Developing with James

A developer blog
James Croft 1
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Members of the team at Future Decoded in London
Opinion
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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James Croft 0
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The programmers keyboard
Opinion
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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James Croft 2
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MADE Apps logo
Projects
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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James Croft 0
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Projects
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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James Croft 3
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How To
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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James Croft 0
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Hello World!
How To
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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James Croft 2
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uwp-migration
Tips
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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James Croft 0
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Windows 10 Store Options
How To
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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James Croft 0
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TVSample
Projects
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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James Croft 0
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Projects
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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James Croft 0
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Add file to view
How To
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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James Croft 0
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Nokia Lumia 950 XL
Review
20th December 2015

A new Windows experience with the Lumia 950 XL and Microsoft Band 2

I've been rather lucky over the past months to get my hands on some of Microsoft's latest tech courtesy of the company I work for, Black Marble, including one of…
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