Embedding Native Views in Your Xamarin.Forms Apps
Tue, 01 Nov 2016 10:00:00 GMT
Native view embedding allows you to directly reference iOS, Android and Windows native controls right in your Xamarin.Forms XAML files. You can assign them properties, handle events, and use them with nearly as much flexibility as the standard Xamarin.Forms controls to improve cross-platform mobile development.
DirectX Factor - Pixel Shaders and the Reflection of Light
Wed, 01 Oct 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold brings his series on DirectX to a close with an exploration of the classic Gouraud and Phong 3D light shading models.
DirectX Factor - Vertex Shaders and Transforms
Tue, 02 Sep 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold presents the ThreeRotatingTriangles program, which does some 3D graphics processing without Direct3D, using the powerful feature of Direct2D effects.
DirectX Factor - Breaking the Z Barrier with Direct2D Effects
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Using custom effects you can get much closer to authentic 3D programming than otherwise possible with Direct2D, as Charles Petzold explains.
DirectX Factor - The Canvas and the Camera
Mon, 02 Jun 2014 10:00:00 GMT
When moving from 2D to 3D programming, the metaphorical canvas needs to be supplemented with a metaphorical camera. Charles Petzold explains how.
DirectX Factor - Manipulating Triangles in 3D Space
Thu, 01 May 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold explores 3D concepts as he shows you how to give 2D graphical objects depth and body as they arise from screen and float in 3D space.
DirectX Factor - 3D Transforms on 2D Bitmaps
Tue, 01 Apr 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Achieving fluency in 3D transforms is crucial if you want to become a 3D graphics programmer. Charles Petzold shows how you can explore them within the relative familiarity and comfort of Direct2D.
DirectX Factor - Triangles and Tessellation
Mon, 03 Mar 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Though triangles are far less integral to 2D graphics programming than to 3D, Charles Petzold explores some interesting effects created with tessellated triangles in two dimensions.
DirectX Factor - A 2D Portal into a 3D World
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Did you know you can get your 3D feet wet in Direct2D, so a later plunge into Direct3D programming won’t be quite so shocking? Charles Petzold shows you some 3D features in Direct 2D that let you get started.
DirectX Factor - A 2D Portal into a 3D World
Mon, 03 Feb 2014 10:00:00 GMT
Did you know you can get your 3D feet wet in Direct2D, so a later plunge into Direct3D programming won’t be quite so shocking? Charles Petzold shows you some 3D features in Direct 2D that let you get started.
DirectX Factor - Character Outline Geometries Gone Wild
Mon, 02 Dec 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Manipulating character outlines lets you create weird and wonderful text effects. Charles Petzold shows you how to obtain character outline geometries in a Windows 8 application.
DirectX Factor - Who’s Afraid of Glyph Runs?
Fri, 01 Nov 2013 10:00:00 GMT
If you’re writing a Windows Store app, you may want to use glyphs to display text. Charles Petzold explains the rationale behind using glyphs, as well as how to take advantage of DirectX to use them.
DirectX Factor - Text Formatting and Scrolling with DirectWrite
Tue, 01 Oct 2013 10:00:00 GMT
DirectX splits the subtle task of working with text into two major subsystems: Direct2D and DirectWrite. In this column Charles Petzold explores how DirectWrite is used to format and scroll text, and sets the stage for exploring more advanced text handling and effects.
DirectX Factor - Direct2D Geometries and Their Manipulations
Mon, 02 Sep 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold explores the ID2D1Geometry interface and some of the intriguing methods it defines for manipulating geometries to create different geometries.
DirectX Factor - Finger Painting with Direct2D Geometries
Thu, 01 Aug 2013 10:00:00 GMT
In a multi-touch environment like Windows 8, one kind of program every developer should know how to code is a finger painting app, which involves tracking individual fingers to draw lines on the screen. Charles Petzold explores how to do this using DirectX.
DirectX Factor - Simulating an Analog Synthesizer
Mon, 01 Jul 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold creates a digital simulation of a small 1970s-era analog synthesizer using XAudio2 audio effects.
DirectX Factor - An Introduction to Audio Processing Objects
Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold shows you how to create XAudio2 Audio Processing Objects (APOs) to perform customized processing of audio streams.
