No more dealing with three completely different projects connected by just an App.xaml The main XAML file (or wherever your application first starts from) just defaults to the desktop screen designer page. Want to see how it looks like on a tablet, phone, Xbox or IoT? Just click the dropdown box and select whichever device you want to see. Voila! Super easy!

Good job MS!

EDIT: I created examples of the changes and advancements: http://imgur.com/a/04aU6

Mircosoft has just announced that since now XAMARIN will be free even with VS Community. Source: Build 2016

Hi all,

May to June, I created Countdown Interval Timer. Starting July until now, I created Pillbox.

Reason for making it

• I wanted to practice using SQLite in an app, so this was the perfect idea for that since it also had a limited scope.

• My mom wanted an app like this and the store only had 1, which wasn't a UWP app, plus it was a bit too complicated for someone like my mom.

Challenging features/designs to implement

• OneDrive backup/restore was a crap shoot to implement. Reason is that they recently upgraded their API to version 2.0. Lots of changes came with this, which meant that nearly all the available stackoverflow solutions were not applicable to the new API. Moreover, the c# SDK was not that well documented. So I had no clue what certain class objects/methods were doing. I ended up reading through the API documentation (which was written for HTTP I think? It wasn't c#) and doing trial & error on the c# SDK to see what worked.

• Reminder notifications, the core functionality, took me several days to figure out. I didn't know there was a built-in toast notification manager that would pop your toast automatically. I thought I had to have a background task for EACH toast that I wanted to pop. I attempted to implement my own toast notification manager which didn't end up working properly. Luckily I stumbled upon a random blog that used ScheduledToastNotification (the built-in API). I scrapped my own implementation and used that API and it was smooth sailing since then.

• Live tile was also difficult to debug. In Visual Studio, the tile updates fine. But in real world scenarios, the tile doesn't update every 30 minutes, which is how I scheduled the background task. So I had to cut out this feature from the initial public release until I figure it out.

Lessons learned

• Use less for loops and more Tasks. In my database insertion function, I used a couple for loops. My insertions (at worst) took roughly 4 seconds. I made it faster by reducing to one for loop and using async Tasks. At worst, my insertions take 2 seconds now.

• use user controls for XAML that will be used in more than one area of the app. This saved me so much time after I started using them.

• If you're scheduling a toast notification, use ScheduledToastNotifications.

• if you're working with toasts or tiles, use the UWP Toolkit provided by Microsoft.

TL;DR - I made my second app Pillbox. It was fun, but had lots of challenging areas. Check it out!

Edit - Feel free to use the feedback button under the three-dot menu to post any feedback!

Hey Guys,

After a lot of work I finally got my game available for IOS, Android, and Windows. I'm doing my best to keep the Windows platform in mind with every project I create. I feel that Windows deserves all the apps that IOS and Android have. I also think with the release of Windows 10 that everything will start to take off more for Windows mobile side. If you have some time, please try my FREE game Jungle Ball. It's a causal adventure game where you tilt your device and draw ropes to navigate a ball out of the jungle and past all the trick obstacles that come in your way. I think lots will like it since it's not a "one tap" game. Also, there are no annoying IAP! Try it out here: https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBLGGH1XW90 Thanks Guys!

Hi all,

I just recently saw and read these two links regarding the process from BEFORE you write a single line of code.

Good reading.

Microsoft on Planning you App

Things not to do when developing an app

Hi together!

Over here in Dresden, Germany, some clever people started to build some great project which scrapes the real time data of the Dresden's public parking lots and showed them in some Android and iOS apps: our project website.

Over the time we created more scrapers for other cities (and also integrated 1 (one!) city, which already had open data: Zurich) and open sourced this backend part over here: ParkAPI (head there if you want to have your city added)

I started working on a Win 10 client some months ago and released it at the beginning of this month: Win 10 store link (screenshot)

After some refactoring and lot of bug fixing, I decided to open source ParkenDD on Github.

I hope that the source can help people building some great UWP apps. Feel free to add issues, make pull requests or maybe just fork the app and integrate some other data sources. Or just tell me where my code sucks - I'd love to learn from this as well :)

Here are some challenges I encountered while developing:

• for the MapIcons, I render a custom control and convert it to a bitmap. Win 10 has a great new API to handle taps on MapIcons, which allows me to select an item in the list by tapping on the corresponding icon in the map. This feels so much better than having XAML controls on top of the map!

• Cortana integration with app services: not only can you use Cortana to open the app and select a city - you can also let the app respond directly in the Cortana app by using the background task.

• Localization of Cortana voice commands. I use POEditor to localize my voice command definitions and this project of mine to directly create a vcd file out of it.

• I use adaptive triggers to have some quite complex visual states which are bound to the viewmodel. The great WindowsStateTriggers library helped a lot!

• there are behaviors included, which let you set the min windows size (so that desktop apps can be smaller), set custom title bar colors for desktop and status bar colors for mobile via XAML.

TL;DR: enjoy my source code, maybe rate the app in the store and try spreading the word about open data in your city as well as it's the future <3