HoloLens 2
Magic Leap 2
Quest 2/Pro
Android phones
Cross-platform Yolo object detection with Sentis on Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2
Some time ago, I wrote about Yolo object recognition using HoloLens 2 and the Unity Barracuda inference engine. However, Unity seems to have stopped developi...
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Posts by Year
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2024
Cross-platform spatial QR code tracking for HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2 with a ServiceFramework Service, part 2
As promised on August 18, this blog contains a more detailed description of the inner workings of cross platform QR code tracking for HoloLens 2 and Magic Le...
Cross-platform spatial QR code tracking for HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2 with a ServiceFramework Service, part 1
QR codes AGAIN???
Making an MRTK3 based HoloLens 2 app run on Magic Leap 2
This is a bit of an unusual post, as it does not have a project attached to it. Instead, it’s more like a recipe that I followed to get my app “Walk the Worl...
A little tool to compare two Unity Manifest files
I recently published a Walk the World version for Magic Leap 2, but I would be lying if I said it was as easy this time as when I ported HoloATC. Things have...
Logging Mixed Reality app data in Azure Application Insights using the official Microsoft SDK
If you are supporting any kind of professional business app, you don’t want to rely on users reporting issues. They typically concentrate on doing their job,...
Unit testing UI interaction with MRTK3
Unit testing is a method software developers use to ensure code reliability. It involves writing extra code to input known data into other code - the busines...
Detecting user presence using MRTK3 gaze tracking state
Sometimes it’s necessary to know whether or not the user is actually wearing the headset while running your app. For instance, this might be because the user...
Using the non native keyboard in touch scenarios in MRTK3
History repeats itself - a little under four years ago, I wrote about how the non-native keyboard in MRTK2 could be made to play with the then-new HoloLens 2...
2023
Showing multiple location-based items based on QR codes using MRTK3 and HoloLens 2
Once again, I am revisiting the subject of displaying things in HoloLens 2 using QR codes. Developers who tried to use the code from my widely used example f...
Getting the hand ray end position with MRTK3
Like I wrote before, I sometimes feel like I am Microsoft’s one-man Mixed Reality Q&A department, judging by the number of questions I get. I guess it’s ...
Fixing HoloLens 2 app build failure indicating il2cppFileRoot.txt and LineNumberMappings.json do not exist
This seems to be a very rare case, and one that I have not been able to reproduce. It mostly seems to happen when you upgrade from one major Unity release to...
An MRTK3 KeywordRecognitionSubsystem for Magic Leap 2
As I have shown already, MRTK3 is very versatile and very well suited for cross-platform development. The architecture is extensible by the usage of Unity su...
A cross-platform Service Framework service to write Unity log messages into files on-device
HoloLens applications conveniently dump all the Unity log messages in a text file - including all run time errors. This file can be very useful for tracking...
Getting raw air taps and their positions with MRTK3
Over the last few months, I sometimes feel like I am Microsoft’s one-man Mixed Reality Q&A department, as I get lots of questions for tips, samples, and ...
Using a Spatial Mesh with MRTK3 on Magic Leap 2
After successfully porting the MRTK3 version of HoloATC to Magic Leap 2, I wanted to try some other experiments on it as well. For one of those experiments, ...
Running a YoloV8 model on a Magic Leap 2 to recognize objects in 3D space
After I successfully got to run YoloV8 models on HoloLens 2 to recognize the model aircraft I made as a teenager and locate them in space - using the Unity B...
Full underlay passthrough transparency with MRTK3 GA on Quest 2/Pro
Hey, didn’t I write about this before? Indeed, I did, but last Monday I got a report from José Rocha that my sample didn’t work anymore after he followed my ...
A ServiceFramework Service to help update Magic Leap 2 MRTK3 apps
When I talked to the folks at Magic Leap about getting a loaner Magic Leap 2, my first plan was to port HoloATC to their device. My second plan was to get it...
Using MRTK3 GA on Magic Leap 2
I hope the good folks at Magic Leap don’t get sick and tired of me hacking their SDKs to work with software versions they are not intended for, but I found a...
Upgrading to MRTK3 GA from a pre-release: some assembly required
[Update - October 6, 2023]
Using MRTK3 pre17 on Magic Leap 2
As James Ashley demonstrated in his AWE talk in May, it’s perfectly possible to run an MRTK 3 app on Magic Leap 2, provided you take some steps - which are n...
HoloLens AI - training a YoloV8 model locally on custom pictures to recognize objects in 3D space
In April, I described my experiments with computer vision, using a HoloLens 2, the Unity Barracuda inference engine, and an off-the-shelf YoloV7 model to rec...
MRTK3 StatefulInteractable gaze, hover and select events - and how to use them
When my colleague Sophie asked me if I had a sample for something I had written before, but then for MRTK3, I had to admit that I did not. So I set out to cr...
Accessing and recording eye tracking data with MRTK3
Recently a community member asked me how to set up eye tracking data and record that into a CSV file. I decided to turn the sample I created into a blog post...
Fixing HoloLens 2 headband adjustment knob falling off
HoloLens 2 is a device of very high build quality, and very, very rarely something goes physically wrong with it if you handle it with proper care. However, ...
Apple Vision Pro - a new push for XR?
So what do I think of the new VisionPro by Apple?
Using ARMeshManager for Spatial Awareness with MRTK3 on HoloLens 2
The transition from MRTK2 to MRTK3 leaves some people confused, especially less experienced developers, as a lot of GoogleBinging for “how to do things” lead...
Using ARPlaneManager as an alternative to Scene Understanding with MRTK3 on HoloLens 2
Recently someone asked how Scene Understanding could be done with MRTK3 - the samples don’t work anymore as they are targeted towards MRTK2. The short answer...
Building HoloLens/MRTK3 applications on an Azure virtual Machine using GitHub Actions
Unity is a great tool, but all too often I have been confronted with different developer machines delivering different build results. If you pull an update i...
Turning Azure virtual machines on and off from a GitHub action
For building Mixed Reality applications I use an Azure virtual machine, because reasons. The great thing about virtual machines is they can be deployed prett...
HoloLens AI - using Yolo ONNX models to localize objects in 3D space
Since everyone seems to be an AI expert all of a sudden, I decided to jump on the bandwagon too and see what I could do with ‘AI’. Large Language Models (LLM...
Full underlay passthrough transparency with MRTK3 on Quest 2/Pro
The fun thing with giving to the community is - sometimes the community starts giving back to you.
Passthrough transparency with MRTK2 and 3 on Quest 2/Pro
Recently I had an informal talk with a fellow Mixed Reality developer who was convinced it was not possible to use Quest passtrough transparency with MRTK. ...
Using hand simulation with MRTK3 in the Unity Editor
Recently, someone asked me if I knew how the MRTK3 input simulation works, as it seems to have significantly changed since MRTK2. As far as I could find, it’...
Getting Unity XR hands to work on HoloLens and Quest in a bare bones project
Recently I saw someone (I think on LinkedIn) post a screenshot about Unity XR Hands - this basically claims hand tracking via a standard Unity API, using a p...
Fixing Quest 2 controllers not showing up in MRTK3 app
A very quick and small tip. When I deployed my new HoloATC app to the Quest 2, I noticed hand models showed up when I was using hand control, but no controll...
2022
Using Azure Web PubSub and WebSockets for multi user XR experiences with MRTK3
Currently I am building a new version of my now 7 years old HoloLens app AMS HoloATC. In am cleaning out the cruft that accumulated from going from HoloToolk...
Fixing hand models spawning when hand tracking is lost in MRTK 2.8.x
Wait, what? MRTK 2.x? Yeah, sometimes older apps need to be maintained, you know. Recently I upgraded an app to a newer Unity version and MRTK 2.8.2, and not...
Fix: after setting up a new MRTK3 project Newtonsoft.Json is missing
If you are like me, you never even think about it. Newtonsoft.Json is like the hammer in your toolbox, the knife in your kitchen drawer: it’s always there in...
MagSafe your HoloLens
In 2006, Apple introduced the concept of using powerful magnets to a connect a power supply to a device with the MagSafe connector, that made its debut with ...
Quick Fix for MRTK3 pre.11 CameraCache removal
A very small and short post for a change. When working on my previous blog post I noticed yet another shiny new drop of the MRTK3, I upgraded merrily, and wa...
Running an MRTK3 app on an Android Phone
On September 6 2022, fellow MVP Zaid Zaim, who is also busy with MRTK3, mailed me with to ask me if I thought MRTK3 apps could run on phones as well. I had t...
Intercepting raw air taps with MRTK3 - cross platform (Quest 2 and HoloLens)
Some people might start to think I am becoming a bit obsessed with the subject of air taps, as this the third post about this subject in two months. First I ...
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - simple global speech recognition
Updated December 6, 2023
How to setup up MRTK3 to support HoloLens 2 and Quest 2 - including hand tracking
I recently showed off my AMS HoloATC app running on the Meta Quest 2. But to be honest - I copied over some settings from the Zappy project, but I had no ide...
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - a MUCH SIMPLER way to intercept a raw air tap like with IMixedRealityPointerHandler
Sometimes the gods themselves descend from the Olympos - or in this case, Mount Rainier maybe - to explain to you things can be done a lot simpler ;). When I...
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - migrating the QRCode sample
As I announced in a previous post, in which I migrated the extension services to the Reality Collective Service Framework, I am now migrating the whole sampl...
Hide runtime hand visualization in HoloLens with MRTK3
A rather simple thingy this time, but one that was slightly irksome while I was playing with the MRTK3 private preview. As you may have seen in the ‘video’ i...
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - intercepting a raw air tap like with IMixedRealityPointerHandler
NOTE: there is a simpler way of doing this
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - migrating Extension Services to the Reality Collective Service Framework
One of the great but really underrated and underutilized boons of the MRTK2 are Extension Services. Unfortunately, in MRTK3, Extension Services, as well as t...
MRTK2 to MRTK3 - tapping / selecting holograms
I have a confession to make: as a Microsoft MVP I got a bit earlier in on MRTK3 than the rest of the world. I’ve spent the time porting AMS HoloATC over to M...
Hiding the circles around MRTK objects when you select stuff in Unity
A very short Unity tip this time. Something that has bothered me for quite some time, but never enough to actually find out what the hell it was - until toda...
How to fix authorization errors after upgrading an Azure .NET 4.6 function to .NET 6.0
Okay, one more Azure functions post. After upgrading my .NET 2.0 standard function for AMS HoloATC I discovered the back end function for my HoloLens app Wal...
Upgrading a .NET standard 2.0 Azure function using Table Storage to a .NET6 function
To reassure my regular readers - no, I am not pivoting from Mixed Reality and HoloLens. Far from that! But you see, any HoloLens application that is more tha...
Make a 3D HoloLens app launcher appear above the launcher controls
A very, very small tip this time. In HoloLens 2 - or actually Windows Mixed Reality - you can create these awesome 3D launchers that look a lot better than t...
