VisualTreeHelper Extensions for Windows Store Apps

Preface The VisualTreeHelper “provides utility methods that can be used to traverse object relationships (along child-object or parent-object axes) in the visual tree of your app.” In this post I will show two extensions to VisualTreeHelper. Since you cannot create an instance of VisualTreeHelper, these are not extension methods from …

Discover Properties of Storage Items in Windows Store Apps

Preface Sometimes it is helpful to discover some or all properties of storage items (StorageFile, StorageFolder). These classes implement the interfaces IStorageItem and IStorageItemProperties. IStorgeItem.GetBasicPropertiesAsync gets an object that provides access to the basic properties of an item. IStorageItemProperties.Properties gets an object that provides access to the content-related properties of …

MessageBox for Windows Store Apps in C# / XAML

Preface The replacement of MessageBox for Windows Store apps is the class MessageDialog. This class is fine as long as you do not need more than three options the user can choose from. In technical words, MessageDialog allows only up to three commands. At the time of writing, this is …

BusyIndicator for Windows Store Apps in C# / XAML

Preface The BusyIndicator for Windows Store apps is a variation of the Busy-Indicating Dialog for Windows Store apps. The motivation for creating such a control is almost the same. No such a control is available. And I want to make sure the user cannot start a new task while a …

Busy-Indicating Dialog for Windows Store Apps in C# / XAML

Preface Some of you might know the BusyIndicator from the WPF Toolkit or from Silverlight. I was using this control in Silverlight to disable user interaction while the application was performing some long running operations. This makes it really easy to make sure the user will not start a new …

Simple and Generic ICommand Implementation for Usage in XAML

Preface The Commanding Overview says “Commanding is an input mechanism in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) which provides input handling at a more semantic level than device input. Examples of commands are the Copy, Cut, and Paste operations found on many applications.” Well, one should extent the definition and mention Windows …

Using Windows Store App Resource Libraries in C# / XAML

Introduction Given there is a Windows Store app. Some of the resources that this app needs are part of a library. This library contains a XAML file (ApplicationStyles.xaml) for application specific styles and the StandardStyles.xaml that is generated when a new Windows Store App (XAML) project is created. ApplicationStyles.xaml uses …

Change Color of ToggleSwitch

Given you implement an app using the dark theme. This app contains some configuration values, which can be changed using a settings flyout. According to the design guidelines, the background of the settings flyout should be white. Unfortunately, the default color theme for all controls is dark. So they are …

Checklist: Submitting an App with Ads to the Windows Store

Preface When you use the Microsoft Advertising Services, adding AdControls to your app is the easy part of the job (see my posts with a sample showing all the available ad types and how to configure AdControls to make it easy to switch between test mode and production ad). The …