Posts by Year

2024

Unit testing UI interaction with MRTK3

8 minute read

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...

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2023

Using MRTK3 GA on Magic Leap 2

1 minute read

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...

Using MRTK3 pre17 on Magic Leap 2

2 minute read

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...

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2022

MagSafe your HoloLens

2 minute read

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 ...

Running an MRTK3 app on an Android Phone

9 minute read

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...

Workaround for MRTK 2.7.x glTF import bug

2 minute read

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...

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2021

Rounded corners in MRTK UI

5 minute read

Rounded corners are suddenly hip again and all the rage, even in Microsoft land, as is clearly visible in Windows 11.

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2020

Generic MRKT2 Extension Service Inspector

5 minute read

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 ...

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2019

First look at the HoloLens 2 emulator

4 minute read

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...

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2018

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2017

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2016

Why you should update your apps to UWP

3 minute read

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...

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2015

Windows 10 maps part 6 - scenes and camera

4 minute read

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...

Windows 10 maps part 5 - styles and 3D

7 minute read

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...

Windows 10 maps part 1 - setting up

4 minute read

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...

Windows 10 build 10061 fixes MapIcon woes!

2 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

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2014

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2013

Build for both–introducing WpWinNl

2 minute read

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...

Commercial break - introducing 2 Phone Pong

1 minute read

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...

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2012

On blogging, sharing and commenting

2 minute read

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...

A WinRT behavior to mimic EventToCommand

5 minute read

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 &...

NavigationService for WinRT

4 minute read

"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...

MVP Summit 2012–the day after

8 minute read

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...

JSON deserialization with JSON.net - basics

4 minute read

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,...

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2011

Carpe Lumia!

12 minute read

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?

2 minute read

“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...

Being spammed to MVP

3 minute read

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...

New binding possibilities in Mango

2 minute read

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...

Marketplace monetization idea: gift items

1 minute read

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...

HTC 7 Pro in da house!

9 minute read

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 ...

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2010

Enum values can be characters too

less than 1 minute read

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...

Making internals unit testable

2 minute read

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

3 minute read

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

4 minute read

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...

A generic convertor for IEnumerable

less than 1 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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...

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2009

Cutting images with PresentationCore

2 minute read

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

2 minute read

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>...

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2008

[Serializable] does not inherit (aka RTFM)

1 minute read

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 ...

Converting colors from RGB to HTML and back

less than 1 minute read

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

2 minute read

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

less than 1 minute read

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...

Calling a WCF service from Javascript

6 minute read

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...

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2007

String extension methods

1 minute read

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

1 minute read

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...

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