Making only one entry of a Flag Enum selectable in the Unity Editor
Another small trick, easily reusable. Attentive users might have noticed something odd in my recent blog post about Scene Understanding. You can assign a Sur...
Using Scene Understanding in the Unity Editor
A short tip this time, but nevertheless one that merits its own post. Scene Understanding is an awesome feature, but it would be nice if you could use a sca...
Making Surface Magnetism work on specific surfaces by sorting Scene Understanding surfaces into separate layers
In a previous post I showed how you can use Surface Magnetism to make an object ‘stick’ to the Spatial Mesh while placing it. But what if you want to use onl...
Placing holograms on any surface using the MRTK surface magnetism
After revisiting my good old FloorFinder by request of a community member, I started playing around with Surface Magnetism because one of my colleagues start...
Workaround for MRTK 2.7.x glTF import bug
Not-so-hypothetical situation: your co-worker, who is a designer, sends you a nice glTF or glb file, or you made one yourself after getting inspired by my la...
Removing the ‘hiccup’ from repeating Unity animations
This is one of those trivial things ‘everyone’ knows - every Unity game developer, that is - except for wierdos like me who come from a enterprise developmen...
Finding the Floor with HoloLens 2 and MRTK 2.7.3
Time flies… this blog is now past it’s 14th anniversary, in internet time this means parts of it are ancient - and indeed, it contains it’s share of posts th...
Some Blender tricks for the impatient Mixed Reality / HoloLens developer (2)
As I wrote in my previous post about this subject - a Mixed Reality / HoloLens developer sometimes just needs to tinker a bit with models, but doesn’t have t...
Some Blender tricks for the impatient Mixed Reality / HoloLens developer (1)
Ideally, when you are working on HoloLens or other Mixed Reality projects, you have a full time designer on call in your team handling all the nastiness arou...
2021
A behaviour to put MRTK buttons in a disabled state
Sometimes you want UI elements to show in a disabled state - indicating you can do something, but that’s not available right now because the app is in a stat...
Populating MRTK toggle button state without an intermediary script
Another short tip: Usually when you want to act on a toggle button press - for instance on a PressableButtonHoloLens2Toggle - you connect a script method to ...
Fix: Dark background when taking pictures or making movies with HoloLens 2 and OpenXR
The problem A short tip this time. At Velicus, we are currently working on two apps. One is built with Unity 2019.4 LTS, the other with Unity 2020.3 LTS. The...
MSIX install via website does not work anymore after flashing a HoloLens
“Failed to launch ms-appinstaller…” For some reason you had to flash your HoloLens 2. For instance, because you lived on the edge and it started to misbehav...
Quick and dirty fix for broken Button Icon Set Editor in MRTK 2.7.2
People who, like me, use the heck out of Mixed Reality Toolkit as the base for all their Mixed Reality projects and dutifully upgraded to the latest version ...
Easy way of detecting which hand presses an MRTK button
Some UI elements cannot be neutral to the fact whether or not someone is right-handed or left-handed. For instance, if someone is left handed, you might want...
Manipulating holograms using the MRTK Hand Physics service
One of the great things that makes HoloLens 2 special is hand tracking, and the fact you can actually touch and move holograms. There are several nice compon...
Correct setup of OpenXR in a HoloLens 2 project including Holographic Remoting
This is a short tip, and an easy checklist reference (not only for you, but also for myself). Although Microsoft does have a guide for this, it’s missing som...
Showing water in HoloLens 2 using the (deprecated) standard assets - in BOTH eyes
A pretty short tip this time. Recently I had the requirement to show water (that is, a fluid) in a HoloLens 2 app. Something like this: Fortunately, from ...
Rounded corners in MRTK UI
Rounded corners are suddenly hip again and all the rage, even in Microsoft land, as is clearly visible in Windows 11.
Getting Eye Tracking to work with OpenXR on HoloLens 2
You have moved your Unity project to OpenXR following Microsoft’s Guidelines and/or my blog post and upgraded to Unity 2020.3.x. Maybe there were some hiccup...
Getting the Unity Localization Package to work with HoloLens
Since parties outside of the Netherlands seem to have become very interested in the current product I am working at for Velicus, I was looking into multi lan...
Upgrading reading and positioning QR codes with HoloLens 2 to Unity 2020 + OpenXR plugin
In a previous posts I showed how to read QR codes with HoloLens 2, and how to use those to get a position in space - using that position to align a Hologram ...
Custom editor configurable dependency injection using the MRTK ImplementsAttribute
If you ever have created or used the Mixed Reality Toolkit’s Extension Services, you have probably seen this:
Controlling a Unity animation using HoloLens 2 hand tracking
The whole point of my previous two blog posts, in which I first described DIY hand gesture recognition, then some way to use that to move stuff along a multi...
Moving an object over a multi line path using HoloLens 2 hand tracking
In the previous part we established how we could do some basic hand tracking and gesture recognition. The goal, at least part one of the goal, was to be able...
Basic hand gesture recognition with MRTK on HoloLens 2
For a little POC I was working on, I wanted to be able to detect if a user was grabbing or pinching on or near specific locations. I did not need the elabora...
Short Unity / HoloLens tip: change package name before deploying
Let me first show up where this shows up in Unity: Create a new, empty 3D Unity project When it’s done creating hit File/Build Settings, select “Univer...
Positioning QR codes in space with HoloLens 2 - building a ‘poor man’s Vuforia’
In my previous post I showed how to read QR codes using native functionality of the HoloLens 2 and the Microsoft.MixedReality.QR package, using a MRTK Extens...
Reading QR codes with an MRTK2 Extension Service
QR codes are a great way to input data into Mixed Reality apps. You can simply hold them in front of the device you are wearing and the app can read the data...
HandSmashService - an MRTK2 extension service to smash holograms at high speed
I was (and am) very excited about the HoloLens 2 hand tracking capabilities, and was intrigued by the MRKT2 Hand Physics Service. Yet I quickly found out tha...
2020
Short Unity tip: apply changes made in the scene to a prefab
Common problem: you have created a prefab which you want to modify. Of course you can open the prefab and edit that, but when you want to edit a prefab in th...
Short Unity tip: keeping values changed in play mode
A common annoyance and mistake: the only way to position an object on the correct place, in the correct scale and/or rotation in Unity is in play mode.
Short Unity tip: conditional compilation with custom preprocessor directives
If you are developing Mixed Reality apps with Unity, you often create code that only works in the editor, to simulate test conditions - for instance, a keybo...
Setting up unit tests in Unity to test your Model Driven Mixed Reality app
One benefit of writing model driven Mixed Reality apps, as I demonstrated in this and this post, is that you are using a consistent architecture that makes i...
Model driven Mixed Reality apps using UniRx and a MRKT extension service, part 2 - showing a ‘list’
In the first part of this series I showed how to make a model, host that in a MRTK Extension service, and then have a single source of truth accessible every...
Model driven Mixed Reality apps using UniRx and a MRKT extension service, part 1
Unity, my preferred platform for making Mixed Reality apps, is a gaming engine. The mindset of people using platforms like this is definitely different from ...
Generic MRKT2 Extension Service Inspector for MRKT 2.5
If the title of this blog post seems a bit familiar, you are right. About two months ago I proudly wrote about a Generic MRTK2 extension service inspector I ...
Solution: Visual Studio 2019 and Unity 2019.4.x LTS are very slow when adding/changing files
Although I like to stay at the minimum recommended version for the MRTK (currently 2018.4.20f1), for the app we are currently developing for my employer we n...
Generic MRKT2 Extension Service Inspector
I make extensive use of the MRTK2 extension service feature and its dependency injection capabilities. Unfortunately it’s not easy to see the internal state ...
Upgrading to MRTK2.4-eye tracking does not work anymore (and how to fix it)
Is it possible to write a blog post about one single check box? Gather ye children, around the fire, and I will tell. For an app for my employer I am employi...
Setting physical properties to the Spatial Mesh in MRTK2
Long ago, when I made the CubeBouncer for HoloLens 1, I already noticed I could change the so called ‘physical material’ of holograms so they bounced off eac...
Crash in image creation at System.Windows.Media.Imaging.ColorConvertedBitmap.FinalizeCreation
For my blog videos I tend to use Camtasia and I was not very amused when the 2019 version stopped working on my big development box - while it kept running p...
Migrating to MRKT2 - NuGet for Unity crashes when using MRTK2
Intro Recently I was setting up a new HoloLens 2 project. I usually take the following route: Create a Unity project with the recommended version for the cur...
Migrating to MRTK2: Changing viewpoint rotation angle when pushing the thumbstick
Intro A short one, but one that took me quite some time to find. If you are using MRTK2 to build a Mixed Reality app to run on Immersive Headsets - or at lea...
Fixing the “Windows Mixed Reality specific camera code has been moved…” message when upgrading the MRKT2
A very short and very simple trick today: If you - like me - are crazy enough to dutifully update the MRTK2 in your apps whenever a new version arrives, at s...
Migrating to MRTK2: using a Spatial Mesh inside the Unity Editor
Intro If you are developing an app using the Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 that requires interaction with a Spatial Mesh, the development process can become cumber...
Migrating to MRTK2: right/left swappable hand menu’s for HoloLens 2
Intro As I announced in this tweet that you might remember from February the HoloLens 2 version of my app Walk the World sports two hand palm menus - a prima...
Migrating to MRKT2 - easily spacing out menu buttons using GridObjectCollection
Intro This is simple, short but I have to blog it because I discovered this, forgot about it, then discovered it again. So if anything this blog is for info...
Migrating to MRTK2 - configuring, understanding and using Windows Mixed Reality controllers
Intro Although the focus for Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 now understandably is on Microsoft's big Mixed Reality business player - HoloLens 2 - it's still perfect...
Migrating to MRKT2 - multi-device behaviour switching and scaling
Intro The MRTK2 allows for development for both HoloLens 1, HoloLens 2 and Windows Mixed Reality immersive headsets with nearly identical code. And a growing...
Migrating to MRTK2 - using the non-native keyboard in touch scenarios
Prelude With apologies for the uncharacteristic hiatus in my blog - last month I had a HoloLens 2 available for development and test purposes, and utilizing...
HoloLens 2 - it’s the interaction, stupid!
Intro Tuesday, February 7, 2020 marked an important occasion to me. A HoloLens 2 arrived at my door. For the first time since March 2019, where I got to try ...
Mixed Reality apps failing the WACK - revisited
Intro Last September I wrote about various hoops you had to jump through to get a Mixed Reality app to appear in the store and not have it to fail the ...
Mixed Reality apps failing MS Store validation on “10.5.1 Personal information” - and how to fix it
Intro After fellow MVP (and RD, although not fellow-) Philipp Bauknecht discovered a bug in my AMS HoloATC app while testing it on his HoloLens 2 (what lunat...
2019
Migrating to MRKT2 - Interaction with irregular or complex objects
Intro Interaction with objects that are not simple shapes like cubes, spheres, capsules etc. poses some challenges. The Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 offers some g...
Migrating to MRKT2 - using extension services for dependency injection
Intro Coming from business development, you might get a little shock coming into Unity - traditionally, game developers are much more focused on making the o...
