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There’s an issue I’ve encountered in every single of my UWP applications, so it’s very likely you know about it. In Universal Apps, you can subscribe to the SystemNavigationManager.GetForCurrentView().BackRequested event. It’s usually done firsthand to mimic Windows Phone’s behavior where pressing the back button loads the previous page in the back stack. So far, so good. But then comes the moment when you need to implement a back button behavior that is specific to a page. For instance, you have a popup and you want to dismiss it when the user presses the back button. So you subscribe once more to the SystemNavigationManager.GetForCurrentView().BackRequested event, implementRead More →

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There’s a dilemma you probably faced if you’ve written a mobile application displaying a large number of pictures. You could display gorgeous hi-resolution pictures, but if you do so, you’ll provide a poor experience to users who use your app on the go. Particularly, users with a poor mobile connection who will have to wait minutes before the pictures are displayed. You may also discontent users with limited data plans, who don’t want to eat gigabytes of data just to display your pictures. On the other hand, if you settle for low-resolution pictures, you’ll provide a sub-optimal experience you are at home, with an unlimited andRead More →

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MVVM is a commonly used design pattern for XAML-based applications (WPF, Silverlight, and now WinRT). I won’t go into a full description of the pattern, but I’d like to spend some time on a design issue I’ve encountered ever since I’ve started Silverlight/WinRT development. The issue Everybody will tell you: nowadays, for a good UX, animations are a must-have. XAML applications have a very powerful animation system based on storyboards, but it doesn’t fit well with MVVM. How so? One of the recommendation when using the MVVM pattern is to make a clear separation between the viewmodel and the view. The viewmodel should have noRead More →

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While the Windows 10 SDK is still unavailable, and will likely remain so until the Build event in April, Microsoft allowed developers at Mobile World Congress to briefly try an early preview of the SDK. Two novelties have been publicly revealed: StateTriggers and the RelativePanel. I’ll present in this post all the information I could gather about those two features. StateTriggers Anyone who has used Visual States, be it manually or using Blend, will probably agree: the syntax is unnecessarily verbose, and having to use a storyboard to change even simple properties quickly gets tedious. The situation has been going on for a while, but with universalRead More →