DirectX Factor - Exploring Filters in XAudio2
Wed, 01 May 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold explains how you can alter the harmonic composition of sound through the use of filters and he shows how to accomplish this using XAudio2 in Windows 8.
DirectX Factor - Streaming and Manipulating Audio Files in Windows 8
Mon, 01 Apr 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Windows 8 makes it easy to write programs that can access individual music files. Using DirectX components is more difficult, but adds versatility, as Charles Petzold describes.
DirectX Factor - Constructing Audio Oscillators for Windows 8
Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Windows 8 combines a high-performance audio API with touch screens on hand-held tablets. Join with Charles Petzold as he explores the potential this combination offers for creating musical instruments.
DirectX Factor - Windows 8 Sound Generation with XAudio2
Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold finds that XAudio2 offers sophisticated audio processing for Windows Store applications.
Touch and Go - A Touch Interface for an Orienting Map
Mon, 03 Dec 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Touch and Go - Assembling Bing Map Tiles on Windows Phone
Thu, 01 Nov 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Getting a map on the Windows Phone screen is easy, but rotating it so that north on the map is actually pointing north is another matter entirely. Charles Petzold describes how he used the Bing Maps SOAP Service to get the results he wanted.
Touch and Go - Viewing the Night Sky on Your Windows Phone
Mon, 01 Oct 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold concludes his four-part exploration of motion sensors in the Windows Phone platform, building an application that lets users interact with planets and constellations in the night sky.
Touch and Go - Exploring Spherical Coordinates on Windows Phone
Tue, 04 Sep 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Charles lays the conceptual, mathematical and programmatic groundwork for a program that lets you point a Windows phone at a spot in the night sky and show the planets and constellations.
Touch and Go - Viewing a Virtual World from Your Windows Phone
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Although we no longer believe that celestial spheres surround the Earth, that’s still a handy concept for programs that let you use a smartphone to view a virtual world. Such a program needs to determine its orientation in 3D space, and Charles Petzold explains how to accomplish this using the horizontal coordinate system.
Touch and Go - Windows Phone Motion and 3D Views
Mon, 02 Jul 2012 10:00:00 GMT
When a Windows Phone program knows the orientation of the phone in 3D space, the phone can provide a portal into a 3D world. The new Motion class makes it possible, as Charles Petzold explains.
Touch and Go - Getting Oriented with the Windows Phone Compass
Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Smartphones get lots of input from the world through their sensors, but you can get even more by combining those sensors, as Charles Petzold shows with an example that combines the compass and accelerometer.
Touch and Go - Musical Instruments for Windows Phone
Mon, 02 Apr 2012 10:00:00 GMT
What could be more fun than combining audio streaming with multi-touch and turning your phone into an electronic music instrument? Charles Petzold shows you how.
Touch and Go - Streaming Audio in Windows Phone
Thu, 01 Mar 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold looks into streaming audio on Windows Phone. This occurs through a class derived from MediaStreamSource, which feeds the audio data to the OS's audio player on demand. Petzold shows how to stream audio in the background on Windows Phone OS 7.5.
Touch and Go - Background Audio on Windows Phone 7.5
Wed, 01 Feb 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Windows Phone 7.5 introduces the concept of a background agent, which you can use for playing either music files or streaming audio while your program is suspended. Charles Petzold shows you how to play audio files in the background.
Touch and Go - Playing Audio Files in Windows Phone
Tue, 03 Jan 2012 10:00:00 GMT
Before he tackles the new background audio capability in Windows Phone OS 7.1, Charles Petzold explores the ins and outs of the more standard way to play songs.
UI Frontiers - Video Feeds on Windows Phone 7
Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:00:00 GMT
While the initial release of Windows Phone included only one camera API, that deficiency has been corrected with two new sets of APIs that Charles uses to have some fun with video.
UI Frontiers - Finishing the E-Book Reader
Wed, 26 Oct 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold finishes his Windows Phone 7 e-book reader with a Web service that gets the catalog file from Project Gutenberg, and a Pivot control to display a search screen and a list of downloaded books.
UI Frontiers - Pages and Pop-ups in Windows Phone 7
Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Charles turns to the horror genre in celebration of Halloween as he improves his e-book reader with the addition of “a whole bunch of dialog boxes” to aid in navigation and enhance user interaction.