Migrating to MRKT2 - making a ‘hand palm’ menu
Intro In all modesty I think I pretty much nailed making simple 'user interfaces' for HoloLens 1 - simple dialogs and stuff. Clients told me 'even a moron ca...
Migrating to MRTK2 - setting up and understanding Eye Tracking
Intro One of the exiting features HoloLens 2 brings us, is Eye Tracking. On HoloLens 1, you had to move your whole head to move the gaze cursor. and while th...
Migrating to MRTK2–submitting a HoloLens 2 app to the Microsoft Store
Intro On Monday September 2 version 4.0.19 of my first HoloLens Store app, AMS HoloATC, became available in the Microsoft Store. This version has been comple...
Migrating to MRTK2–interacting with the Spatial Map
Intro One of the HoloLens’ great features is the ability to interact with real physical objects. This allows apps to place holograms on or adjacent to real o...
Fixing error Failed to locate “CL.exe” or MSB8020 when deploying IL2CPP solution
Symptom You have created a Unity project to create an app using MRTK2, and you want to use the new IL2CPP backend. You open the solution in Visual Studio 201...
Minimal required software for MRTK2 development for HoloLens 2 and Immersive headsets
Intro A short one this time – and codeless to. You see, next Saturday I will be giving an workshop for MixUG Netherlands about development with the Mixed Rea...
Migrating to MRTK2–manipulating holograms by grabbing
Intro To be honest, the title of this blog post is a bit weird, because in Mixed Reality Toolkit 1 the concept of grabbing was unknown, as HoloLens 1 does no...
Migrating to MRTK2– handling tap, touch and focus ‘manually’ (in code)
Wait a minute – you did handle tap before, right? Indeed, dear reader, I did. But I also had signed up for a MixUG session on Wednesday July 3. And while mak...
Migrating to MRTK2 - missing Singleton and 3DTextPrefab
Intro If you are migrating from the HoloToolkit to Mixed Reality Toolkit 2 'cold turkey', as I am doing for my AMS HoloATC app, a lot of things break, as I a...
Migrating to MRTK2 - looking a bit closer at tapping, and trapping ‘duplicate’ events
Intro In my previous post I wrote about how game objects can be made clickable (or 'tappable') using the Mixed Reality Toolkit 2, and how things changed from...
Migrating to MRTK2 - IInputClickHandler and SetGlobalListener are gone. How do we tap now?
Intro Making something 'clickable' (or actually more 'air tappable') was pretty easy in the Mixed Reality Toolkit 1. You just added the IInputClickHandler in...
Migrating to MRTK2 - MS HRTF Spatializer missing (and how to get it back)
Intro One the many awesome (although sadly underutilized) capabilities of HoloLens is Spatial Audio. With just a few small speakers and some very nifty algor...
Migrating to MRTK2–NewtonSoft.JSON (aka JSON.Net) is gone
Intro In ye olde days, if you set up a project using the Mixed Reality Toolkit 1, NewtonSoft.JSON (aka JSON.Net) was automatically included. This was because...
Migrating to MRTK2 - Mixed Reality Toolkit Standard Shader ‘breaks’
Intro At this moment I am trying to learn as much as possible about the new Mixed Reality Toolkit 2, to be ready for HoloLens 2 when it comes. I opted for us...
HoloLens 2 Emulator - showing and manipulating hands in an MRTK2 app
Last week I wrote a first look at the new HoloLens 2 emulator and showed you how something of the hand movement in the HoloLens shell using an Xbox One contr...
First look at the HoloLens 2 emulator
Intro Today, without much fanfare, the HoloLens 2 emulator became available. I first saw Mike Taulty tweeting about it and later more people chiming in. I im...
Debugging C# code with Unity IL2CPP projects running on HoloLens or immersive headsets
Intro My relation with Unity is a complex one. I adore the development environment. It allows me to weave magic and create awesome HoloLens and Windows Mixed...
Labeling Toy Aircraft in 3D space using an ONNX model and Windows ML on a HoloLens
Intro Back in November I wrote about a POC I wrote to recognize and label objects in 3D space, and used a Custom Vision Object Recognition project for that. ...
Adapting Custom Vision Object Recognition Windows ML code for use in Mixed Reality applications
Intro In November I wrote about a Custom Vision Object Detection experiment that I did, which allowed the HoloLens I was wearing to recognize not only what o...
Making lines selectable in your HoloLens or Windows Mixed Reality application
Intro Using the Mixed Reality Toolkit, it's so easy to make an object selectable. You just add a behavior to your object that implements IInputClickHandler, ...
2018
Improving Azure Custom Vision Object Recognition by using and correcting the prediction pictures
Intro Last month I wrote about integrating Azure Custom Vision Object Recognition with HoloLens to recognize to label objects in 3D space. I wrote the predic...
Mixed Reality Toolkit vNext–dependency injection with extension services
Intro The Mixed Reality Toolkit vNext comes with an awesome mechanism for dependency injection. This also takes away a major pain point – all kinds of behavi...
Mixed Reality Toolkit vNext–setting up a project
Intro You might have heard it – the Mixed Reality Toolkit folks are busy with a major rewrite. The original MRTK was intended to accelerate applications targ...
Using Azure Custom Vision Object Recognition and HoloLens to identify and label objects in 3D space
Intro HoloLens is cool, Machine Learning is cool, what's more fun than combine these two great techniques. Very recently you could read "Back to the future n...
Adjusting and animating HoloLens/Mixed Reality holograms using Unity animations
Intro Of course you scan script literally all animations using (something like) LeanTween, but you can also animate things using Unity animations. I have bee...
Responding to focus and showing data when tapping a hologram in Mixed Reality/HoloLens apps
Intro One of the things you tend to forget as you progress into a field of expertise is how hard the first steps were. I feel that responding when gaze strik...
My first Azure build & deploy pipelines for an Azure Function V2
Intro For those who think I am breaking rank and suddenly move away from HoloLens and Mixed Reality to Microsoft Azure (like some *cough* these days) - don't...
Workaround: remote texture loading does not work with MRTK Standard Shader
This is one of those things that can cost you hours to fix and drive you completely crazy. I was working on a new improved version of my HoloLens / Mixed Rea...
Getting a quick Mixed Reality log file from someone else’s computer or HoloLens
When the **** hits the fan A quick tip this time, born from necessity. I guess we've all been here - you make a perfectly working Mixed Reality app for Immer...
Auto word wrapping a text to fit before a backdrop pane in Mixed Reality apps
Intro As Mixed Reality in general and HoloLens apps in particular become more mainstream, so they become ever more complex, and this reflects in their interf...
An advanced gaze-following behaviour to place objects on top or in front of obstructions (and scale if necessary)
Intro In my previous post I described some complicated calculations using a BoxCastAll to determine how to place a random object on top or in front of some o...
Calculate Mixed Reality object locations on top or in front of obstructions using BoxCastAll
Intro It was quite difficult to name this article. Usually I try to find a title that more or less describes a good search term that I used myself when I was...
Measuring user movement in Mixed Reality apps
Intro For a business HoloLens app I am currently developing - as well as for my app Walk the World - I needed a way to see if a user is moving or rotating in...
Simple way to prevent an unintended double tap in Mixed Reality apps
This is an easy and simple tip, but one that I use in almost every Mixed Reality app at one point. It’s mostly applicable to HoloLens: especially new users t...
Developing in Unity for Windows Mixed Reality without having to unplug your device all the time
A very simple but potentially quite a big time saving tip this time. Typically, when you are developing for Windows Mixed Reality, you spend a lot of time in...
Fixing the “…Unity\Tools\AssemblyConverter.exe exited with code 1” error when you are building your Mixed Reality app
It's not easy being green - I mean, a Mixed Reality developer This is one that has annoyed me for quite some time. When developing your Mixed Reality app, I ...
Running Mixed Reality apps on Windows 10 on ARM PCs–get ready for a surprise
Intro I was planning to write a step-by-step procedure of the things you would need to do to get the Mixed Reality app I created in my previous post to work ...
Running your Mixed Reality app on an ‘ordinary’ PC–using an Xbox One Controller
Intro Let’s face it – although Windows Mixed Reality has a steady uptick (at least I think I can draw that conclusion from the increasing download numbers of...
Downloading holograms from Azure and using them in your Mixed Reality application
Intro In my previous post I explained two ways of preparing holograms and uploading them to Azure: using a whole scene, and using just a prefab. In this post...
Preparing and uploading Holograms into Azure for use in Mixed Reality apps
Intro In my series about remote assets, there’s one major thing left: how to use remote assets that can be used as Holograms in your Mixed Reality app. I wil...
For crying out loud, compile for native ARM!
CHPE works its magic… Let me get this straight first: Microsoft did and amazing job with CHPE and x86 emulation, that allows x86 to run without any conversio...
How to detect your Windows Mixed Reality app is actually running on a head set
Very short and small tip – Windows Mixed Reality can run on a HoloLens, on an immersive headset – but although the Store warns about necessary hardware to ru...
Windows 10 on ARM and devices–hang on to your continuum dock!
Drumroll I have been asked to evaluate a prototype Windows 10 on ARM PC. You might have seen people talk about it earlier, like my friend Lance who wrote abo...
Loading remote video stored in Azure blob storage into a floating gaze activated video player in a Mixed Reality app
Intro The title of this blog post kind of gives away that this is actually two blog post in one: How to prepare and load videos into AzureHow to load these v...
Building a floating audio player in Mixed Reality
Intro As I promised in my previous blog post, I would write about how I created the floating audio player designed to easily demonstrate how to download and ...
Downloading audio files from Azure blob storage and playing them in Mixed Reality apps
Intro All but the most trivial apps have some kind of back end. In the past, I have written about accessing all kinds of services from HoloLens and Mixed Rea...
Fantastic buttons and where to find them–in the Mixed Reality Toolkit
Intro When I started making Mixed Reality apps (or better, HoloLens apps, as Mixed Reality as we learned to know only became available with the Fall Creators...
2017
Centralized reusable audio feedback mechanisms for Mixed Reality apps
Intro – feedback is key Although speech recognition in Mixed Reality apps is very good, sometimes the best recognition fails, or you slightly mispronounced s...
Short tip: using the UI components from the Mixed Reality Toolkit examples
The Mixed Reality Toolkit is the foundation for nearly all apps built for HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality immersive head sets. It has a lot of indispensab...
Getting your logos and splash screens right for Mixed Reality apps
Intro Way too often I still see Mixed Reality apps with default (white) splash screens, app windows, or even worse – the default Unity Icon. When Mixed Reali...
Finding the floor - and displaying holograms at floor level in HoloLens apps
Intro Both of my HoloLens apps in the store ask the user to identify some kind of horizontal space to put holograms on, in one case Schiphol Airport, in the ...
Build for both from one source–Hololens and Immersive Apps
Intro The time has come. As I predicted in my previous blog post, it’s now possible to build a HoloLens app and an Immersive Apps (targeted toward the new im...
