Cimbalino Toolkit 2.0.0-beta1

July 31, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone Cimbalino, UWP, Windows, Windows 10, Windows Phone, WPDev Comments Edit

Assuming you don’t live in a planet where you don’t get internet (and I know that’s not the case as you’re reading this!), by now you know that Windows 10 has officially launched!

So did Visual Studio 2015 and NuGet 3.x, so pretty much everything you need to develop new Windows 10 universal apps, right? Not quite! ;)

Presenting the new and improved version 2.0.0-beta1 of the Cimbalino Toolkit, and as you already suspect, it is fully compatible with UWP (Universal Windows Platform)!

Proper kudos is owed to MVP Scott Lovegrove as he has done pretty good job for the last couple of weeks to get the toolkit up and running in Windows 10! :)

There is a breaking change on using the toolkit from previous versions: NuGet has removed the functionality of running Powershell scripts when you install a package, and Cimbalino Toolkit required that to add the Behaviors SDK to your projects… that said, please make sure that you manually add the Behaviors SDK to any project using the Cimbalino.Toolkit NuGet package!

On a final now, remember that this new version is still a beta as the code and documentation will be reviewed and tested during the next weeks, so do expect to find some issues and bugs! If you find any, please do report them directly on GitHub!

There’s never been a better time to be a Microsoft developer!

May 5, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone BldWin, Build, Build2015, Microsoft, Windows, Windows 10 Comments Edit

Full disclosure: though I’ve been a Microsoft employee for a short while, I currently have no professional (or other type of) connection with the company.

Now that we have got that out of the way, I do believe that there has never been a better time to be a Microsoft developer than today! :)

Ok, I’ll bite… why do you think that?

Microsoft Build Developers Conference was held last week in San Francisco. On it, Microsoft showed it’s vision for the future, and it is a bright one!

Though this article only scratches the surface on all that was shown, these were my personal highlights of the event!

Windows 10 everywhere!

Yes, Windows 10 will be everywhere, from PC’s, Laptops and Tablets, the Xbox One and Hololens, and also powering IoT devices like the Raspberry Pi 2.

For developers this translates in the fact that apps you develop for Windows 10, will also run in any other device! Functionality may obviously differ from device to device given their capabilities (touch screen on a tablet, augmented reality in Hololens, sensors on IoT devices, etc.), but in the end it will be the same Windows 10 app running on all of them!

Open-source initiative

The amount of code made available over the last couple of weeks in Microsoft’s GitHub page is truly astonishing!

Microsoft went from a closed-source software company to open-source a big chunk of their code in order to get contributions from the community (comments, reviews, code contributions, etc.), just like in any other GitHub repository!

Going cross-platform

Say goodbye to the Microsoft you’ve know for years as a Windows and Office only company; “Mobile first, cloud first” is the new motto, and there was enough proof of that in Build conference.

If you’re a web developer, you should definitely give Visual Studio Code a spin - and here’s the twist: it runs not only in Windows, but also in Mac and Linux, as Visual Studio Code is itself built on top of open-source technologies!

The whole CoreCLR (.NET Core Runtime) was built for Windows but now runs in Mac and Linux machines, meaning you can run the same .NET based code in all these platforms!

iOS and Android apps are welcome!

Develop apps for iOS or Android? Well, there’s some good news for you too: with Project Islandwood and Project Astoria, you’ll be able to make those apps run in Windows 10 with just a few modifications, and even sell them through the Windows Store and make some money out of it!

Targeting the Windows platform is definitely a smart move, as it will enable you to reach more users and increase potential revenue from your apps.

All apps are now Windows Apps

The “older” .NET and Win32 desktop apps we use all day long will now have a place in the Windows Store, making life easier for users to find, download and use them!

Just package those apps as a Windows 10 app, ship it to the store, and you’re done!

One more thing

Hololens! If you don’t know what it is by now, then you definitely should!!

While other companies are investing Virtual Reality, Microsoft took a different approach with Hololens and went with Augmented Reality.

As the name might suggest, “Augmented Reality” adds information to your real environment, and it’s usages are quite diverse. Microsoft showed a couple of demos of usage for construction and health that I believe made some jaw’s drop!

“DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS!!”

