Zubair

For last couple of weeks I have been playing with the Leap Motion device, it’s a small hardware that tracks your hands, fingers and gestures and it has a rich API that you can use in your application to receive signals when a movement is detected. Fore more info go to leapmotion.com

In the following video I am using my hand to control a Bing Map in a Windows store app using @LeapMotion. Source code of this app will be available on this blog.

Update: New video with smoother gesture recognition and zoom in/out support

That’s right, my open source C# and XAML powered Windows 8 RSS Reader app is now available to download from Windows Store go get it now. I have been working on it for many months and previously wrote about it on this blog also spoken about it at Microsoft events in 2012.

This is first version of the app so please rate and review it on Windows store and send me your feedback.

If you are looking for source code then that is available from Codeplex.com and has received over 11K downloads so far.

Here a screenshot from app’s details page on Windows Store

Recently I received an email from Telerik inviting me to try their
new Rad controls for Windows 8 applications, for past few days I used some of these and in this post we’re going to take a look at two of them.
First download them from Telerik.com. After installation, a Rad Controls for Windows 8 section will appear in your toolbox.

Using Rad Controls for Windows 8 in C# and XAML Windows Store app

Lets drag and drop RadHubTile from the toolbox to the designer and set some properties, this control allows you to use an image as a Tile. I have a created a new Windows Store app in C# and XAML, here’s the markup for the RadHubTile control

<telerik:RadHubTile HorizontalAlignment="Left" 

Margin="76,95,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="152" 

ImageSource="Assets/Profile.jpg"/>

Now do a Ctrl+F5 and see that the image appears as clickable Tile, pretty simple huh?

Lets look at the slightly more customizable RadSlideHubTile control that lets you specify Top and Bottom content that changes just like Tiles on your Windows 8 Home screen, here’s the XAML

<telerik:RadSlideHubTile HorizontalAlignment="Left" 

Margin="47,59,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top">

 <telerik:RadSlideHubTile.TopContent>

  <TextBlock FontWeight="Light" FontSize="22" HorizontalAlignment="Left" 

   Margin="12,12,12,12" Text="Zubair" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" TextWrapping="Wrap"/>

 </telerik:RadSlideHubTile.TopContent>

 <telerik:RadSlideHubTile.BottomContent>

  <Image Source="/Assets/Profile.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill"></Image>

 </telerik:RadSlideHubTile.BottomContent>

</telerik:RadSlideHubTile>

One thing I really like about Rad controls for Windows 8 is their excellent

design-time support in Visual Studio 2012, you can see that my

RadSlideHubTile now shows changes in the designer.

So there you have it, a quick look at the Rad Controls for Windows 8,

after you install the package you can find the complete samples in 
<drive>:\Program Files (x86)\Telerik\RadControls for Windows 8 XAML Q3

2012\Demos try them yourself and let me know what you think.

Found this poster for the new features in .NET 4.5 from Jouni’s blog so decided to share

I was invited by Microsoft Gulf to speak at Windows 8 Developer Boot Camp in Dubai, I spoke about some of the new features to build Windows 8 style apps including Search and Share Contracts, building fast and fluid apps with new Async support in C#.

I also talked about my open source Windows 8 RSS Reader app and showed few code examples from it. You can download the full source from Codeplex.com

Links to slides, photos and video are available below

Presentation on Tools for Building Windows 8 style apps VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

It was a very interactive session with question from audience throughout the demo.

You can watch the video recording of the entire event on the Microsoft Gulf Community blog

Update: Watch the recording of my talk below [54mins]