Lessons learned from adapting Walk the World from pure HoloLens to Windows Mixed Reality
Heads-up (pun intended) This is not my typical code-with-sample story - this a war story from the front line of Windows Mixed Reality development. How did I ...
Creating a 3D topographical map in your HoloLens / Windows MR app with the Bing Maps Elevation API
Intro All right, my friends. It's time for the real deal, the blog post I have been anticipating to write since I first published the 3D version of Walk the ...
Creating a geographical map on the floor in your Hololens / Windows MR app
Intro If you make an awesome app like Walk the World, of course you are not going to spill the beans on how you built it, right? Well – wrong, because I thin...
Styles in Xamarin Forms don’t work properly in UWP .NET Native - here is how to fix it
Intro Xamarin Forms is awesome. If you have learned XAML from WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Universal Windows Apps or UWP, you can jump right in using the...
Building a dynamic floating clickable menu for HoloLens/Windows MR
Intro In the various XAML-based platforms (WPF, UWP, Xamarin) that were created by or are now part of Microsoft we have the great capability to perform datab...
Building a floating HoloLens ‘info screen’ - 2: adding the C# behaviours
Intro In the first installment of this 2-part blog post we have created the UI of the info screen, now we are going to build the dynamics. First we will make...
A HoloLens helper class to get a position dead ahead of the user–on a physical object or at a max distance
This is a little tidbit I use in a lot of apps, for instance in the CubeBouncer and for floating info screens in my other apps. Basically I want to know a po...
Building a floating HoloLens ‘info screen’ - 1: making the Unity assets
Intro Those who have seen my HoloLens apps (most notably Walk the World) have noticed I tend to use floating "info screens", especially for help screens. My ...
Setting up a HoloLens project with the HoloToolkit - June 2017 edition
Preface with lame apologies My apologies for the longest blogging hiatus in the history of this blog, I was very busy with things both HoloLens and not-HoloL...
Using a messenger to communicate between objects in HoloLens apps
Intro I know I am past the ‘this has to work one way or the other’ stage of a new development environment when I start spinning off reusable pieces of softwa...
A ‘roller blind’ animation component for HoloLens applications
Intro This is a cool little tidbit that I wrote in the cause of a project that required 2D images to be shown in a 3D context. Not everyone has 3D models of ...
A generic toggle component for HoloLens apps
Intro The following scenario is one I have seen a lot of times – the user taps on a UI element, and then it and/or a couple of elements need to fade out, dis...
A behaviour for dynamically loading and applying image textures in HoloLens apps
Intro After two nearly code-less posts it’s time for something more code-heavy, although it’s still out of my ordinary mode of operation: it’s fairly short a...
Using a HoloLens scanned room inside your HoloLens app
HoloLens can interact with reality – that’s why it’s a mixed reality device, after all. The problem is, sometimes, the reality you need is not always availab...
Scanning physical objects with an Xbox One Kinect to use as Holograms in HoloLens
Intro There are several demos out there that show obviously scanned models of people or physical objects used in HoloLens applications. I think it was fellow...
Manipulating Holograms (move, scale, rotate) by gestures
Intro This tutorial will show you how to manipulate (move, rotate and scale) Holograms by using gestures. It uses speech commands to change between moving, ...
Dragging holograms with gaze and tapping them in place on a surface
Intro Simply put – what I was trying to do create is the effect of what you get in the – in the meantime good old – Holograms app: when you pull a hologram o...
2016
Unity 5.5/HoloLens: AudioPluginMsHRTF.dll has failed the AppContainerCheck check
All right, so I was finally past a couple of deadlines with paid HoloLens apps and was ready to take the plunge to update my app AMS HoloATC to Unity 5.5 and...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 8–adding the church and the billboard
Intro All the code to track aircraft in a HoloLens is already yours. Now the only thing I have left to write is how the Wortell Church and the billboard that...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 7–activating an aircraft by air tapping
Intro In this episode I am going to describe how the airplanes are selected in the sky by air tapping them. This requires some changes made to both the Azure...
Running a Hololens app on a Raspberry PI2–and controlling it with a keyboard
Intro No, I am not drunk, nor did I smoke some peculiar produce our capital Amsterdam is famous for, and I did not bump my head a bit too hard on my car whil...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 6–adding an airport (and a tower)
Intro This episode is nearly codeless, it’s all Unity and general geeky GIS stuff. We are going to cut out a piece of OpenStreetMap to depict the location of...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 5-smooth movement with iTween and adding a trail
Intro In the video in the first post of this series you can see the airplane models leaving a kind of trails in the air, while they move and rotate in ...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 4–Reading data and positioning airplanes
Time to rock and roll All right my friends, it’s time to show the heart of the matter – how to read data from an Azure Mobile App Services data service and m...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 3–Creating an annotated airplane
Intro In this post we are going to create a game object holding the aircraft and a label showing aircraft data that always looks at the user. We are not goin...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 2–Setting up the project and getting airplane assets
Intro All right my friends, it’s time to hit Unity again. In a previous blog post about the Cube Bouncer I have told you how to set up a project. That was qu...
A HoloLens airplane tracker 1–an Azure dataservice for aircraft data
Introduction Recently I posted my first HoloLens app “AMS HoloATC” to the public store, Now it has been showed to the important customers, I have no longer ...
Converting lat/lon coordinates to local coordinates for HoloLens apps
This is going to be a bit of a theoretical story, but I feel it’s a necessary as a precursor to my promise to explain in detail how I made the AMS HoloATC ap...
Sharing download links to (hidden) HoloLens apps
The Windows store has a very neat feature. You can send out direct http links to people that, when entered, show and app directly in the web version of the s...
How shipping an UWP app update can make your app unavailable
First of all – don’t do this. You might regret it dearly. One might consider the fact that this is possible at all to be a bug in the Store. For the m...
Why servicing UWP IoT apps via the store is such a Big Deal
In the past I have been dealing with IoT equipment made by a manufacturer that shall remain nameless here, but their solution was - like a lot of IoT solutio...
Why you should update your apps to UWP
Woe is us No code this time, but a kind of a rant. Or some advice. Whatever you want to call it. So we all saw the stories. Several pundits all over the worl...
HoloLens CubeBouncer application part 5-using gravity, adding more speech & sound, and app icons
Preface In the previous post I showed you how to integrate speech recognition. This post mostly builds upon stuff we now already know. It introduces actually...
HoloLens CubeBouncer application part 4-integrating speech commands and moving cubes by code
Preface In the previous post I showed how you could interact with the cubes using air taps, utilizing the physics engine. In this blog post I am going to sho...
HoloLens CubeBouncer application part 3-air tapping the cubes away and adding spatial sounds
Preface In the previous post I showed you how to create a neatly arranged grid aligned to your view in your HoloLens app. Now, it’s time to make a mess of it...
HoloLens CubeBouncer application part 2-create the gaze aligned cube grid
Preface In the previous post, I have showed you how to setup a very basic HoloLens application that only shows one floating cube – exactly on the spot where ...
HoloLens CubeBouncer application part 1 - setting up the Unity part
Preface Ever since I knew the HoloLens was coming to my company I have been digging into all the online resources I could find. And ever since the devices ar...
Gotcha–”The associated script could not be loaded” on all C# scripts in a HoloLens Unity3D project
When I work on a HoloLens project, I alternate a lot between the Unity editor and Visual Studio, but I tend to spend a lot more time in the latter. I am a co...
Gotcha - changing a HoloLens app’s name as it appears on the tile
I am currently finishing up a nice little demo app for the HoloLens but ran into a weird problem. Originally the app was called ‘Gazer’, as I only wanted to ...
Floating ‘text balloons’ for context relevant information in Xamarin Forms
Picking the challenge apart An Italian proverb says that a fool can ask more questions than seven wise men can answer – a modern variant could be that a desi...
Default HoloLens Toolkit occlusion script turns magenta
After following some on-line video’s and snooping through some other’s people code I felt I had to start bottom-up to get at least a feeling for how you setu...
Generic databinding for MapIcons in Universal Windows Apps
Preface Ever since I introduced databinding for the UWP map control (and it’s previous incarnations for Windows Phone 8.x and Windows 8.x) I have been asked ...
Keeping input fields above the keyboard in UWP apps
Before you all think I am stark raving mad – it appears that it is actually possible to create XAML constructions that confuse the UWP renderer to such an ex...
Behavior for view model driven animated popups in Xamarin Forms
Preface In my previous post I showed the basics for animation behaviors in Xamarin Forms. Here’s another one I made, that in conjunction with some nifty elem...
Behaviors for animated scroll-down and slide-in menus in Xamarin Forms
Preface Some time ago I wrote about a proof-of-concept for viewmodel driven animations using behaviors in Xamarin Forms. In the mean time, time has moved on,...
Xamarin Forms 2.1 upgrade–some surprises (and how to get around it)
Back in June I wrote about a proof-of-concept for view model driven animations using behaviors in Xamarin Forms. This concept made it into my employer’s stan...
.NET Native, SilverlightSerializer, MakeGenericType and MissingMetadataException
Recently I have ported my app Map Mania to the Universal Windows Platform, and at the moment of this writing it is being certified. (that, I least I ho...
Keeping UI elements above and below the Universal Windows Platform app bars
A little history - or how I messed up I initially created this behavior for Windows Phone 8.1, and then ported it to Windows 8.1 store apps. I presum...
Fix for “could not connect to the debugger” while deploying Xamarin Forms apps to the Visual Studio Android Emulator
While I was busy developing a cross-platform application for Windows Phone, Android and iOS I wanted to test the Android implementation and ran into a snare ...
An AdaptiveTrigger that works with StateTrigger inside WindowsStateTriggers’ CompositeStateTrigger
Intro Still working on porting Map Mania to the Universal Windows Platform, I ran into a bit of a snag. It wanted to have a kind of decision-tree Visual Stat...
Using a style replacing behavior for making UWP adaptive layouts – REVISED
Preface to revision This post was updated significantly on February 13, 2016 as I realized I had once again not adhered to the advice my late Math teacher, M...
What themeresources are available for Windows 10 UWP apps?
If you use Blend, and what to color your elements using a system resource, you get a depressing number of resources in the pop-up. So much, that you actually...
2015
Gotcha–navigating from SplitView requires back button to be pressed twice in UWP apps
Yesterday, while being in the process of converting my one of my apps to UWP, I was moving a lot of the functionality of the app menu to a SplitView. Microso...
UWP Map data binding with WpWinNlMaps explained
Intro Recently I released WpWinlMaps for the Universal Windows Platform, a NuGet package that allows you to data bind map shapes to the awesome new map contr...
Release of WpWinNl 3.0.2 alpha with UWP support - and map data binding
I just released my open source library WpWinNl to 3.0.2-alpha (that is, pre-release) to NuGet. WpWinNl now supports Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1, Windo...
Fixing “Payload file rd.xml does not exist” when creating a Windows 10 UWP NuGet Package
Just as I thought I finally was done adding Universal Windows Platform support for WpWinNl, I ran into a weird error. I had updated the nuspec file after som...
