Last year I had the awesome privilege to attend the first Codemania conference here in Auckland. It’s a good thing to see more “run by developers for developers” events here in New Zealand that aren’t strongly affiliated with a specific vendor. I had a great time, learnt a lot and met a lot of people working outside the Microsoft stack I tend to live in.
Quite a while ago I wrote a post on two different mechanisms to how to execute code on animation completion, it’s a handy trick when you need to chain different animations and code together. Back then I used two different approaches, the first was a self-removing event handler and the second with Reactive Extensions. With the coming of C# 5 and the async / await languages features it would make sense that we’d want to “await” an animation, in fact this approach makes for the most readable code for chaining these things together.
The async / await features in C# are incredibly easy to use but there’s a number of pitfalls than can be trap the unwary. The following are my golden rules when building any app (usually Windows 8 but now also Windows Phone 8) using the async / await features.
I’m pleased to announce the Windows Phone 8 version of Left to Spend is available from the marketplace. As well as providing updated high definition assets and lock screen notifcations it also adds one of the coolest features I’ve been able to work in a while, voice commands!
Last night I was able to give a talk to the Auckland Windows Apps Meetup on the voice features included in the new Windows Phone SDK and how you an augment existing apps with the features.