Monthly Archives: January 2012

Thursday, 2012-01-26
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Computers and Internet

Another XamlParseException – “Unknown parser error: Scanner 2147500037”

Yesterday I got one of those XamlParseExceptions that do not seem to make sense. It happened after I moved most of the code from my Windows Phone application to a class library. In fact the only things I left in the application project were the App class, the Properties folder and some resources that differentiate different applications that share the library. If you want to do something similar – you can have your MainPage class defined in a library and just need to update the WMAppManifest.xml to point at its new location, eg: NavigationPage=”MyClassLibrary;component/Pages/MainPage.xaml”.

Everything worked fine except for this bit:

<i:Interaction.Triggers>
    <ic:PropertyChangedTrigger
        Binding="{Binding PageNumber}">
        <im:ControlStoryboardAction
            ControlStoryboardOption="Play">
            <im:ControlStoryboardAction.Storyboard>
                <Storyboard>
                    <DoubleAnimation ...

It kept throwing an exception:

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Sunday, 2012-01-22
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Computers and Internet, Uncategorized

Displaying Webcam Preview in a Metro App Using WinRT and XAML

Note: the WinRT XAML Toolkit library that I share here has a CameraCaptureControl that makes it simple to host the camera preview, take pictures or record videos.
Note: This article is based on Windows 8 Developer Preview version and it should still be relevant with Windows 8 RTM, but please let me know if that is not the case.

I was looking at the controls available in WinRT () and I’ve stumbled upon this control called – CaptureElement. What it does is it “Represents a media capture from a capture device, for example recorded video content.” I thought I’d give it a go and see if I can display the output from the webcam on screen – which could be useful for AR (Augmented Reality) applications or even just for fun. This is how you do a preview then…

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Monday, 2012-01-16
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Computers and Internet

GridSplitters – Part 3: Limiting the Range of a GridSplitter

Sometimes I look at what people search for when they hit my blog and see some trending questions that don’t seem to have easily findable answers. This one seems to be related to how to set the limit for moving a GridSplitter… Well – you don’t actually touch the GridSplitter to do that. You need to modify your RowDefinition or ColumnDefinition. In a similar way that you can define MinWidth/MaxWidth/MinHeight/MaxHeight on any FrameworkElement – you can do MinWidth/MaxWidth on a ColumnDefinition and MinHeight/MaxHeight on a RowDefinition. By setting these – you limit how much the GridSplitter will be able to resize them. I actually take these into account in my SimpleGridSplitter implementation, so if you have lots of rows or columns in your WPF app – you can use that one. Silverlight works fine there with its own GridSplitter.

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Monday, 2012-01-16
2 Comments
Computers and Internet

Beginning WinRT Development – Part 2: Learning Resources

This is just a short post that I will likely update in the future. A where to start/how to ramp up sort of link list on WinRT development.

Main Reference Resources

News & Blogs

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Monday, 2012-01-09
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Computers and Internet

Vibration Behaviors for Windows Phone – Part 1

So I got my wife an HTC Titan for Christmas and I loved the way it vibrates compared to my Focus. It just feels nice with much lower frequency, while the vibrations on the Focus are a bit like an electric shock. This got me thinking that it would be nice to have the same sort of haptic feedback you get on the 3 hardware buttons on the regular Silverlight buttons. While you could just handle the touch events on every button you choose – it is a lot of code that just gets duplicated all over your app and it is hard to update it globally – e.g. if you want to allow the user to switch it off everywhere or automatically preconfigure it when the app first runs based on the device used. The best solution for it seems to be to create a Behavior that you can easily attach to any button, so that is what I had set off to create.

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Sunday, 2012-01-08
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Computers and Internet

“Moving GridSplitter with code behind” is not the right question

Occasionally I see people searching for how to move the GridSplitter with code behind…
This is not the right question. You can in theory move the GridSplitter itself with code – it is just a control that is hosted in a Grid (if used correctly), so by adjusting the Margins or ~Alignment properties – you can change its position, but what you really want is to resize the associated column/row – which will also incidentally move the GridSplitter.

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Thursday, 2012-01-05
2 Comments
Computers and Internet

ProgressBar and PerformanceProgressBar performance issues with IsIndeterminate = true

Abstract

The gist of this post is that if you use the ProgressBar that comes out of the box with the Windows Phone tools or use the PerformanceProgressBar that comes in the Silverlight Toolkit – you should always set its IsIndeterminate property back to false when you are done displaying it to not use up the CPU and drain the battery.

If you are using an older version of the Silverlight Toolkit – you should update to the latest one, because some of the older ones have a bug that will cause the PerformanceProgressBar to use up the CPU cycles even once you switch IsIndeterminate back to false.

Ideally – you should just use the non-Silverlight-rendered, OS-managed ProgressIndicator like this:

<shell:SystemTray.ProgressIndicator>
    <shell:ProgressIndicator
        IsVisible="{Binding IsWaitingForAnOperationToComplete}"
        IsIndeterminate="True" />
</shell:SystemTray.ProgressIndicator>

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