We started with a Windows Phone application and converted it to a Windows 8 equivalent. The end result was far from a clone, neither visually nor in function, but that was never the goal. The goal was to take a real application through the trembling steps of converting into a fully functional prototype on Windows [...]

The Mango (7.1) update for Windows Phone brought us a lot of goodies including the Scheduled Task Agent. It allowed us to create a feeling of push notifications without actually doing any server push implementation. In the Reseguiden app we use the background agents to do new searches for trips and displaying the top result [...]

Live tiles was introduced with Windows Phone. Compared to an icon, which only used to start an application, a live tile is more like a window into your application. A window where you can present up to date information even if your application is not running. Live tiles in one of the strengths of Windows [...]

I don’t think I need to stress how important it is to place all of your texts (as in language specific texts visible to the end user) in the same place. To look around in your code and XAML after strings that may be duplicated through the application makes us sad developers. Even if you [...]

Navigation in Windows Phone has a clear legacy from Silverlight, you get around using Uris and query strings. What might have been the best solution for the web is clumsy and cumbersome in a native environment. This has often led to custom wrappers around the navigation APIs. All this has changed in Window 8, navigation [...]

Just as with most Windows Phone applications, you typically add value to a Windows 8 application when caching data. You gain some offline ability as well as a quick and snappy application that doesn’t need to go online and download data all the time. In Reseguiden’s application we are not actually saving any data in [...]

Right now, one of the big differences between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is what third party components you can use. For Windows Phone you have a huge selection of components that you can choose from to get help with anything from MVVM to animations. We used several when implementing Reseguidens sista-minuten application. One we [...]

Just to be clear, this is not a necessary step for us to take in our conversion process. But it’s a step that spreads some light on some of the differences regarding how you write code for Windows Phone and Windows 8. You can even say that it will show how much easier life gets [...]

The perhaps most obvious difference between Windows Phone and Windows 8 is that XAML is no longer a part of .NET in Windows 8. The reason for it being so obvious is that all references to System.Windows breaks the build. Simply put – XAML now resides in Windows Runtime instead of .NET. The problem is [...]

Now we’ve reached the point where we stop talking and start playing around with some code. As concluded in the previous post on porting strategy, we’ll simply copy the code files from the Windows Phone project and create a new Windows 8 project. It won’t build right away, let alone run, but it’s a start. [...]

In our previous introductory post we set the stage for what we’re going to accomplish with this conversion. Now it’s time to take the first step. Before we dive in, lets lean back and think about how to proceed. We have a working Windows Phone application and we have nothing when it comes to Windows [...]

You have to start somewhere, and both a blog series and a conversion starts here. During the following weeks we’ll take a real (is-deployed-to-marketplace-real) Windows Phone application and convert it, step by step, to a Windows 8 Metro application. Our hopes and dreams are, because the similarity between the platforms and the mutual design language, [...]

There is one thing that most client projects have in common – they request data, in some form, from a server. When developing for Windows Phone I prefer to do these requests using HttpWebRequest instead of WebClient (why – explained here by Andreas). But this is not a post about Windows Phone, it’s about the [...]

I actually attended BUILD. I sat there, bombarded with so much information about Windows 8 and Metro style applications that I just went into my happy place, franticly taking notes on all that I should investigate later on. That very long and almost unreadable list contained, amongst many others, the keywords – contracts and charms. [...]

I wrote my first Windows 8 Metro application right before Øredev 2011. It was a small application that basically just displayed all tracks and speakers at the conference. I had the luxury of having access the raw conference xml data from the server, but one thing that I have learnt from conferences is that the [...]