UI Frontiers - Touch for Text
Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Text selection can be awkward on a touch interface, but it offers too many benefits to ignore. Charles Petzold shows you how to implement this feature in the context of an e-book reader, using concepts that can be applied to any Windows Phone program that displays text to the screen and allows the reader to interact with that text.
UI Frontiers - Font Metrics in Silverlight
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Silverlight is a graphical environments that doesn’t provide font metrics to application program developers, so Charles Petzold shows you a workaround to help you lay out text and pages.
UI Frontiers - Page Transitions in Windows Phone 7
Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:00:00 GMT
For the most fluid page transitions in an e-book, the user interface needs to support three distinct pages—the current page, the next page, and the previous page. Charles Petzold describes a flexible way to implement this using three different page transitions.
UI Frontiers - Principles of Pagination
Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:00:00 GMT
E-book readers are simple, right? Just render some text and a way you go. Well, maybe it's not that simple after all. We start building an e-book reader for Windows Phone 7 by investigating the mechanism behind paginating the text.
UI Frontiers - Silverlight Printing Basics
Mon, 02 May 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Get a handle on the nuts and bolts of adding printing capabilities to your Silverlight apps as Charles walks through programs to print an ellipse, an image and a calendar.
UI Frontiers - Lissajous Animations in Silverlight
Fri, 01 Apr 2011 10:00:00 GMT
The pattern created by the interaction of two sine waves is a Lissajous curve – you've probably seen one on an oscilloscope. We'll show you how to make one in Silverlight for the Web or Windows Phone 7.
UI Frontiers - Touch Gestures on Windows Phone
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Charles this month takes a look at multi-touch APIs and delves into the workings of the new gesture support in the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.
UI Frontiers - Sound Recording in Windows Phone 7
Tue, 01 Feb 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Stripping down the UI to essentials is important when programming for a smartphone. We'll see just how stripped down an app can get while still being useful, and we'll explore the sound recording APIs in Windows Phone 7 along the way.
UI Frontiers - A Color Scroll for XNA
Tue, 04 Jan 2011 10:00:00 GMT
Charles this month serves up an introduction to XNA programming for Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight coders as he shows you how to build a color scroll control for Windows Phone 7.
UI Frontiers - Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and the Multi-Touch Thumb
Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:00:00 GMT
The versatile, touch-enabled Thumb control is supported by Silverlight on both the Web and Windows Phone 7. We’’ll show you how to create a shared-code project for both platforms that uses Thumb for both mouse and multi-touch input.
UI Frontiers - The Intricacies of Touch Controls
Tue, 02 Nov 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Charles is intrigued by the Windows Phone 7 touch controls and tries to duplicate them in Windows Presentation Foundation, finding out that good multi-touch coding is a lot harder than it seems.
UI Frontiers - Multi-Touch Inertia
Fri, 01 Oct 2010 10:00:00 GMT
One of the ways in which a multi-touch interface attempts to mimic the real world is by introducing inertia. We’ll show you how easy this is to duplicate in your own WPF apps.
UI Frontiers - Touch and Response
Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold continues his exploration of multi-touch Manipulation events in the Windows Presentation Foundation and shows you how to design custom classes to decorate elements and provide visual feedback to users.
UI Frontiers - Multi-Touch Manipulation Events in WPF
Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Multi-touch has progressed from being a futuristic prop of sci-fi films to a mainstream means of user interface. We’ll show you how support for multi-touch in Windows 7 has filtered down and settled into various areas of the .NET Framework.
UI Frontiers - The Fluid UI in Silverlight 4
Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold shows how to extend the limited fluid UI capabilities of Silverlight 4 with new techniques so you too can dazzle users with those cool object entrances and transitions.
UI Frontiers - The Ins and Outs of ItemsControl
Mon, 07 Jun 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold performs more UI magic by implementing a variation of the drag-and-drop that presents users with a natural, fluid look and feel.
UI Frontiers - Thinking Outside the Grid
Mon, 03 May 2010 10:00:00 GMT
In Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight, using a Canvas or a single-cell Grid seems very similar. The difference is in how the container appears to the rest of the layout system. Canvas doesn’t participate in layout, so you can use it whenever you need to transcend layout.
UI Frontiers - Projection Transforms Sans Math
Fri, 02 Apr 2010 10:00:00 GMT
See how to taper text, flip panels, animate a calendar and more--without resorting to complicated math--as Charles Petzold delves into new “pseudo 3D” capabilitie in Silverlight 3, made possible by the new Projection UIElement property.
