Friday, April 19, 2013 9:26 AM

WebAuthenticationBroker & Facebook

I needed to use Facebook authentication in a Windows Store app the other day. The Windows Runtime makes this trivially easy with it's WebAuthenticationBroker class. The web authentication broker allows apps to use Internet authentication and authorization protocols like OAuth and OpenID with minimal effort. Unfortunately the samples I found on the interwebs for Facebook were buggy/incomplete or assumed the I had a deep understanding of Facebook authentication. After a bit of work I was able to get it working and...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
Wednesday, March 13, 2013 11:47 AM

Style In The Round

As part of my job I get to talk with a lot of developers, designers and product managers. When the subject of User Experience comes up (and it always does), I always emphasize the importance of thinking "outside the box".

Yes, I know. It is a horrible cliché, a vestigial remnant of bad management consulting that should have gone the way of sock puppets. But stick with me for a second, it isn't what you assume it is.


When I say this,...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Wednesday, March 06, 2013 11:40 AM

A Better Sample Data

Scott Hanselman recently wrote about some placeholder images sites for web development. As is typical for one of his posts, it pointed me towards something I was completely unaware of. It also inspired me to solve a personally annoyance of mine.

As a Technical Evangelist I spend a good deal of presenting Windows 8 development techniques. In most cases these presentations consist of my coding up an application in front of the audience. I almost always start with one of the...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Monday, March 04, 2013 4:11 PM

Do It With Style

Along with the introduction of Windows 8 came the induction of formalized user experience design guidelines. This was a pretty revolutionary step in Windows development. The historic lack of any formal UX guidelines for previous versions of Windows had been bemoaned by for years. Developers were left to their own devices with predictable results; including entire web sites devoted to shaming some of the more horrendous examples.

While some members of the community did an excellent job of attempting to educate...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:36 PM

Word as Blog Editor

Did you know that Microsoft Word also makes an excellent blog editor? In fact, this post made using Word 2013. So how do you set up Word for blog editing? It is rather simple, albeit a little round about.

The process starts by opening Microsoft Word and selecting "Blog Post" as the template. This is the convoluted part, even if you are looking to edit and existing post you start by opening a new Blog Post template. Like I said, it is a...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Wednesday, January 09, 2013 8:53 AM

Custom Headers with HttpClient

I while back I talked about Basic Authentication with HttpClient. Kaysha posted an excellent question about custom headers for things like User-Agent and Content-Type. Here is how you handle those headers.

HttpClient is extremely simple to use out of the box. Most of the plumbing is automatically handled for you. In some cases however you need to change some of that plumbing. As with most abstractions however, you often need to take a few steps back when you need to change the assumptions...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Thursday, January 03, 2013 4:33 PM

Too Clever By Half

So I'm a bit of a stickler for fool-proof configuration, sometimes to my own detriment.  In response to my earlier Bing Maps SDK issue with x64 I thought I would be really clever and just remove x64 as a target platform from the solution configuration. I thought it was clever. Heck, It was clever....too clever it seems.

It turns out that removing a Solution Platform from your solution will result in a rather unceremonious Visual Studio crash when you attempt to Create App Package for...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Thursday, January 03, 2013 10:22 AM

Bing Maps SDK

I've been playing around with the Bing Maps SDK over the holidays. The documentation includes a step-by-step guide for adding Bing Maps to my app that got me up and running. I had to make some small changes like targeting specific CPU and not the default 'Any CPU' target and (since this app is written in C#) I had to add a reference to the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime Package in addition to the Bing Maps SDK.

Once I had the project...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Sunday, November 18, 2012 11:10 PM

Settings Charm

One of the nice things about Windows 8 for developers adoption of some clearly defined (and long needed) user experience standards. While in the past we relied on conventions (Help -> About for example) those conventions were not always followed and often didn't make a lot of sense (Help -> About for example). A great example of these UX standards are the Charms. Here we'll take a look at the Charm you're most likely to encounter; the Settings Charm.

Why is the...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur
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Wednesday, November 07, 2012 12:50 AM

Windows Store Apps

I've run into a couple of developers asking where "Metro Style Apps" went in the RTM version of Visual Studio 2012. Don't worry, they are still there. They just have a new name. That term "Metro" was just a placeholder during the beta phase.

There are two different types of Windows Apps. The first is the classic "Desktop App" which you either buy off the shelf (for those under 20, this is how we "old timers" used to buy our software)...
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Posted by MarcLaFleur | 5 comment(s)
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