Drawing polygons with holes (donuts) on Windows 10 UWP apps
November 30th was the day a long standing wish of me came true - Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform gets on par with some professional geographical inform...
Fix - Dell Venue 8 Pro Windows 10 Fall update gets stuck at 40%
My Dell Venue 8 Pro that I primarily use as an e-reader was the last of the flock to get the update... so after gone trough the plight of getting about 8GB o...
Re-enabling the Hanselman trick to easily switch between Hyper-V and VirtualBox after Windows 10 Fall update
Since my first forays into Xamarin I have been making great use of this awesome trick by Scott Hanselman to quickly change from a configuration with Hyper-V ...
Windows 10 maps part 7 - using external maps with TMS/WMS
IntroIn this final episode of the planned series, posted on "Back to the Future" day, I will show you how to use external map sources and how to use them wit...
Borders on Xamarin Forms user interface elements
This is one of those blog posts, born out of utter frustration because looking for this yielded no usable results - while you would expect a lot of people wo...
Windows 10 maps part 6 - scenes and camera
IntroPicking up the thread where I left it rushing into an IoT series, which I wanted to have ready before the Microsoft devices event that took place on Oct...
A Microsoft Band client to read temperatures and control a fan on a Raspberry PI2
Part 6 of Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band IntroIn the final post of this series I will show h...
A Windows 10 UWP app to receive temperature data from a Raspberry PI2 and control a fan using the Azure Service Bus
Part 5 of Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band IntroYou cannot deploy apps to a Microsoft Band dir...
Controlling a fan using a UWP on a Raspberry PI2 remotely
Part 4 of Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band IntroThis article shows you how to control a device...
Measuring temperatures using an UWP on a Raspberry PI 2
<h4>Part 3 of Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band</h4> <p>IntroIn this articl...
Using system accent color brush from code in Windows 10 UWP
A very short one this time. I wanted to give some UI element the same color as the accent color, but I wanted to use it from code, not from XAML, as written ...
Using an Azure Service bus queue for two-way (IoT) communication
<h4>Part 2 of Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band</h4> <p>IntroIn this post I...
Reading temperatures & controlling a fan with a RP2, Azure Service Bus and a Microsoft Band (1)
Part 1 - Idea, architecture, hardware shopping list and hardware configuration Sometimes simple ideas have a tendency to balloon almost out of control, and t...
Windows 10 maps part 5 - styles and 3D
IntroIn part 5 of this series I will show two seemingly unrelated things - the map "styles" and 3D maps. From a code perspective this is, just like last time...
Microsoft are not spying on your hard disk because there is nothing to gain - and everything to loose
There is a debating technique that is called "reductio ad absurdum" which demonstrates the validity of a statement by proving that the opposite is impossible...
Windows 10 maps part 4 - color scheme and options
Intro This part of the mapping series is the shortest from a code perspective - it actually only handles six properties of the Map control, but these give yo...
Windows 10 maps part 3 - querying the map & attaching business objects to map shapes
IntroIn my previous post in this series I showed how to draw lines, polygons and icons on the map. What I did not show was how you could query the map for th...
Windows 10 maps part 2 - manipulation and drawing
IntroIn my previous post in this series I have talked about how to get a map control in a Universal Windows App and how to set it up with a proper key, now i...
Gotcha: Windows 10 mobile does not download additional keyboards and speech language after hard reset
A quicky and nothing code related this time. After upgrading from Windows Phone 8.1 through a number of intermediary Insider builds I found I got more and mo...
Gotcha: custom Microsoft Band page shows only data in last added UI element
Today I finally nailed a very odd issue in the Microsoft Band SDK - or actually, my understanding thereof. For my current research project, I am building a c...
Windows 10 maps part 1 - setting up
IntroEver after my TechDays 2015 talk I have been getting a lot of questions about the new Universal Windows App map control for Windows 10, and now th...
Gotcha: Azure website debugging not working in mixed VS2015RC solutions
As I was working on yet another piece of POC code showing off the power of both the Windows 10 IoT Core stuff and Microsoft Azure I ran into a very odd probl...
Custom oAuth login to Facebook for Windows Store apps
Intro: the joy of third party dependenciesI am currently working on a Windows app that uses some kind of Facebook integration. Last Friday (June 20) somethin...
View model driven animations using behaviors and MVVMLight in Xamarin Forms
IntroFor some time now I have been making a number of behaviors implementing animations driven by view models for Windows and Windows Phone. Implementing ani...
Using a Windows 10 UWP app and Signal/R on Azure to display Microsoft Band heart rates–basically everywhere
Intro: sometimes it seems like I’ve been here before Back in February I got my Raspberry PI2 and wanted to do something with it. So I created a setup that ma...
Getting Signal/R clients to work on Windows 10 UWP apps
Very recently Windows 10 IoT Core became available – just one of the very exiting technologies Microsoft are cranking out like crazy now. This will enable ev...
Fixing Windows 10 emulators not showing up in VS2015RC or not having internet access
On one of my two PCs running Windows 10 10074 the Phone emulators did not have internet access, which is a bit of a hindrance if you want to write a demo tha...
Windows 10 build 10061 fixes MapIcon woes!
I discovered this while preparing for my Techdays 2015 talk and you probably have to be a mapping nut like me to appreciate this fully, but some things canno...
3D maps with the Windows 10 Maps SDK
Notice - this is not an April fool's joke, although you may think it is. It is not my custom to write about something without a real ready-to-run sample, but...
Displaying Microsoft Band heart rate via Raspberry PI2 using Mono, C#, OWIN and a Windows Phone
Intro – what? WHY? As regular readers of my blog might have seen, I got myself a Raspberri PI 2 and a Sunfounders sensor kit, and was happily dabbling a litt...
Controlling a LED with a Raspberry PI 2 using Mono and C#
My fellow MVP Peter Nowak from Germany pointed me to this awesome kit on Amazon.de that has this vast array of sensors in it. It comes with 37 sensors and p...
Starting an OWIN ASP.NET server on Raspberry PI 2 automatically at boot up
Inspired by the buzz that engulfed the Microsoft community when it was announced the new Raspberry PI 2 was going to support Windows 10 I actually got myself...
Using a full-size none-stretched background image in a Xamarin.Forms app
Intro I always like to use a kind of a translucent background image to my app’s screens, that makes it look a bit more professional than just a plain single-...
Keeping popups above the bottom app bar in Windows 8.1 store apps
Recently, I wrote about the KeepFromBottomBehavior that helped me to deal with popups that appeared on the bottom of the screen, but were covered by the app ...
“System.IO.FileNotFoundException” using controls from another assembly in Xamarin Forms on iOS.
Disclaimer: I am at the early stages of learning Xamarin and may be just writing some stupid and obvious things. That’s just the way it is. This blog is as m...
Binding shapes to the Windows Phone 8.1 Here Maps control
Intro Every time I meet someone from the Windows Phone Map team (or get into contact with them in some other way) I talk about the importance of being able t...
2014
A behavior to show a MessageDialog from a MVVMLight viewmodel in Universal apps–with callbacks
Of course you are now all writing MVVM based apps, after all I have been advocating that for years, and you are listening this here old venerable MVP, right?...
A behavior to deal with UI consequences of full screen and Software Keys in Windows Phone 8.1
This week I was presented with an interesting challenge. Using this technique, I used the whole screen for my app. The problem was I had not anticipated a De...
The Microsoft Band and me–three weeks later
Why? How? I will be honest – I wasn’t really thinking the whole thing about wearables is more than a bit overhyped marketing stuff and that I personally woul...
Executing and testing geofencing background tasks in Universal Apps
Intro On October 18th the Dutch and Belgian Windows Platform Development communities got together for an event called “Lowlands WPdev 2014”- yours truly was ...
Returning Task from a Windows Runtime Component
A very short tip this time, that took me some time to find out. You will need a Windows Runtime Component if you want, for instance, host a background task i...
Making the Application Bar display on of top of the UI in Windows Phone 8.1 Store Apps
In Windows Phone 7, 8 and 8.1 Silverlight apps this is very easy: you just set the Opacity of the Application bar to any value less than 1 as described here,...
Visualizing geofences as circles on the map in Universal Apps
Intro If you tried to work with geofences, you may have encountered this problem. You want to have an easy way to show where the darn things are on the map, ...
Simple workaround for “Design view is unavailable for x64 and ARM target platforms”
When you are developing for Windows Phone or Windows and you are faced with using a native component (for instance the Bing Maps control on Windows, or the S...
Querying the Windows Phone 8.1 map when there are child objects over it
With the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK came (yet again) an improved Map Control. This brought, among other things, the MapIcon. In ye olde days, the map could only d...
AngularJS + TypeScript: how to implement validation
Preface AngularJs supports all kinds of simple client-side validation. The simplest is data-ng-required which basically says a UI element must be filled in b...
AngularJS + TypeScript – using $resource to talk to a WebApi backend
Intro – multiple stacks to choose from There are a number of ways to talk to a backend (i.e. communicate over JSON services) in Angular. I know at least of t...
Sharing code between a Xamarin Forms/MVVMLight app and EF-code first backend using Shared Reference Project Manager
Disclaimer I am in the very early early stages of toying with Xamarin and it may well be that whatever I am doing here, is not the smartest thing in the worl...
AngularJS + TypeScript – how to setup a watch (and 2 ways to do it wrong)
Introduction After setting up my initial application as described in my previous post, I went about to set up a watch. For those who don’t know what that is ...
Angularjs + TypeScript – setting up a basic application with Visual Studio 2013
Preface No, I have not abandoned Windows (Phone) Development, and am not planning to do that. But apart from being Windows Platform MVP (as it is called sinc...
Cross-platform behavior for making screenshots in Windows (Phone) 8.1
Currently I am developing an app that should be able to share or save whatever is on the screen. I came upon this article by Loek van den Ouweland about Rend...
Using SensorCore and MVVMLight to build a ‘what did I do where and when’ Windows Phone 8.1 app
Introduction As you might have seen, the SensorCore SDK has been released. I intended to bring out a full fledged app utilizing this new and exiting SDK, but...
Building multi-resolution popups in an Universal App
With the advent of Windows Phone 8.1 multiple resolution are now also becoming a fact of life for Windows Phone developers (as they already were for Windows ...
Messaging class for detecting and broadcasting that your Universal app is running in the background
Some time ago I discovered that you can trap Window.Current.VisibilityChanged in a Windows 8 app to check if the app was running in the background, and that ...
Introducing WpWinl 2.0.0 (prerelease version)
Today I have decided to take the plunge – I have released an early version of WpWinNl 2.0.0 to NuGet. This introduces quite some changes. To start with, WpWi...
Using Fody.PropertyChanged for automatic PropertyChangedEvents and model-to-viewmodel communication
When you are working with MVVM, you are faced with a couple of interesting challenges. Usually you have something like this: You see a lot of properties with...
Fix for being unable to rename files after applying Visual Studio 2013 update 2
A couple of people – me included – have been suffering from the fact that, after they applied Visual Studio 2013 update 2, it became impossible to rename fil...
