Windows 8.1 Update

Saturday, May 31, 2014

I’m a little late to the party of writing about Windows 8.1 Update, but I wanted to get a fair result. My initial thoughts on it were that I didn’t like any of the improvements they made for keyboard and mouse users. Until a couple days ago when I was forced to use Windows 8.1 long enough to install the Update. I have to concede that the keyboard and mouse improvements are wonderful.…more

Build 2014 an outsider's summary

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

I was unable to go to BUILD this year, and that made me pretty sad. This year’s theme was “Cloud First; Mobile First.” - but wait, how can both be first? Well, that’s the question they wanted you to ask. So instead let’s ask, “What about desktop?” You see //build (yes I’m going to type it every way I can) was about 2 things this year: Azure (now called Microsoft Azure) and Windows Phone 8.…more

Office for iPad is now available

Friday, March 28, 2014

Today at a press briefing in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Office for iPad is now available. The press briefing was entitled “The Intersection of Cloud and Mobile” and there was plenty of information on Microsoft’s new core: The world will not be defined by the form factors that we have today. Everything we do will be digitized. Improve the fidelity of the interactions with all of the digitized information.…more

Surface RT and Surface 2 USB to Ethernet Connection

Friday, November 1, 2013

My company has a very secure WiFi connection. Part of that security comes at a cost though. We can’t do remote debugging of the NOOK for Windows 8 app over WiFi. As many of you know the Surface RT and Surface 2 don’t have an Ethernet port. Under Windows 8 there was a single USB to Ethernet device that you could use, and it worked well. Microsoft asked people hosting that ARM based driver to remove it, and Windows 8.…more

HttpRequestException in mscorlib.dll

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

If you run into this exception in a Windows 8 App: A first chance exception of type ‘System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException’ occurred in mscorlib.dll you should probably check to make sure that Internet (Client) is enabled in the App Manafest:

EventToCommand is now built into Windows 8.1!

Thursday, October 24, 2013

In MVVM code is separated to make it easier to test. You write a View Model and bind it to the View. Sometimes the View has elements that trigger events that you want to listen for in the View Model. This is where EventToCommand comes in handy. However, up till now this has been a bit of a trick to do in Windows 8 because it isn’t built in. You have to use a third party extension or write all the wiring up yourself.…more

Acer Iconia Ad Featuring NOOK!

Friday, October 4, 2013

Recently Microsoft let out an ad that featured that Acer Iconia W3. This is an 8.1 inch tablet that I got at the //build/ conference. I use it quite a bit for reading and some lite web surfing. The neat thing about this ad below is that it is featuring NOOK not only on the Iconia, but on the iPad Mini too! Check it out!

Upgrading Apps to Windows 8.1 - Deprecated Methods

Thursday, October 3, 2013

In upgrading NOOK from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 there are four methods/properties that we were using that have been deprecated since Windows 8. Here they are and the replacement: ScrollViewer.ScrollToVerticalOffset and ScrollViewer.ScrollToHorizontalOffset have been replaced with ScrollViewer.ChangeView(OffsetX, OffsetY, ZoomLevel) ApplicationView.View has been replaced with ApplicationView.GetForCurrentView().Orientation which is an ApplicationViewOrientation DisplayProperties.LogicalDpi has been replaced with DisplayInformation.GetForCurrentView().LogicalDpi The first one has a catch though. Previously if the horizontal scroll width was smaller than the requested position it would fail silently.…more

Packt Microsoft Carnival

Friday, May 11, 2012

A little over a year ago I wrote a book: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Applications on Windows Phone 7. Packt Publishing has since taken three of the chapters from this book and added them to a compendium: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Developer’s Compendium: The Best of Packt for Extending SharePoint. And for a limited time you can purchase this book at a discount during Packt Microsoft Carnival. See the site for more details, and let me know via Twitter @spatacoli if you want some help updating any of my examples for Windows Phone 7.…more

Hello from Windows 8

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

I am writing this from Windows 8. I have been running the developer preview since last September, but just last week I upgraded all of my machines to the Consumer Preview. So far it is an interesting transition from Windows 7. Windows 8 was built around the idea of touch first, and using the OS really reminds you of this fact. Many commenters on the Internet have looked down on this fact and dismissed the entire experience as either too childlike or too much of a change.…more