No one said it, but I’m sure a lot of people remembered this while watching Build 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs

Cimbalino Toolkit Documentation

April 24, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone Cimbalino, Windows, Windows Phone Comments Edit

The biggest request (and at the same time, the biggest complaint) I always had about Cimbalino Toolkit was to get some proper documentation about what the toolkit actually contains!

That has now changed, as the documentation is live at http://cimbalino.org/help

The whole documentation was generated from the inline XML Documentation with the help of SandCastle, so it’s still a bit minimum but I expect it to improve along time!

Please feel free to check it out and send some comments! :)

Windows 10 Technical Preview Tools now available!

April 2, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone Cimbalino, Windows, Windows 10 Comments Edit

In case you’ve missed it, Microsoft has now released the Windows 10 Technical Preview Developer Tools!

These allow you to start using the Windows 10 Universal Apps Platform (UAP) and thus developing apps for the next generation of Windows!

All you need is a machine (or VM) with the latest Windows 10 Preview and Visual Studio CTP 6 to install the developer tools preview and start building some awesome apps!! :)

Cimbalino Toolkit Windows 10 UAP support

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about Cimbalino Toolkit support for Windows 10 Apps (aka Universal Apps, UAP, Windows Apps, etc…)

I can assure you that support is definitely coming and you can get an early look on what is being done in Scott Lovegroove’s fork available here!

Cimbalino Toolkit: Integrating with MVVM Light Toolkit

January 26, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone Cimbalino, MVVM, Windows, Windows Phone, WPDev Comments Edit

Picking up where we left off on the previous article, you now know how to install the Cimbalino Toolkit in your app, so congratulations for that! :)

On this article I will show how to integrate it with the MVVM Light Toolkit, and then build a really simple “Hello World” app!

Note: Though this article will focus on how to integrate with the MVVM Light Toolkit, the Cimbalino Toolkit can be combined with most Windows development toolkits and frameworks that are available (like MVVMCross, Caliburn, etc.)

Using the same approach to add NuGet packages to the solution shown in the previous article, now search for “MvvmLight” and select the package shown in this picture:

You should now click on the Install button, confirm that you want to install the package into both projects, review the details shown in the License Acceptance window, and click the I Accept button.

You will now see a couple of warnings about moving the ViewModel folder manually; this is expected and it is due to the fact that we are building a Universal App (you can find more information about this here).

Look at the Solution Explorer Window, you should see that we have two ViewModel folders, one on each of the projects:

Go ahead and delete one of the ViewModel folders, and move the remaining one from the project to the shared files on the bottom. The end result should look something like this:

We now we need to register the IMessageBoxService with the ViewModelLocator so that we can use it in the MainViewModel to show message popups in the app!

Edit the ViewModelLocator.cs file and change it to the following:

using Cimbalino.Toolkit.Services;
using GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Ioc;
using Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation;

namespace App1.ViewModel
{
    public class ViewModelLocator
    {
        public ViewModelLocator()
        {
            ServiceLocator.SetLocatorProvider(() => SimpleIoc.Default);

            SimpleIoc.Default.Register<IMessageBoxService, MessageBoxService>();

            SimpleIoc.Default.Register<MainViewModel>();
        }

        public MainViewModel Main
        {
            get
            {
                return ServiceLocator.Current.GetInstance<MainViewModel>();
            }
        }

        public static void Cleanup()
        {
            // TODO Clear the ViewModels
        }
    }
}

As you can see above, we registered the IMessageBoxService with the MVVM Light Toolkit IoC Container by calling SimpleIoc.Default.Register<IMessageBoxService, MessageBoxService>(), and this is how we will use all of the services provided by Cimbalino Toolkit - and there are quite a lot of them!!

Now open the MainViewModel.cs file and change it to the following code:

using Cimbalino.Toolkit.Services;
using GalaSoft.MvvmLight;
using GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Command;

namespace App1.ViewModel
{
    public class MainViewModel : ViewModelBase
    {
        private string _name;

        public string Name
        {
            get
            {
                return _name;
            }
            set
            {
                Set(ref _name, value);
            }
        }

        public RelayCommand SayHelloCommand { get; private set; }

        public MainViewModel(IMessageBoxService messageBoxService)
        {
            SayHelloCommand = new RelayCommand(async () => await messageBoxService.ShowAsync("Hello " + Name + "!"));
        }
    }
}

We started by adding a couple of properties, Name and SayHelloCommand, that we are going to bind to the view.