Finger Style - Exploring Multi-Touch Support in Silverlight
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Touch isn't just a form of mouse input in Silverlight: Sometimes what's required are controls specialized and optimized for touch.
UI Frontiers - MIDI Music in WPF Applications
Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Every PC contains a built-in 16-piece band ready to play some music. Charles shows you how MIDI support in the NAudio sound library lets you play tunes in your .NET apps.
UI Frontiers - Sound Generation in WPF Applications
Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:00:00 GMT
A good case could be made that computers should not make noise except in response to a specific user command. We’re going to ignore that and show you how to play custom sounds in a WPF application.
Extreme UI - Line Charts with Data Templates
Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold continues his investigation into robust XAML coding made possible by Windows Presentation Foundation, this time tackling the complicated process of creating line charts.
Foundations - Charting with DataTemplates
Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:00:00 GMT
For WPF programmers, one major revelation about the power of the DataTemplate comes with a demonstration of how XAML can turn business objects into bar charts. This column explores how to use DataTemplates to create different types of charts.
Foundations - Customizing the New WPF Calendar Controls
Mon, 18 May 2009 10:00:00 GMT
Late last year Microsoft released Calendar and DatePicker controls for WPF in the WPF Toolkit. We’ll show you how they work, and how you can customize them.
Foundations - Writing More Efficient ItemsControls
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 10:00:00 GMT
Here Charles Petzold explains several techniques for improving the performance of ItemsControls.
Foundations - Render Text On A Path With WPF
Wed, 19 Nov 2008 10:00:00 GMT
With Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) you can lay out text on a path, then animate the individual points defining the path and watch the characters bounce around in response.
Foundations - Dependency Properties And Notifications
Wed, 20 Aug 2008 10:00:00 GMT
Windows Presentation Foundation dependency properties don’t always play well with others. Learn how you can compensate for their lack of notification events.
Foundations - Bitmaps and Pixel Bits
Thu, 22 May 2008 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold takes an inside look at the flexible bitmap pixel formats offered by the retained-mode graphics features of Windows Presentation Foundation.
Foundations - Vector Graphics and the WPF Shape Class
Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:00:00 GMT
The System.Windows.Shapes namespace is Charles Petzold's namespace of choice for rendering two-dimensional vector graphics in WPF. Here he explains why.
Foundations - Templates for Uncommon Controls
Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold demonstrates how Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) templates let you turn common controls into uncommon visual objects.
Foundations - 3D text in WPF
Wed, 19 Sep 2007 10:00:00 GMT
This month Charles Petzold explores techniques for generating 3D text in Windows Presentation Foundation.
Foundations - Extending the WPF Animation Classes
Tue, 22 May 2007 10:00:00 GMT
Learn what the WPF Animation Classes can do, what they can't, and how to extend them.
Foundations - 3D Mesh Geometries
Tue, 13 Mar 2007 10:00:00 GMT
This month Charles Petzold focuses on a very important part of the Viewport3D assemblage—the MeshGeometry3D class that defines thegeometry of a 3D object in Windows Communication Foundation.
{ End Bracket } - Let My People Code
Thu, 21 Dec 2006 10:00:00 GMT
Charles Petzold discusses why limiting resources can spawn great creativity.
Foundations - Using Templates to Customize WPF Controls
Wed, 22 Nov 2006 10:00:00 GMT
This month we welcome Charles Petzold to MSDN Magazine with his first column on building apps for Windows Vista and the .Microsoft NET Framework 3.0.
Power to the Pen - The Pen is Mightier with GDI+ and the Tablet PC Real-Time Stylus
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 10:00:00 GMT
Code Name Avalon - Create Real Apps Using New Code and Markup Model
Tue, 16 Dec 2003 10:00:00 GMT
The presentation subsystem in the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, offers powerful new capabilities to developers. This subsystem, code-named Avalon, allows developers to take advantage of its capabilities through a new markup language code-named XAML. In addition, modern object-oriented programming languages such as C# and Visual Basic .NET can be used to tie everything together. Because most applications written to Avalon will probably be a mix of XAML and programming code, this article discusses XAML tags used to control page layout along with the procedural code written to respond to events.