Windows Phone emulator–“Unable to create a route between the waypoints”
The Windows Phone 8.1 emulator has a beautiful new option: if you want to simulate a route you don’t have to put in a gazillion points anymore, you just inpu...
Writing behaviors in PCL for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1
This article was updated after a tip from Daniel Plaisted – see comments I was happily adding Windows Phone 8.1 support to WpWinNl – or actually support for ...
MovedCheeseException–where is StorageFolder.TryGetItemAsync in Windows Phone 8.1?
A quickie this time: when I finally started porting WpWinNl over to Windows Phone 8.1 (sorry, I was busy testing, preparing a talk and the Windows Phone Code...
A screen-size independent scroll-into-view pane for Windows Phone and Windows Store apps
In this article I introduced MoveObjectBehavior and a way to use it to make Facebook-app like scroll-into-view panes. All very nice, but with a minor drawbac...
Windows Phone 8.1–moving your cursor. Don’t panic!
No code today, but a simple how-to. I was caught off-guard by this, a lot of people – including people who I concern to be power users, are pretty much confu...
Code sharing strategies between Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 with the new Universal Windows apps
With the announcement of the new SDK for Windows Phone Microsoft now really starts to stress the companionship of Windows and Windows Phone, and makes it a l...
Drawing circles on Windows Phone Here Maps and Windows Store Bing Maps
One of the areas where the mapping systems for Windows Phone and Windows 8 are lacking, is the ability to draw circles. In particular in Windows Store apps, ...
A behavior to replace LayoutAwarePage in Windows Store and Windows Phone apps
Sometimes I think up things all by myself, sometimes I have to read something first to let the ole’ light bulb in my brain go ‘ping’. This post is of the 2nd...
Commercial break 2 – introducing 2 Tablet Pong aka Play On Both
Regular readers might remember the launch of 2 Phone Pong in August 2013, one of the first – if not the very first – action game that could be played on two ...
Build for both–an instruction video pivot page for Windows Phone apps
For Windows Phone apps, the same goes a for Windows 8 store apps – a picture tells more than a thousand words and a video even more. So as promised earlier, ...
Build for both–an instruction video pivot page for Windows store apps
For my game 2 Phone Pong – and its Windows 8.1 counterpart 2 Tablet Pong, that at the time of this writing is going through some interesting certification ch...
Drawing translucent shapes and lines on a Windows Phone 8 Map
For those who think the MVP title comes with divine wisdom, I have a disappointing announcement to make: it does not. Recently I discovered (or actually was ...
Build for both–a very simple wp8 style app bar hint control for Windows Store apps
Windows Phone users are very familiar with the concept of an app bar at the bottom that, in collapsed state, gives a kind of indication that it’s available. ...
2013
Build for both–introducing WpWinNl
Intro As I alluded to in a few previous posts, I have been working on a merged version of both my Windows Phone and Windows 8 libraries on Codeplex: wp7nl an...
Understanding and preventing Multilingual App Toolkit ‘lost translations’
<p>Update: the MAT was updated on February 7, 2014, adding new capabilities to handle this issue better</p> In the old days, making apps in mult...
Building for both: a tap+send/Bluetooth connection helper for Windows Phone 8 AND Windows 8.1
On my way to the November 2013 MVP Summit, at Matthijs Hoekstra’s house in Sammamish, and back again in the Netherlands I spent considerable time trying to g...
Build for both-Reflection bits & pieces for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8
This is a bit of an odd post – it’s the things I learned while porting SilverlightSerializer 2 from Windows Phone to Windows 8 Store apps code. For those who...
Build for both-Converters for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8.1 Store apps
Our Dutch DPE Rajen Kishna has been quite heavily banging the ‘build for both’ drum for some time now, and after having spent quite some time on exclusive Wi...
An MVVM friendly tap+send and Bluetooth connection helper for Windows Phone 8
Why?Early this year I blogged about TtcSocketHelper, an MVVM friendly helper object that allowed you connect two Windows Phone 8 devices to each other using ...
Introducing Win8nl for Windows 8.1–kissing WinRtBehaviors goodbye
Updated November 11, 2013It was at my very first MVP Summit in February 2012 that I learned that Windows 8 XAML was not to have any behaviors. I remember dis...
Utility classes to check if lines and/or rectangles intersect
I have a for a developer unusual confession to make: I don’t like math. As a tool, great, but as a thing, no. One thing that really infuriates me is than whe...
A behavior to implement a scroll-into-view panel (for a Facebook-like GUI) on Windows Phone
As promised, this post describes a behavior to scroll parts of a Windows Phone GUI into view, after I first described how you can create such panels by makin...
Aligning XAML elements outside the screen using scaling (for a Facebook-like GUI)
This is a trick I use to make partial screens outside of the actual Windows Phone viewport, for instance like the Facebook app for Windows Phone does – that ...
Zero lines of code solution for in-app checking for updates on Windows Phone
“Good artists copy; great artists steal” –Steve Jobs Every Windows Phone developer who has non-tech friends, relatives or a wife with a Windows Phone knows t...
Zero lines of code solution to entice Windows Phone users to rate and review an app
I don’t think I need to elaborate on how important it is to get ratings for your app in the Store – and preferably good ratings. By no means this is new and ...
Commercial break - introducing 2 Phone Pong
With a little pride and much joy I hereby release my newest Windows Phone application 2 Phone Pong into the wild. It is intended to show off the fun things y...
A behavior to animate mirroring of GUI elements on Windows Phone
In this third and final installment of my scaling and opacity animation series I am going to show how easy it is to build more behaviors on top of the now ex...
A behavior to animate folding in and out of GUI elements on Windows Phone
Like I wrote in my earlier post about extension methods for animating scales and opacity – those were merely building building blocks for something bigger. T...
Extension methods to animate scaling and opacity on Windows Phone
This is the first part of a tree-part series handling animating scaling and opacity. If you kind of wonder how the hell something that simple can require thr...
Modifying look and feel of your App Studio generated Windows Phone app using Blend and Visual Studio
By now you all probably heard about App Studio, the great new on line tool the Windows Phone team have created to create custom Windows Phone apps based upon...
Extension methods to animate an object over the screen via waypoints for Windows Phone
A long time ago, before I even was a Microsoft MVP, I wrote an article about a behavior that could make anything draggable and flickable for Windows Phone (t...
On-the-fly updating of a data template selected by a DataTemplateSelector
It’s really fun when someone contacts you with a Windows Phone development problem and you have already something standing by to solve it – even if it was in...
Behavior to hide UI elements when a bound collection is empty
This is a fun little thingy I wrote when dealing with error lists. Suppose, you want the user to be able to see there are errors, but not directly fly them t...
x86/ARM configuration gotcha in Windows Phone 8 projects when adding unit test projects
BUILD 2013 may be all the rage at this moment, but between watching sessions online this here die-hard still is doing some Windows Phone development. Doing s...
Workaround for selecting the last vertex of a Windows Phone MapPolyline
Fellow MVP - and fellow map maniac - Morten Nielsen brought me into contact with a Windows Phone developer called Jonathan Aghachi. He was struggling to sele...
Windows Phone 8 navigation part 4–updating the tests, fixing the final issues
Last time: so close, yet so far: This series appears to have become a trilogy in four parts – at the end of the last episode everything worked, save for tomb...
Windows Phone 8 navigation part 3–assembling the MVVMLight app
Last time on, on Dotnetbyexample… In the first post I described how to write the business logic to find a location by searching for an address by text, and ...
Windows Phone 8 navigation part 2–routing, route details,tombstoning–and testing
What happened last time on this show In the previous post I described to how to write the business logic to find a location by searching for an address by te...
Windows Phone 8 navigation part 1–geocoding, tombstoning–and testing
After my post about reverse geocoding I set out to make a little app to demonstrate routing in Windows Phone 8. The demo app went quite out of hand, so I dec...
ViewModel driven multi-state animations using DataTriggers and Blend on Windows Phone
Long long time ago I wrote how to drive animations from your ViewModel using DataStateBehavior, and I explicitly stated this was the only way to do it, since...
Enabling basic OpenLayers pinch zooming for Internet Explorer 10 touch events
A phenomenon described by the term ‘webkit monoculture’ is causing quite some concern in the web development community. A lot of web developers are basically...
Unit testing async Windows Phone 8 code on the UI thread with VS 2012.2 CTP4
This may be the most cryptic acronym-laden title I ever used for a blog post, but it quite exactly describes what I was trying to do yesterday. The Visual S...
Simple reverse geocoding with Windows Phone 8 and MVVMLight
Having worked in Geographical Information Systems over 20 years, I can tell you rightfully the new Windows Phone 8 mapping and location abilities are more th...
Surface RT versus Surface Pro versus the competition for REAL dummies
About every pundit who is somewhat interested in Microsoft either by love or abject hate has written about this already – and still I am going to do my take....
Publishing games in the Brazilian Windows Phone store
Brazil, a strong developing economy, is the largest country is South America, and has the biggest population of South America as well. From a game developer’...
A KnockOut.js binding helper for a JQuery Mobile Slider
For those who have missed it – besides all the things I do on Windows Phone and Windows 8 I actually have a job, and in that job I am currently doing a lot o...
An MVVM-friendly ‘tap-to-connect’ NFC socket network helper for Windows Phone 8
For my Windows Phone 8 game “Pull the Rope” I wrote a utility class to make pairing phones and obtaining a two-way communication channel a little bit e...
Playing sounds on Windows Phone using the MVVMLight Messenger
In my never-ending quest to preach the gospel of MVVM in general and MVVMLight in particular as the way to make a structured Windows Phone application I show...
2012
Handling Windows Phone 8 NFC startup events using the MVVMLight Messenger
As regular readers of this blog know, I am currently playing around with NFC on Windows Phone 8. I peeked a little in the Bluetooth app to app sample at MSDN...
On blogging, sharing and commenting
This is not about code, but about something a fellow developer and blogger told me, which made me quite sad. It’s a kind of personal rant, so feel free to sk...
Preventing high speed socket communication on Windows Phone 8 going south when using async/await
Currently I am working on a Windows Phone 8 action game in which you can fight a kind of duel. This involves pairing the phones via NFC and then obtaining a ...
Passing event arguments to the WinRT EventToCommandBehavior
This week my fellow MVP Scott Lovegrove contacted me and asked if and how he could pass the result of an event to my WinRT EventToCommandBehavior and/or Even...
Reactive Extensions in Windows Phone 8 and the 2001 submission error
You can read the whole story if you like reading, but this whole blog post comes down to one piece of advice: If you value your sanity, do not, under any cir...
A WinRT behavior to mimic EventToCommand (take 2)
(Updated with sample code January 19 2013) Some time ago I posted a WinRT behavior to mimic EventToCommand. This behavior cunningly looked for the command na...
Data binding shapes to the new Windows Phone 8 Map control (and more)
A little history When I accepted the invitation from MADNbe to talk about Maps and MVVM on September 20 early in the summer (or what was supposed to be the s...
