TechDays 2011 (Canada) New Windows Phone Application

Last year, i did an unofficial Windows Phone application. This year the team in charge of the TechDays ask me to create the application for this Year events. They provide me with a brand new event OData feed. In this new application, I’ve decided to make the application to support some Mango feature like Fast-switching, Secondary Title, etc.

I restart from scratch for the implementation of the Data inside the application. Now the application is fully functional without Internet connectivity (only the first time to gather the latest data from the OData feed).

I did a brand new scheduler, where you can easily view and flag which session you want to see. I hope you will like the application and find it useful.

The application have just been certified so the application should be available by Tuesday morning.

Here is the direct link:

I hope you enjoy TechDays (currently in Toronto, and coming soon in Vancouver and Montreal).

Regards,
LP

Presenting at TechDays 2010 (Ottawa)

Next Wednesday, November 10th, I'll be presenting the session “Building Web Forms Applications Made Easier with Microsoft ASP.NET 4”.

The agenda for the session:
- An end-to-end story for getting started, developing, deploying in VS 2010
- Cleaner HTML, Search Engine Optimization, (SEO) and standards
- Improving productivity with dynamic data
- A lots of demo

Also, Runatserver is offering to every TechDays attendee a rebate of 40% on the Silverlight Tour training. For more information : http://www.runatserver.com/techdays.aspx

Regards,
LP

Summer review!

This summer is going to fast! Mainly i was working on many project at the same time. I was lucky because most of them were Silverlight. So i had reduce the time i had to work on my blog. Now most of them are completed. So i expect to have more free time to play with Windows Phone 7, read some books and wrote some blogs.

So this autumn will be exiting. First the development tools for Windows Phone 7 will be finalize and released on September 16th. I’m can wait to work with it. So as soon as I can, I will convert the application for the TechDays I'm working on and I'll publish the source code on Codeplex.

On the community side, i will do a presentation on Windows Phone 7 (November 15th) at the .NET Montreal user group. I expect to have a lot of fun for this session has i have a lot of information to share. Also for those who assist at user group there is a “Speaker Idol” again this year. I encourage everyone who want to share his passion about .NET to participate. It the way i begun speaking. I’ll be there to encourage all the participant.

Again this year, Microsoft Canada organized the TechDays which will stop in Montreal on November 23-24. There is a great list of session. Again, i will probably speak at this event (subject need to be confirmed) again this year.

Have fun coding!
LP

Expression Blend for Developers at TechDays 2009 Montreal – Part 2 – Creating Glass Effect

For the second part i will show you how to create some glass effect. Just as a reminder i’m not a graphic artist, i’m .NET Developer. As you can see Expression Blend allow any developer to improve the design without the help of a graphic artist or images (keep in mind Silverlight and WPF are vector graphic base).

Starting with the background I've created in the previous post we will add some stuff to have parts of the application looking like glass.

Now we will add an header that will look more fancy and glassy. First we will add a rectangle.

Again we will use the gradient properties to add the required effect. So we will change the background to use the gradient.

Now we will change the start anchor and set the Alpha to 20. After we will add a new anchor in the middle and set the Alpha to 50. We will add another anchor to the right of the last one just added, and we will set the Alpha to 15. Finally we will set the Alpha of the last anchor to 0.

To polish this title bar we can add a drop shadow. To do so, in the Properties under Appearance, there is a property called Effect. We now click on the New button. In Expression Blend there is some predefined effect available. You can now select DropShadowEffect.

Now we have an header that look a lot better. As you can see if we resize the window, the the opacity effect is visible in the header.

Now you can add some text in the header. You can also apply the DropShadowEffect on the text to make it more readable. And again you can play with the Gradient. Here is an example:

Now we will add glass effect over an image. So add an image in your application. Over this image we will add a new rectangle. This will be the object that will create the glass effect.

Now we will set the gradient to a really soft blue #CEDDEC. Now we will need 4 anchor in our gradient slider. And the only thing that will change is the Alpha on each anchor.
(From left to right)
- 1rst : Alpha = 80
- 2nd : Alpha = 25
- 3rd : Alpha = 50
- 4th : Alpha = 30

Also I've changed the gradient arrow to make the illusion of the direction of the light.
 

The final result:

Next part: Working with Template and data binding to a sample data source.

Regards,
Louis-Philippe