IMPORTANT: You find the newest versions of TCD.Serialization on NuGet – it works with Windows Phone as well. This post will Show you how to serialize and save objects with XML to your apps LocalFolder/RoamingFolder. Metro style apps in Windows 8 have their own folders where they can store their data. These folders can be accessed by: StorageFolder localFolder = ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder; StorageFolder roamingFolder = ApplicationData.Current.RoamingFolder; The difference between these two folders is that Windows 8 will synchronise the RoamingFolder between different machines. This can be useful if you want to improve the user experience, for example by synchronising drafts of a blog post between a users tablet and PC. It’s very important, that the data you want to save is serializable. When designing the data structure and classes for your data, you got to make sure, that each class has a parameterless constructor. Properties can be marked with a set…
Tag: NuGet
XML and JSON (De)Serialization in WinRT and Windows Phone
In some of my recent Metro/WinRT projects I had to save data to the disk. I decided to go for Xml-serialzation, because it’s human-readable, and flexible. Also it was perfect for the data I wanted to save (eg. metadata about a movie). (If you want to do it on your own: System.IO and System.Xml.Serialization are the namespaces you need for XML (de)serialization.) As I needed this in many projects, I composed a small library, containing a TCD.Serialization.XmlDeSerializer as well as a TCD.Serialization.JsonDeSerializer. Both have four static methods to serialize to/from Stream and string. You can download a package with the sources and a ready-to-use dll. TCD.Serialzation is available on NuGet it works with Windows Phone as well. NOTE: the methods aren’t fail-safe, so you might need to try{}catch{} them to handle exceptions. (For example if you want to serialize to a FileStream without write permission.) Have fun and let me hear…
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…