Posts about Universal Apps
When Lifeline was originally released in 2015 for iOS, it became the number one paid app in the App Store. Although, in essence it was just a text based adventure, it took full advantage of interactive notifications introduced in iOS 8, creating an illusion of real-time communication with the stranded astronaut Taylor. While Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 had no support for custom toast interactions, making the experience impossible to recreate, notifications in Windows 10 are on par with iOS and Android.
New versions of applications introduce new features. Sooner or later this inevitably causes the format of locally stored application data and settings to evolve, as well. To avoid loss of data or even application crashes, newer application versions must be able to at least read older data formats or convert them to its own native format. The option of having data roamed between different devices with potentially different versions of application, can make handling data format changes even more complex.
At first sight there doesn't seem to be a way for a universal Windows application to be directly notified, when one of its background tasks has completed. Fortunately, there is an event that will get raised when a specific background task completes. In this post I'll explore how to take advantage of it and what it allows you to do.
There are a lot of features in WPF that are not available in other XAML dialects, such as the latest one for Universal Windows applications. One of them is multibinding, which allows binding of multiple view model properties to a single dependency property of a WPF control. Fortunately, there is a third party library available which makes this possible in UWP apps as well.
Under what circumstances can a static field be initialized multiple times? C# language specification makes it pretty clear that static fields are initialized only once, before the class is first used. This meant, it was time for some creative thinking, when I encountered an issue, seemingly caused by the static field being initialized multiple times.
When I tried to run a universal application in the Windows Mobile 10 Emulator today, I was greeted with an error. The phone OS in the emulator was unresponsive and Visual Studio couldn't deploy the application to it. Here's the solution that worked for me in the end.
Today the first TechDays conference of 2015/2016 took place at the premises of Microsoft in Slovenia. Me and Andrej Tozon, a fellow Slovenian Microsoft MVP, did a track on Windows 10 Universal Apps. He started with 2 overview sessions about what's new and how to migrate existing Windows Store and Windows Phone applications to the new development platform. I followed with a deep dive into 2 more specific topics.