WinRT Settings with Caliburn Micro

As well as support for the Share charm, the recent 1.5 release of Caliburn Micro adds to functionality around the Settings charm as well!

WinRT Sharing with Caliburn Micro

With the version 1.5 release of Caliburn Micro we now have seamless support for having your WinRT act as a Share source. Acting as a Share source allows the user to send data from your app to other WinRT apps, it’s great in that you don’t need to build “export to …” functionality into your apps because other apps can provide the functionality for you. For instance Hub Bug acts as are Share target so people can quickly create GitHub issues from other applications.

Nextgen Reader and replacing Google

As it seems half of the people I follow on Twitter I was shocked to hear about the impending closure of Google Reader. It’s the tool I use to be good in my career, to stay up to date with changes in technology and exposing myself to new ideas. Weirdly I thought a tool that better informed Google about my reading habits would be quite useful to them.

Turning Geocode Query into a proper async operation

The Windows Phone 8 platform comes with some very useful services around Maps and Location, these lurk in the Microsoft.Phone.Maps.Services namespace of the Microsoft.Phone.Maps assembly. There are three services available encapsulated by the classes GeocodeQuery, ReverseGeocodeQuery and RouteQuery with self-explanatory purposes.

Content button styles

When building apps sometimes you need to make things “ click-able” with either a mouse, finger or some other pointing type device. The default button templates for both Windows Phone and Windows 8 are great, but aren’t useful if you just want to wrap them around some content.