Introducing the new Windows Phone 8 Map control
The time is finally there: the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is out, and now we can finally talk about all the great news things for developers that this new SDK bri...
A WinRT behavior to start a storyboard on an event
Sometimes I get a bit distracted. In this article I mention a behavior that I wrote which starts a storyboard on an event, I even put in in the win8nl librar...
Repairing the Windows Phone 7 behavior to show an image background for a search string
On the last day of 2011 ago I made DynamicBackgroundBehavior - a quite bizarre behavior which plays a supporting role in my latest Windows Phone application ...
Data binding shapes to the WinRT Bing Maps control – coming from Windows Phone
Disclaimer: this is not a 101 article. It requires understanding of the basic idea about MVVM, data binding, the MVVMLight messenger, and the use of behavior...
A WinRT behavior to turn a FlipView into a kind of Windows 8 Panorama
(UPDATED for RTM August 18 2012) One of the most beautiful controls of Windows Phone is the Panorama. It’s ideal for showing a lot related content on a smal...
A WinRT behavior to mimic EventToCommand
This is deprecated. Please use the official behaviors SDK now. See here for a simple migration guide Updated September 2 2012 with two sample applications &...
Using a provisional WinRT port of SilverlightSerializer to store state in MVVMLight ViewModels
Over 1.5 years ago I showed how to store your Windows Phone application state (‘tombstoning’) using SilverlightSerializer by Mike Talbot. In my quest to leve...
Reflection in WinRT: use Rx Extensions for dynamically adding event handlers
Suppose you want to add an event handler, but you don’t know up front which event. Admittedly, this is a bit of an edge case, but I have used it in a behavio...
Reflection in WinRT: DeclaredProperties vs GetRuntimeProperties caveat
I suppose this is part of some FM I did not R, but I would like to point it out in case some other sod wastes just as much time on it as me. I embarked upon ...
NavigationService for WinRT
"If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." Isaac Newton It was only 1.5 years ago, but it...
Behavior to make Bing Maps view area bindable
The Bing Maps control in Windows Phone 7 is pretty versatile but does not always play along very well with data binding. You can bind ZoomLevel and MapCenter...
Detecting your Windows 8 app is running in the background
In Windows Phone life was so simple: when the user put your app in the background, as of version 7.5 the OS effectively froze all threads, timers and whatnot...
JSON deserialization with JSON.net - caching results
On January 22 I promised this to be a three-part series. I’ve been kinda busy with upgrading apps, Windows 8 experiments and trivial ;-) stuff like code camp...
Porting the DragFlickBehavior from Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 Metro Style
Preface A little over a year ago I made DragFlickBehavior, a behavior for Windows Phone that makes essentially anything draggable and ‘flickable’, that is, y...
Attached behaviors for Windows 8 Metro Style XAML
This post was updated substantially at March 31, 2012 Regular readers of my blog know that there are some recurring themes: MVVM, maps and behaviors. I am a ...
Instant language update in a Windows Phone 7 application using MVVM
With more and more Marketplaces being added to the Windows Phone ecosystem, globalization of your app becomes all the more more important. I am happy to see ...
MVP Summit 2012–the day after
So here I am, back in the Netherlands, after the MVP Summit 2012, still quite dazed from what hit me. It was my very first summit, and I was not quite sure w...
Behavior to show a MessageBox from a ViewModel
Since I am a very lazy programmer and I not always want to register or define services and whatnot for showing a simple message I created this extremely simp...
JSON deserialization with JSON.net - class hierarchies
In part 1 of this series I described the basics of creating classes from a JSON string and then simply deserializing the string into a (list of) classes. Tha...
Behavior to force TextBox model update to prevent trouble with the ApplicationBar
A small quicky this time: Problem: TextBox, Text property bound to a string in my ViewModel I type text in the TextBox I click a “Save” button on my Appli...
Templating a XAML CheckBox to a thumbs-up/down control using Expression Blend
Preface The checkbox has been been around in the Graphical User Interface for as long as I can remember doing GUI – since the early 90’s I guess. You know wh...
JSON deserialization with JSON.net - basics
I’ve been contemplating an article about handling JSON for some time now, but it turned out to be a rather long article. So I’d thought to try something new,...
2011
A Windows Phone 7 behavior to show an image background for a search string
Note: an update to this article has been written here On New Year’s Eve I can’t help but writing this last bit of 2011: yesterday on a #wp7nl developer’s mee...
Re-imagining the behavior to show the Windows Phone 7 camera as background
This blog turns out not only to be a collection of how-to samples but also a record of my evolution as a Windows Phone 7 developer. At the end of my previous...
Safe event detachment base class for Windows Phone 7 behaviors
Some time ago I blogged about the Safe Event Detachment ‘pattern’ for behaviors and even included a snippet that made implementing this pattern easier. When ...
Using MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’
When I talk of the MVVM pattern, people usually think of business objects that get wrapped by ViewModels which get data bound to a user interface. Usually th...
Carpe Lumia!
Last updated November 10 2011 You know that band you used to love when you were in your teens? They really rocked your adolescent years. They rocked like hel...
So what about Windows Phone 7 adoption rates?
“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics” (Benjamin Disraeli) There is a nifty little Windows Phone 7 app out there called “…I’m a WP...
Using the motion API to check what direction the camera is looking
Recently I had my very first real try with the Windows Phone 7 Motion API, using the Simple Motion Sample and the Augmented Reality Motion Sample which both ...
A behavior to show the Windows Phone 7 camera as background
This article was updated October 29, 2011, implementing correctly handling of “back” navigation In a previous post I showed how to use the camera feed as bac...
Taking screenshots with Windows Phone 7 applications using a video feed
The Marketplace screenshot tool that came with the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK made life for developers a whole lot easier. But suppose you want to enable users to...
Wireless podcast sync on Windows Phone 7 outside USA–yes we can!
Sorry! No code here as well, but a usability tip. Mango RTM came, the Dutch Marketplace went live, I nuked my HTC7 Pro and finally used my age-old live id as...
The Standard About Page for Windows Phone 7 revisited
Back to business! Although section 5.6 requiring an application to have easily discoverable application name, version information, and technical support cont...
Being spammed to MVP
This posting is not about code or anything. Skip it if you are searching for that ;) I had a rotten day yesterday. I was tired from an extremely busy and str...
Mango ‘Augmented Reality’ 101: showing a video background
Some things on Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” are so easy that it’s almost embarrassing. Like showing a running video of what the camera is seeing on the backgrou...
New binding possibilities in Mango
Apart from all the goodness the new API’s in “Mango” bring us, there is that other great gift that it brings us: Silverlight 4. After spending so much time o...
MVVMLight based language selection for Windows Phone 7
Updated 25-09-2011 with a new implementation of LanguageSettingsViewModel to make it compatible with SilverlightSerializer. It appeared that every 2nd tombst...
Speed and distance calculation extension methods for Windows Phone 7
Upgrading stuff to from Windows Phone 7 to “Mango” is sometimes like cleaning your desk drawer before going on a holiday – you stumble upon stuff you forgot ...
Concatenating a long set of objects in a string with a separator
It still amazes me when I see people concatenating a long set of repetitive strings with a StringBuilder, adding a separator to each string it, and then remo...
Using Kinect and MVVMLight 4 for some basic Google Maps manipulation
Being a new tech junkie, I of course wanted to try the waters when the Kinect beta SDK was released on June 16, 2011. I thought it best to avoid domestic tro...
Mogade powered Live Tile high score service for Windows Phone 7
Those who are following my twitter timeline cannot have missed the fact that I recently published a little game called “Catch’em birds” for Windows Phone 7 i...
Debugging Windows Phone 7 device network access with just a laptop
It’s a strange world. Today I needed to debug an iPad’s web traffic, and ended up getting instructions from the Dutch Windows Phone 7 DPE Matthijs Hoekstra. ...
Safe event detachment ‘pattern’ for behaviors
For the past few weeks I’ve been hacking away at my Windows Phone 7 game and noticed something odd. The objective is to intercept moving objects on the scree...
Preventing objects made invisible by data binding to show up initially
Currently I am in the process of writing a small Windows Phone 7 game . It sports a ‘game over’ panel with a ‘play again’ button and it’s visibility is contr...
Bing Maps control with MVVMLight on Windows Phone 7
This article appeared originally in the March 2011 issue of .Net Magazine – in Dutch. By popular request I wrote this English translation. Regular readers of...
Simple Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight drag/flick behavior
In this post I describe a behavior that will essentially make anything draggable and ‘flickable’, that is, you can drag a GUI element along with your finger ...
Easy access to WMAppManifest.xml App properties like version and title
Every Windows Phone 7 application must have an Application Manifest file called WMAppManifest.xml. In this you must state title, author, version and some oth...
Sharepoint Client Object Model: sites, roles, lists, documents, AD users and permissions
Recently I had my very first encounter with Sharepoint, and I cannot say it was a pleasant meeting. I was doing a proof of concept for a customer to manipula...
Using attached dependency properties to toggle an Application Bar Icon from viewmodel
Application Bar Icon buttons are a look-and-feel-wise very consistent and easy to understand way for every Windows Phone 7 application to give it’s users acc...
Marketplace monetization idea: gift items
I seem to be going off-topic a lot these days but I hope you will forgive me for that. My wife has been eying my new HTC 7 Pro quite a lot, especially since...
Converter to convert a single item to a list to enable Bing Maps binding
Some things are so simple that I wonder if I am missing something. I tried to bind a single GeoPosition to Bing Maps’ MapItemsControl ItemsSource on Windows ...
Extended Windows Phone 7 page for handling rotation, focused element updates and back key press
In this article I present ‘my’ base class for Windows Phone 7 Application Pages – essentially nothing more than a collection of utilities to handle common sc...
HTC 7 Pro in da house!
After my first smartphone – my honored Windows Mobile 6.0 and later 6.1 powered Samsung i780 – I got hooked on smartphones – with a physical keyboard. Don’t ...
A Blendable Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight clipping behavior
If you are moving images around on a Canvas, you don’t want to show them when they get, for example, a negative Y-coordinate – for else they move outside of ...
The case for the Bindable Application Bar for Windows Phone 7
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: ”Thou shalt not make unto thee any Windows Phone 7 application without MVVMLight” Even when using Application Bar. I...
ViewModel driven animations using the Visual State Manager, DataStateBehavior and Expression Blend
Leon Zandman, fellow member of the Dutch Windows Phone 7 developer community, told me that my MapMania app used too much screen real estate for secondary con...
Displaying an image in Windows Phone 7 accent color
One of the customizing features of Windows Phone 7 is the accent color, which is used to display tiles and certain user interface elements. Default is blue, ...
A Standard About Page for Windows Phone 7 applications
<p>Update - if your read this, you might want to read this update too when you are done</p> I admit – I fell for it too. I was a bit too lax read...
Tombstoning MVVMLight ViewModels with SilverlightSerializer on Windows Phone 7
I’ve been down this road before but I thought it wise to revisit this subject, since I see a lot of people in the Windows Phone 7 developer community still s...
