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
Tag: TCD
TCD.Device
Just another TCD namespace: TCD.Device. Its purpose is to contain additional namespaces that use features like Camera, GPS, Accelerometer, Compass.. Everything that has an effect on the App permissions the user sees on the Windows Phone or Windows 8 application. (Like ‘This app has access to your location, compass..’) TCD.Device.Camera CodeScannerPopup is another async control, specific to the Windows Phone platform, that can be used to scan for QR codes. (In theory other 2D-codes as well.) Usage: add the TCD.Device.Camera NuGet package add using directives for TCD.Device.Camera and TCD.Device.Camera.Barcodes in the calling method (eg. a Button.Click event) hide/show ApplicationBar, attach/remove BackKeyPress event Code sample: private async void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { CodeScannerPopup scp = new CodeScannerPopup(Microsoft.Phone.Shell.SystemTray.IsVisible, Format.ALL_1D); //important: hide ApplicationBar and handle BackKeyPress ApplicationBar.IsVisible = false; this.BackKeyPress += scp.HandleBackKeyPress; //now let’s go ScanResult r = await scp.ShowAsync(“BARCODE SCANNER”, “scan”); if (r != null) output.Text = string.Format(“{0}n{1}”, r.Text, r.Format.ToString()); //clean…
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…
Exploring NuGet
Since 5 hours now, I ‘m on NuGet and I’d like to share my first experiences. Why did I join NuGet? I joined NuGet, because it seems to be the most comfortable way to share libraries, containing XAML controls. Share them between my own projects, as well as with you. Previously I always had to include the project containing the controls in the solution I was working on, which was really annoying.. How can you use it? Let’s assume that you want to use a package in your project. All you need is the NuGet Package Manager Visual Studio extension. You can install it via Tools/Extensions and Updates. To use/reference a package from NuGet right-click on the references in the solution explorer and select ‘Manage NuGet Packages’. Then you can search for the package you desire (for example ‘TCD.Serialization’) and add it to your project. How do I use it?…
Draw the Skeletons in two lines
Hello, Recently I was coding some Kinect stuff and wanted to draw the skeleton that the user can see what’s going on. In the Samples there’s some code for that, but it’s pretty annoying to copy/paste it in your own project every time, so I wrapped it up in a class called SkeletonPainter. To use it you just need an Image of either 640×480 or 320×240 and hand it over to the SkeletonPainter, along with the resolution and a background Brush of your choice: SkeletonPainter painter = new SkeletonPainter(skeletonImage, SkeletonPainterResolution.Resolution320x240, Brushes.White); Of course, you need to hand him the KinectSensor as well: painter.SwitchSensor(sensor); This way you can easily switch the KinectSensor while the painter is still active^ Have a try and tell me what you think =) Download TCD.Kinect.zip
Async CustomMessageBox on Windows Phone
UPDATE: There’s a new Version with .NET4.5 Support, Code Samples Hey there, As you may know, there’s just a limited set of MessageBoxButtons available in Silverlight for WP. However, you can make your own MessageBox in your Silverlight app using the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices namespace as explained in this tutorial by Den Delimarsky. This method uses the old style async, which really sucks, so I decided to go the cool and smart new async way. You need Visual Studio Async CTP and Visual Studio 2010 to do this. The trick is to wrap the old async methods together with async Tasks, resulting in a Task<int> that shows the custom message box and returns the selected button in just one line: int result = await CustomMessageBox.ShowAsync(“Dinner time!”, “What do you prefer?”, 0, CustomMessageBoxIcon.Alert, “German”, “Italian”); Asynchronously and therefore non-UI-thread-blocking, of course If you’re interested you can have a look at the source: CustomMessageBox.cs…
Save objects to the ‘LocalFolder’
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…
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
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…
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…