the Flyout control you should know about: It now has a property called “IsIgnoreLightDismissal”. To understand its purpose, imagine the following scenario (video below) You have a Button control that opens a FilePicker/FolderPicker, asking the user to select a File/Folder. This Button is hosted inside a Flyout control. Now when the user taps the Button, the Picker will popup, stealing the focus from your applications Window. Flyouts are required to hide on App-switch by the design guidelines, which is…
Column-Styled GridView
Today I had to figure out a way to make a single-row, column-styled GridView that looked like this: Some minor design improvements are still to be made, but the hardest part is done. Particulary tricky was, that the items didn’t want to Stretch the height. (I wanted to avoid hard-coding the height, because of different screen resolutions.) Finally I’m using a GridView – I archived almost the same results with a ListView, but the ScrollBar was gone.. Maybe this is possible with a ListBox as well, but maybe I want to integrate this with a SemanticZoom control later, which requires ListView or GridView. Here’s a screenshot of the XAML code: You can copy/paste the following: <GridView ItemsSource=”{Binding Mensen}” SelectionChanged=”GridView_SelectionChanged”> <GridView.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <Grid Background=”Green” Width=”250″> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height=”Auto” /> <RowDefinition Height=”*” /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <TextBlock Grid.Row=”0″ Text=”{Binding Titel}” Foreground=”{StaticResource ListViewItemOverlayForegroundThemeBrush}” Style=”{StaticResource TitleTextStyle}” Height=”60″ Margin=”15,0,15,0″…
Migrating TCD to Windows 8 Release Preview
Two days ago, I migrated my laptop to Windows 8 Release Preview and today Windows Live Mesh finished syncing all of my files. So in the last few hours I migrated all the dev stuff and I’d like to share the latest versions of them too. Most of the libraries haven’t changed that much, only their namespaces have changed from TCD.Windows8.xxxx to TCD.xxxx. TCD.Serialization TCD.Serialization.Xml.XmlDeSerializer – (de)serialize an object from/to a string or Stream using XML TCD.Serialization.Json.JsonDeSerializer – (de)serialize an object from/to a string or Stream using JSON Download TCD.Serialization.zip TCD.Controls TCD.Controls.Flyout – create your own Flyout TCD.Controls.Settings.SettingsContractWrapper – integrate with the settings contract in just a few lines of code Download FlyoutAndSettingsSample.zip
Making a reverse Autocomplete-TextBox on Windows Phone
I’m sure you’re familiar with autocomplete textboxes and maybe you’ve even used them in a project yourself. They provide a fast and easy way for the user to select something, but they lack one important feature: they don’t show what could be selected. ReverseAutocompletePopup is a mixture between an autocomplete text box and the kind of popup you get when a ComboBox has more than five items. At first it displays all options in a ListBox and as you type non-matching ones are filtered out. (And brought back when you delete the text!) EDIT: In the newer version, the user can hit Enter to select, or optionally use his input as the result. When working with it there’re a few things you need to have in mind: The Popup control is no real navigation-thing, so you are in charge to handle OnBackKeyPress according to the guidelines! The Options for the…
SettingsContractWrapper – the easy way to integrate w/ settings
In the previous post I introduced the Flyout control. Now the most common use case for the Flyout controls is in the inegration with the settings contract. Integrating with the settings contract is usually a two-step procedure. First you have to add a SettingsCommand to the charm and then attach a Flyout or similar to it. Now that you have a Flyout you could do that on your own, but with the SettingsContractWrapper it is even more fun. To use it you need to define one or more instances of SettingsEntry. This class holds the information required to set up the Flyout Its constructor takes three arguments: Title, FlyoutDimension, Content. The SettingsContractWrapper takes five arguments: Foreground, Background, Theme, Icon, SettingsEntries. The required namespaces are ‘TCD.Controls’ and ‘TCD.Controls.Settings’. As soon as you called the SettingsContractWrapper constructor you can forget about the settings contract integration. Just make sure that the UserControls you hand…
Flyout control for Windows 8 Metro (XAML/C#)
IMPORTANT: This post ist partly outdated. TCD.Controls is now available on NuGet, so you don’t have to import the *.xaml into your project anymore! All code shown in this post still applies. Please refer to this post for more information on the changes. In Windows 8 Metro style apps there’s something called ‘Flyouts’. It’s a panel that slides in from the right. Sadly the control is not available to C#/VB developers. In this post Tim Heuer shows how to integrate with the settings contract using flyouts. Based on his code I developed a Flyout control for XAML/C# solutions. Here’s a list of what it can or can’t do: It does: light dismissal, back button easy integration of ‘content’ swipe-in transition custom color theme ‘narrow’ and ‘wide’ mode It does not: theming of the BackButton beeing attached to the left construct it in XAML I would like to provide you with a dll, but there’s a…
WikiSearch – a quick and dirty Windows 8 Metro App
I’ve been playing around with Windows 8 Metro development the last months and one day I did a quick Wikipedia App that integrates into the Search. The first version took me – no joke – less than 20 minutes, cause it’s just so easy! All you have to do to integrate into the search is to add this method to your App.xaml.cs: protected override void OnSearchActivated(SearchActivatedEventArgs args) { base.OnSearchActivated(args); if (mainPage == null) mainPage = new MainPage(); Window.Current.Content = mainPage; mainPage.OpenWiki(args.QueryText); Window.Current.Activate(); } After that go into Package.appxmanifest, switch to the Declarations tab and add a ‘Search’ declaration. mainPage.OpenWiki() would be a method that composes a Wikipedia-Search-URL from the queryText and tells a WebView to navigate to it. (webView.Source = new Uri(“http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&search=” + “queryString”);) I won’t go into any more detail at this point, but that is all the magic you have to do. Today I added multiple-language support to…