2010
Enum values can be characters too
Almost everyone who has programmed something in C# has created an enum at one point or another: public enum Whatever { Zero, One, Two, Three } You ca...
WiX- A Developer’s Guide to Windows Installer XML
And now for something completely different – a review of someone else’s examples. I have been reading “WiX- A Developer's Guide to Windows Installer XML“ by ...
Converter for showing/hiding Silverlight/WP7 GUI elements with boolean model values
Typically, when you are writing Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 applications using the MVVM pattern, your viewmodels expose boolean values indicating somethin...
WIX configurable search & replace custom action for text files
Recently I had my first encounter with actually writing setups myself using WIX. This is a powerful albeit a bit complex technology that allows you to build ...
Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 do not like DTDs
My current Windows Phone 7 project requires the possibility of reading configurations from various servers. For the GIS lovers among my audience: I am trying...
Swapping two elements in a bound ObservableCollection IMPROVED VERSION
Today I noticed something odd. I wanted to swap two elements in an ObservableCollection that was bound to a list box – so I could move objects up and down in...
Showing Open Source maps on Windows Phone 7 with the Bing Maps Control
My previous post, which caused a bit of a stirrup and got me over 1000 page hits on that one page alone in less than 46 hours, led to the question if I could...
Google Maps for Windows Phone 7 using the Bing Maps Control
As I write this, we are less than 25 hours away from the moment the first Windows Phone 7 devices are released into the wild – in the Netherlands, that is. T...
Browse the Marketplace for Windows Phone 7 apps outside the USA
This article does technically not belong to this blog, for it does not contain any code samples – in fact it does not handle code at all. But since the launc...
Using MVVMLight Messenger and behaviors to open files from local disk in Silverlight
The very first Silverlight application I had to make professionally (i.e. not as a hobby/research project at home) required the possibility to open a file fr...
Notifying the viewmodel of input errors using MVVMLight in Silverlight
I was creating a little application that had some input fields and a submit button. I wanted the submit button only to be enabled when the user input was val...
Extension methods for tomb stoning the Windows Phone 7 model
As I was (and still am) playing with my MVVM-driven Windows Phone 7 map viewer, I started thinking about tomb stoning and/or serializing stuff into the Windo...
An animated swipe-enabled title control for Windows Phone 7
Updated for the RTM tools, included sample application to show how it’s used. For my ongoing ‘research project’ on making the user experience for my MVVM-dri...
A Windows Phone 7 multi touch pan/zoom behaviour for Multi Scale Images
<p [R=”[R”></p> <p>Some may have read my foray into using Windows Phone 7 to view maps, utilizing a Multi Scale Image (msi), MVVM Light a...
Fixing CLSA property registration issues in child objects
AKA ‘avoiding the dreaded “Can not register property YourProperty after containing type (YourBaseType) has been instantiated” error message’ Somewhere betwee...
Using MVVM Light to drive a Windows Phone 7 / Silverlight 4 map viewer
Updated for Windows Phone 7 beta tools! Traditionally, the first application any developer tries out on a new platform is "Hello World". Working wi...
Making internals unit testable
When creating - or attempting to create ;-) - reusable components, it’s common practice to hide the gory details of your implementation – not only on class l...
Attached dependency properties for dummies
Recently I tried to make my first attached dependency property and it struck me as odd that I could find a lot of articles on dependency properties – but it ...
A very basic MEF sample using ImportMany
If you have been programming since the mid-80’s and have been a IT professional for over 17 years it does not happen often anymore that you get mesmerized by...
Caveats when migrating existing CLSA.NET objects to Silverlight
So you have been working for a while with CSLA .NET by Rockford Lhotka and now you want – like me – jump on the Silverlight bandwagon. So you want to reuse t...
Running CSLALight 3.8.2 under .NET 4 and Silverlight 4
Update December 23, 2013: this is article is pretty much outdated. Currently it gets a lot of traffic. I hope some people reading it would like to leave a co...
Injecting logic in the middle of an algorithm using “Func” function parameters
Sometimes you run into a situation in which you have a very similar complex pieces of logic, that only differ somewhere deep inside. This happens especially ...
A generic convertor for IEnumerable
Apart from ForEach<T>, as I described in my previous post, I noticed the absence of ConvertAll<T> on everything but List<T> as well. Pretty...
One ForEach to rule them all
I ran into this when I was investigating functional programming in C#. That’s been around for a while, but apart from using it for traversing or modifying co...
2009
A light-weight .NET framework for publishing Layar layers using WCF and Unity (C#)
Thus speaks Wikipedia: Augmented reality (AR) is a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged...
A simple Unity helper for making class decoupling easier
Unity, a part of the Enterprise Library, is a great way of decoupling interfaces and implementation, and for opening a road into unit testing with mock objec...
Using the Microsoft Ajax library to keep the javascript “this” context intact
This is not strictly .NET but more of a Javascript trick, but nevertheless, one that you might need. It is a simple trick, and actually requires much more te...
Yet another way to determine root paths in ASP.NET
How many times I have tried to find the root path of an ASP.NET page or a handler (ASHX) in order to call another URL I can hardly count. When working with W...
Azure Tables and DateTime: some limitations
A nice thing I ran into yesterday: if you have a TableStorageEntity child class containing a DateTime property, you have two thing to remember:<ul><...
Using extension methods to serialize objects to XML and compress the result - and deserialize again
Elaborating upon the string extension methods I created for compressing and decompressing strings to and from a byte array, it turned out fairly easy to crea...
Using extension methods to compress and decompress strings
After some rightful comments by Jarno Peschier I decided to once again look into my blog post about putting compressed object on the Azure message queue and ...
Putting multiple elements in a Silverlight 3 DataForm DataField while retaining auto Label and Description generation
Summary: if you want to use a DataForm, want to put multiple controls in one DataField, and still want Silverlight 3 to generate Label and Description from t...
Bind Silverlight 3 Slider Value, Minimum and Maximum attributes in EXACTLY the right order!
Today I want to share a piece of very hard won knowlegde with you. That piece of knowlegde is: if you want to use a Silverlight Slider, and you want to get t...
Storing objects as compressed messages in the Windows Azure Queue
For my current private R&D project I wanted to store ‘task set’ objects (in code samples below as shown type “Request”) on the Windows Azure Queue. To pr...
Calling a service relative to the Silverlight XAP (improved)
In my previous post I showed a way to call a service defined with a full path, as created by the designer, relative to that of the location of your XAP, by m...
Calling a service relative to the Silverlight XAP
This post is deprecated and left here for link reference only. See this post or a better way to do this. A small tidbit that I developed when I was followi...
Adding a Silverlight (3) gui to an existing Azure webrole
This is extremely easy. Steve Marx points out in a comment on this blog post: To add a Silverlight project to a Web Role project, simply right-click your pr...
Using the “global” prefix to prevent namespace clashes
I was running into a snag into the situation in which the compiler was accidentally took my local namespace when I wanted it to use the root namespace of CS...
Using PresentationCore in Azure requires full trust
Sometimes the answer is staring you in the face… I was trying to load an image from an URL in code. Imagine the code for that being something like this<pr...
Hosting a CGI program as a REST service on the Azure .NET Service Bus (allowing anonymous access)
The point of this posting is threefold: I want to show how you can make REST services on the .NET service bus, how you can allow anonymous access to these, a...
Cutting images with PresentationCore
In my business cutting images into smaller images is something that happens quite often these days, since tile based mapping systems like Google Maps, Virtua...
Silverlight data binding the lazy way
Your typical business class utilizing data binding in Silverlight (and possibly WPF too, but I don’t have any experience with that) look like this:<pre>...
2008
[Serializable] does not inherit (aka RTFM)
Of course, everybody knows that if you want to serialize an object, you need to decorate the class with the [Serializable] attribute. Right? Well, yes, and ...
Calling Oracle stored functions from ADO.NET
Die-hard Microsofties may be flabbergasted, but there are people out there using Oracle as a database in stead of SQLServer and - oh horror - are even daft e...
Converting colors from RGB to HTML and back
A very short one this time: it turns out to be pretty easy to convert a RGB color to a HTML color and back. This may come handy when (like me) you are using ...
Writing a simple HTTP proxy using WCF
I ran into a situation with the following network topology: The intranet server served PDF documents via IIS, but was only accessible from the WCF server - ...
Turning off WCF security
Unlike ye goode ole ASMX web services, WCF comes by default with security enabled. That’s a good thing: Microsoft now believes in security being integral par...
Shared code development and easy unit testing with Compact Framework
Microsoft made developing for the Compact Framework relatively easy. Everyone with experience in .NET development can easily take the plunge into mobile deve...
Don’t ever use backslashes in Silverlight 2 image URLS!
I had a great time today and yesterday at the Microsoft Developer Days 2008 in Amsterdam, where they shared quite a bit of data on Silverlight 2.0. I have be...
JSON services revisited: using a Dictionary as a generic parameter
Somebody at Microsoft deserves a Nobel Prize. Well, that is maybe a bit strong, but I ran into the problem that I wanted to create JSON scriptserver that wou...
Running and debugging a Windows Managed Service directly from Visual Studio.NET
Developing a Windows Managed Service (i.e. a service written in .NET ;-) ) is a lot easier than it used to be, still it can be a real PITA to debug, especial...
Simplyfying refactoring by making things obsolete
A very simple one I ran into today - when you are refactoring things, sometimes old methods are no longer required, but for the sake of backward compatiblity...
Starting an external program in the same directory
Especially in development/demo scenario’s you sometimes need to start an external program. In my case, it was a simple batch file that more or less terminate...
Forcing a web service proxy to use a specific http version
A short one this time, and a rare one too, but taken from real life. Sometimes a web service is implemented in such a way that it only understands http 1.1 o...
Calling a WCF service from Javascript
Note - I wrote this a long time ago. While the information in this article is still valid, nowadays I would use ASP.NET MVC 4 WebAPI on the server, and jQuer...
Compacting C# code using implicit properties, object initialization and lambda expressions
Not exactly hot science anymore - most could be distilled from Scott Guthrie’s blog and numerous others, but this shows how you can use new C# 3.0 features t...
2007
String extension methods
C# 3.0 features the new extension methods. This basically seems to allow you to add your own methods to sealed classes. That seems a bit weird, and Microsoft...
Creating a simple proxy
Sometimes you want to give web browsers access to web resources that are best not opened indiscriminatly to the world. A good example are WMS servers: you wa...
Expanding the length of JSON data returned from ASP.NET web services
A very small example this time, but one that can be very time consuming to find out. The basic example I described earlier works fine, but just try to send b...
The right way of accessing Master page properties from a child page
Master pages are a superbe idea. But sometimes you need to access Master Page properties from the child page. Suppose, for instance, you have a button on th...
Calling ASMX web services directly from javascript
The AJAX hype is all around us, and Microsoft provided us with the very neat ASP.NET AJAX extensions and the control toolkit to make things easier. The Updat...