Windows Phone

If you use Windows apps with navigation menus consisting of icons, you may have noticed that some of those apps show you a text when hovering above those icons. This is a nice touch for the users, allowing them to quickly grasp the meaning of the menu icons without the need to click them or to expand the menu (if available).

Implementing this kind of hovers is really easy thanks to the ToolTipService that is available in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 UWP. You can add <ToolTipService.ToolTip> with any element and include basically any XAML content as the tooltip. Here is a sample from the animation using a simple localized TextBlock

When developing Windows Phone apps you may encounter a use case when you have to allow the user to either pick a photo from the photos gallery in the photo or a take a new photo using the phone’s camera. One example of this may be the registration process when the user may choose a profile picture.

In Windows Phone 8.1, this task is quite simple, just use the FileOpenPicker. It allows you to pick a photo from the gallery or take a new photo. Just take a look at this animation showing how the users takes a new photo using the phone’s camera.

Distributing Windows Phone apps to testers has always been a pain. The Private Beta in the Windows Store intended for this is not very flexible and it got much worse with Windows 10 (generating promotional code that can take up to 24 hours).

One of the better ways to solve the beta build distribution is using a service like Hockey App, that Microsoft recently acquired. To be able to use Hockey App (or any other service) you need to buy a $299 certificate from Symantec.

You then use the certificate to sign the XAP or APPX files of your app. Those signed binaries can be than installed on devices with the correct application enrollment token directly from Hockey App, bypassing the Windows Store.

One of my clients got persuaded to try this approach after some problem with the Windows Store Private Beta and bough the certificate. It took a week for the purchase to go through and another week to finally get the certificate in the correct PFX format from Symantec.

I currently work on a Windows Phone 8.1 app for a client with an interesting approach to app localization. They have a Google Docs sheet with all the localization string for the app in all the supported languages and a tool that converts this localization strings in to per-language versioned JSON files. The generated JSON files are kept in a git repository. The Android, iOS and now my Windows Phone app should have the git repository added as a submodule. When a new version of the JSON files with the localization appear in the submodule, the app should use them.

Deciding the localization approach

In the old days of Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 I would simply write an utility that reads the newest version of the JSON localization files and generate a RESX file for each language. RESX is XML format that is simple to generate. If you had a localized string with a key say Game, you would put it everywhere when the localization of the word game was needed. Simple

In Windows Phone 8.1 (and 10) you should use RESW files for localization. This is the new x:Uid approach that, in my honest opinion, really sucks. It forces you to duplicate string if you use I string in multiple places, there is no design time support, you never know what UI element are localized and what you forgot to localize. Simply put, it is a mess. This approach is not usable at all with the string client provides.

When Microsoft announced the Windows 10 developer platform, they also announced bridges to make porting apps from Android, iOS and Web easier. Those bridges are now either dead (Android) or unusable (iOS) but there is another tool that can be considered a bridge left. It is called Mobilize.net Silverlight Bridge and it is not from Microsoft. It promises converting existing Windows Phone 8 (Silverlight apps) to the Universal Windows Platform. Considering the majority of apps in the Windows Phone Store are Windows Phone 8 apps and the fact that Android and iOS developers do not really care about Windows, Mobilize.net seem to be the most useful of the bridges, because there is no easy porting apps from Windows Phone 8 to UWP, just rewriting. So I tried it out.

Mobilize.net is currently in technical preview. After you download and install it, it integrates into Visual Studio 2015 and there is a new context menu for Windows Phone 8 project, allowing you to convert them to UWP apps. If you use it, you get a dialog windows and a conversion process that will fail most of the times with a strange error. At least for me it did.