We can also see a IMessageBoxService parameter in the MainViewModel constructor, which the IoC Container will satisfy by creating an instance of MessageBoxService and providing it to the constructor.

Inside the constructor, we declared what will happen when the SayHelloCommand is invoked: show a popup message box with the input name.

That takes care of the view model, time to work on the view!

On the shared files project, create a new folder named View, and inside it create a new user control named MainUserControl.xaml with the following content:

<UserControl x:Class="App1.View.MainUserControl"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
             xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
             DataContext="{Binding Main,
                                   Source={StaticResource Locator}}"
             d:DesignHeight="300"
             d:DesignWidth="400"
             mc:Ignorable="d">

    <StackPanel>
        <TextBlock Text="name" />
        <TextBox Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay}" />
        <Button Command="{Binding SayHelloCommand, Mode=OneTime}" Content="Say Hello" />
    </StackPanel>
</UserControl>

For the view we will use root StackPanel control, containing a TextBlock with a “name” label, a TextBox binded to the Name property in the view model, and a Button binded to the SayHelloCommand property.

Notice also on the top of the file that we set the user control DataContext property to use the ViewModelLocator.Main property, which returns the instance of the MainViewModel.

Now all that we needed is to add our MainUserControl to the MainPage.xaml file in each of the app projects. In the end, each of the MainPage.xaml files should be similar to this:

<Page x:Class="App1.MainPage"
      xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
      xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
      xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
      xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
      xmlns:view="using:App1.View"
      mc:Ignorable="d">

    <Grid>
        <view:MainUserControl />
    </Grid>
</Page>

And… we are done!!!

Just run the Windows project and the Windows Phone project to confirm that our shared code does in fact work across the two platforms! :)

To make things even easier, you can download the full solution here!

Cimbalino Toolkit, step by step!

January 5, 2015 Windows, Windows Phone Cimbalino, Windows, Windows Phone, WPDev Comments Edit

One of the biggest complaints I always had about Cimbalino Toolkit is the lack of documentation and samples!

Granted, some awesome developers like Sara Silva and Scott Lovegrove have done a lot more than I have to promote the toolkit and write some really good code using it, but I think it’s time I take on some of that work!

As such, I’m now making an effort to regularly write articles on Universal Apps development with Cimbalino Toolkit step by step, and here is the first one…

Adding the Cimbalino Toolkit NuGet to a Universal App

Open Visual Studio 2013, click File -> New -> Project, on the Templates on the left select Store Apps -> Universal Apps, on the right select Blank App (Universal Apps), pick a name and hit Ok to save the solution!

Click Tools -> NuGet Package Manager -> Manage NuGet Packages for Solution….

On the top right of the Manage NuGet Packages window you will see a search box; type “Cimbalino” on it and press Enter. You should now be seeing two packages: “Cimbalino Toolkit Core” (compatible with background agents) and “Cimbalino Toolkit” (main component)

Select “Cimbalino Toolkit” and click on the Install button. You will now see the Select Project window.

Leave all projects of the solution selected and click Ok. You will now see the License Acceptance window, showing the licenses for all packages that will be installed.

Please review the data and then click I accept to continue with the installation.

After this step, you should now have returned to the Manage NuGet Packages window, and a green checkmark should now be shown on the side of each of the toolkit components.

Congratulations: you have now successfully installed the Cimbalino Toolkit in your project! :)

Bye MixRadio!

December 12, 2014 Uncategorized Microsoft, MixRadio Comments Edit

Today was my last day as a MixRadio employee.

After Microsoft completed the acquisition of the Nokia Devices & Services business, MixRadio and all of it’s employees became part of Microsoft.

However, a couple of weeks after that Microsoft started a full reorganization and decisions were quickly made to ensure MixRadio would become a separate entity.

So the only visible changes resulting from the acquisition are actually the company signs around the office, the “blue badges”, and the new @microsoft.com email addresses… no other real integration ever happened for MixRadio, so I can’t actually say I felt like a Microsoft employee during this short period!

As a result of all this, plans have been made for the future of MixRadio as a new company that made me believe this is the right time for our paths to come apart.

