Paneque's Technology Blog

Did you ever have a problem with a WCF client throwing exceptions you can't catch? If you have used WCF clients from Windows Phone, Silverlight or Xamarin.iOS, you might have noticed that it is not possible to create Synchronous or Task-Based operations; the functionality is reduced to the Event-based Asynchronous Pattern (EAP). That means that the way to call a WCF method and get the response is usually as follows: var client = new MyWCFClient(); client.DownloadDataCompleted += (sender, e) => { try { //accessing e.Result here might raise an exception in another //thread, that will not be captured by the 'catch' below. } catch(Exception ex) { } }; client.DownloadDataAsync(url); Our results are wrapped in an auto-generated class that inherits from  AsyncCompletedEventArgs , this class has a property  Error  of type  Exception , that will carry information about the error and a property  Result  with our expected return valu...

Time ago I wrote an article  about the comparison between of HTML5 and Silverlight. That article was indeed about the "comparison" itself rather than another attempt to compare the two; mainly because I consider that kind of measuring to be pointless. Then again with the pass of time the same question arises: is Silverlight dead? Before going into trying to answer that, allow me to be clearer than what I was at the time and let me rephrase the question: is the silverlight plugin for browsers dead? Well... the answer is yes, not even a "maybe". But as with any existing software, dead is not actually extinct. We still have people writing code in COBOL, FORTRAN,  DELPHI and VB6. And this is because the enterprise market does not move at the same pace as the consumer market. They invest in infrastructure, they keep it, and they treasure it. And Silverlight was highly adopted in the enterprise for LOB applications. So in that area, Silverlight is going to be there ...

Just recently updated a couple of apps. Loan Calculator Reversi (both Free and Full editions) Loan Calculator First the small "Loan Calculator" app, got a small update. The UI was simplified and some small glitches were addressed. Is hard to improve an app that is already quite useful yet simple. However new versions will improve it even more and not just cosmetic changes. Reversi Reversi got an "almost major" update, with an improved UI (at least over the previous one) and also a new feature that allows the user to see the possibles moves (hints), which of course, you can turn on/off. Hints are available and optional In addition to these improvements in the user interface, the internals were also improved a lot, the new game is quite faster than the previous versions and also plays better. Fixing an issue introduced with version 1.2 when the AI was... not so smart. For next versions... Sounds Statistics board All levels available ...

Crazy cars, the new game Recently added a new game to my list of apps for Microsoft Windows Phone, a game, and is called "Crazy cars" can be downloaded  here . The game have been download thousands of times and very short time! Check out the new UI created in Silverlight. Hidden Pics The app for hiding photos on you phone also get a new UI, more styled design and several bug fixes. Check out the new look. New updates are coming for this app, including encrypted photo sharing, fake passwords, bogus tiles and more.

Few days ago I added a new App to my inventory on Windows Phone Marketplace. The Loan Calculator app was just something I needed when I was in a hunt for a car (still am). The thing is I wanted to keep it simple. Just input the numbers and see the total, how much, for how long, you know.. just the FINAL number. Which is what car dealers will never give upfront, because they always play that 101 psychology thing on you. So I built this app using the common formula that you can see around in many websites. The idea is pretty simple, just input the data and get the total final price and the monthly installments. As an extra you can also see how the amortization for the loan plays along time. Check it out, assume we want to calculate the final price for a car that cost 25k, we will put a  10% down payment, 2.5k, with an APR of 3.0%, and with a loan term of 3 years. Just enter the data and hit "Calculate" Then we just get the summary result with the final cost, se...

When deploying and testing websites that use secure connections (SSL)  we might get warnings about non secure content on the page. This is usually an easy thing to fix. Just find a tool like "Fiddler" and find out what traffic is going over a regular HTTP (non secure) channel. Sometimes even a simple FIND over the code will let you find those "unsecured" elements. But that's not enough if you refer some javascript or refer a link over SSL that then does some non-SSL redirection.  Each browser has a similar way to show you how secure you are on a website. Google Chrome shows website security indicators (icons) that will appear next to your site URL in the toolbar. The first one (1) is just a regular site with no SSL, and we want number (2) the green one, you should avoid the other ones. Now two notes on that. Google Ads Don't use Google Adsense on your website if you use SSL and you care about your site not showing any warning, the ads will b...

A bit of time ago I published an app called Hidden Pics on the Microsoft Marketplace, on that entry I covered some basics on the Isolated Storage and the PhotoChooserTask for Windows Phone 7. On this entry I want to cover the zooming and panning. As part of that app, the user has the option to open a photo full size on the device screen and then pinch to zoom the photo.  They can also pan by dragging on the screen with the fingers. Now this is supposed to be very basic, but there is a catch, which is making the zoom stable. By stable I mean that if you use two fingers to zoom in the photo, once you finish the two fingers should have the same pixels behind them, which indicates that you zoomed proportionally and panned correctly. After googling around a bit I put together the code to do both zooming and panning properly. So here is the XAML for the control, I am using an Image control inside a Canvas with a CompositeTransform : The photo will start fully fitted on the Ima...

Just days ago I finished and published my first app to Microsoft Windows Phone Marketplace. As part of the "#30tolaunch" program, I must admit that waiting for  the app to be certified was a little scaring, but the app was approved without any trouble and is already up, you can grab it here . Now the idea of the app is simple, it uses the Isolated Storage to hide pictures you want to keep out of curious people looking at your phone. And it involves two common elements that might be useful for you in future apps. 1) Isolated Storage 2) Photo Chooser Task Isolated Storage. The Isolated Storage is a virtualized file system so your app can't really access the device storage like it used to be. If you are a Windows Mobile developer, you might remember those times where you could write/read files all across the filesystem of a windows device. Thankfully that's not like that anymore. And you get a isolated space just for you application. Reading bytes from a file ...

One of the best things about Silverlight is that represents a set of portable functionality that you can expect to run almost anywhere. Its similarity – although reduced – with WPF results in an amazing way to develop rich UIs and logic in Browser-side apps. And then results normal to want to reuse Silverlight code from our own .NET applications. Reusing code from Silverlight assemblies is possible; the referencing process works well because Silverlight is a subset of .NET Framework, so that “by logic” should just work. Of course this is not all happiness, there are lot of limitations, but it will work as long as you keep yourself into the borders of certain assemblies like Mscorlib , System ,System.Core ,System.ComponentModel.Composition and Microsoft.VisualBasic , playing with others might give you mixed results. Now the trick. You SHOULD NOT add the reference to the Silverlight PROJECT. You MUST add the reference to the Silverlight ASSEMBLY. So let’s assume you have a scenario with...