27th October 2018
What’s new in XPlat v1.4
XPlat Windows APIs version 1.4 is now available in the wild as NuGet packages for you to download to your applications or you can get the source via GitHub! XPlat…
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16th June 2018
Lessons learned from technical team leadership
Over the last year, I've had the opportunity to take up a technical team leadership role for a team of software engineers porting a large Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application to…
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26th January 2018
Let’s just copy and paste! – A programming horror story
After recently taking a break from a project that my development team put a lot of time and effort into, coming back to it after another team worked on it…
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7th January 2018
What happened to WinUX?
For those who follow my GitHub projects, you may be aware of a project I created called WinUX, originally codenamed Croft.Core. It is a collection of libraries that were built for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) that allowed developers to take advantage of additional helpers, extensions and controls outside of the core SDK provided by Microsoft.When the project first kicked…
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14th December 2016
What’s new in WinUX update 2.3
As part of WinUX update 2.3, improvements have been made to the WindowHelper to make it easier to create and manage secondary windows for your UWP application. If you've not…
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24th August 2016
Enabling multi-user input drawing on the UWP InkCanvas
Microsoft introduced the InkCanvas into the Universal Windows Platform as a way of apps leveraging the power of ink with devices like the Surface Pro's and Surface Hub being quite…
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8th March 2016
Storing a UWP InkCanvas drawing as an image in a StorageFile
I've been tackling with an issue this morning to store the drawing on an InkCanvas as an image in a StorageFile. After hunting online for possible resolutions, I came across…
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5th March 2016
Gotchas in porting Windows 8.1 apps to the Universal Windows Platform
As the Windows 10 OS has matured over the last year, businesses are looking to finally bring their applications over from Windows 8.1 to the new Universal Windows Platform and…
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7th February 2016
How to: Hide your Windows 8.1 app from the Windows 10 Store
This is a question that has come up on numerous occasions when developers have found issues with their Windows 8.1 apps when they run them on a Windows 10 PC…
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2nd February 2016
Helping UWP developers with sample apps
Over the last few years, I've been developing Windows applications for public and private consumption providing unique app experience throughout. This sparked an idea to provide a collection of sample…
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10th January 2016
Playing with scrolling parallax effects on UI elements in Windows 10 UWP apps
I mentioned recently in my 'Daily Life of a Developer' series that I've been working on some old project ideas that have been stuck on my backlog of things to…
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3rd January 2016
Implementing file drag & drop in your Windows 10 UWP application
Drag & drop is a common feature in the Windows OS, mainly when you're moving a file from one place to another. Did you know that you can drag files…
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About me
James Croft
Software Developer, Black Marble Ltd
James is a Microsoft MVP in Windows Development with over 6 years of experience developing mobile applications for the Windows platform.