During my time with the company, I was involved in almost every aspect of the MixRadio Windows Phone client development; every time I open the MixRadio 4.x client in my phone, I can’t help but to feel proud of what this team accomplished.

I wish the very best to MixRadio and all my colleagues in the upcoming future, and I’m sure to keep using MixRadio service as it is by far one of the best streaming music services available!

As for me, I will keep doing what I love, always related with development under Microsoft Technologies, but more to come on this over the next weeks…

Upgrading from the IsolatedStorageSettings to ApplicationData.LocalSettings

August 14, 2014 Windows, Windows Phone ApplicationData, Cimbalino, IsolatedStorageSettings, Windows, Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, WPDev Comments Edit

When Windows Phone 7 came out, the SDK provided a really easy class to maintain the app settings: the IsolatedStorageSettings.

Basically, the class is an IDictionary<string, object> with a Save() method that will take the instance and serialize it to a file called “__ApplicationSettings” in the root of the app’s isolated storage.

Now if you upgraded your app from Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0 to the Windows Runtime model, you’ll probably want to migrate the settings from the old format to the new one, right?

Problem is that though the class exists in Windows Phone Silverlight apps, it does not in the new Windows Runtime apps, being replaced with ApplicationData.LocalSettings and ApplicationData.RoamingSettings instead.

So the only solution will be doing it ourselves, by reading and deserializing the “old” settings file!

Here’s a sample of the content of an “__ApplicationSettings” file from one of my tests:

PhoneApp1.Address, PhoneApp1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null
<ArrayOfKeyValueOfstringanyType xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/Arrays"><KeyValueOfstringanyType><Key>Name</Key><Value xmlns:d3p1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" i:type="d3p1:string">John Doe</Value></KeyValueOfstringanyType><KeyValueOfstringanyType><Key>Age</Key><Value xmlns:d3p1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" i:type="d3p1:int">20</Value></KeyValueOfstringanyType><KeyValueOfstringanyType><Key>Country</Key><Value xmlns:d3p1="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/PhoneApp1" i:type="d3p1:Address"><d3p1:Code>UK</d3p1:Code><d3p1:Name>United Kingdom</d3p1:Name></Value></KeyValueOfstringanyType></ArrayOfKeyValueOfstringanyType>

By looking at the contents of some samples of settings file like the one above, here’s what we can learn:

the file has always two lines (second line in the above sample is auto-wrapped to fit the post!)
the first line has the known types full names that should be loaded and passed on to the DataContractSerializer constructor, each properly separated by a null char
if only basic types are used, the first line will be empty
the second line is the serialized xml data

So I wrote the following code snippet to read and deserialize the values from “__ApplicationSetting” to an IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, object>>:

public async Task<IEnumerable<KeyValuePair<string, object>>> GetValuesAsync()
{
    try
    {
        using (var fileStream = await ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder.OpenStreamForReadAsync("__ApplicationSettings"))
        {
            using (var streamReader = new StreamReader(fileStream))
            {
                var line = streamReader.ReadLine() ?? string.Empty;

                var knownTypes = line.Split('')
                    .Where(x => !string.IsNullOrEmpty(x))
                    .Select(Type.GetType)
                    .ToArray();

                fileStream.Position = line.Length + Environment.NewLine.Length;

                var serializer = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Dictionary<string, object>), knownTypes);

                return (Dictionary<string, object>)serializer.ReadObject(fileStream);
            }
        }
    }
    catch
    {
        return new Dictionary<string, object>();
    }
}

So all you now have to do is call the GetValuesAsync() method above and load those values to one of the new Settings repositories!

The Cimbalino Toolkit way

Starting in Cimbalino Toolkit 1.2.0, you’ll be able to use the new IApplicationSettingsService to access Local, Roaming, and Legacy app settings.

In case that wasn’t clear from the names, the Legacy settings will allow you to get the values on the “__ApplicationSettings” file (do note that only the Values property is implemented, so it’s read-only).

Here are the platform rules for the ISettingsService:

Local
- Supported in all platforms
Roaming
- Supported in all platforms except Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0
Legacy
- Only supported in Windows Phone

One last suggestion: after migrating the legacy settings remember to delete the “__ApplicationSettings” file as it won’t be needed again! ;)