//Build/ tour bangalore

The sum up of //Build/ Bangalore

This is where I will be sharing my experience of long waited Build ’15 where we had many interesting topics to spice up stuffs before Microsoft officially releases Windows 10 for regular users.

Let me jump with the starting of how it started and the fellow teammates I traveled with. It was on June 10, 2015 when 3 people from Geek Monkey Studios(Abhishek , Pooja and Myself) went to Leela Palace to start experiencing the flow of Build. The whole idea was to give the developers a very clear idea about the areas which Windows 10 will target and Microsoft goals with Edge as well.

The Sessions
Keynote was by  Pete Brown who talked in details about how the computing platform has evolved over the decades and how Microsoft will be looking towards it in near future. He talked in depth about the new IDE and Dev tools, the new browser and the HoloLens. The IoT was kept in focus as it’s the next big thing in terms of computing and Pie 2 along with Intel Galileo Gen1 extends the support of Windows 10 as IoT computing platform.In the later half he showed a really cool demo on IoT using Pie 2.

The Azure cloud platform was taken by Neil Huston where we got to experience how fast the cloud is evolving and how much more we can rely on Azure as a Cloud Platform. The power of ML , Bigdata , Hadoop has really extended the ecosystem and its not very hard anymore to experiment with these. There are few other stuffs as well, this includes the Stream Analytics and the Service Bus on Azure which can be used for data analysis and talking to IoT devices in realtime seamlessly in a hassle free manner.

The Universal App Platform was given by Kiran Kumar where we got the in depth of the new App Model which developers can start hacking on. This is the new, fresh and there are immense set of opportunities which will empower the developers to write apps from one windows platform and run it across any windows 10 builds. The developers can leverage the converged model approach and make something really wonderful with it. There are also a new section of applications which has been announced “ Hosted Web Apps” this means that any website can be deployed as an application and this requires no extra developmental skills because it can be done by the JS UAP from Visual Studio 2015 RC.

The Web was taken by Sen Chauhan , this was the most interesting topics as he walked us through a journey where we saw how the web has evolved and how the new Edge will surpass the web standard web experience and we can make the most of it. The new features and the specs were covered as well. The underlying difference of IE with Edge was focused on.

It was one hell of a experience when today and I will be sharing more on TechNet Wiki by talking about the new experiences and technologies.

Adaptive trigger for XAML UAP Development

Adaptive trigger for XAML UAP Dev

The major focus this article will have is how to have the developers build great UX for the Windows 10 applications. This requires us to perform the best practices which we have been doing for decades as Web Developers. The Web Developers had to encompass so how to render pages in different kinds of screen sizes and devices.
Now in Windows 10 UAP app dev, the app just has one binary which potentially means that the app has to run on all sort of devices. So the UI has to be adaptive such that app can get rendered in all types of screen sizes which means from a small phone screen to a surface hub of 85 inches. So there has to be some practices which will help us achieving the goal.

The offerings of the XAML Toolbox

XAML views is a type of feature which ensures that the XAMl will be broken down into multiple parts while the developer still has one single code behind. The usage of this can leverage the app dev the power of how to share the particular XAML to tester or any other developer and hence ensuring better quality. Also, this is one of the major parts where we can start building our own apps in a better and simplified manner.

XAML RelativePanel ensures that the XAML tree will be more organized and this means that each child will be rendered relative to the all the other children. The adaptive story begins from here and hence is going to be a big thing.

Now, having said all the above there the very important point here is the fact that the developer doesn’t need to bother themselves with any of the rendering stuffs. The whole process is being automatically given by VS2015RC with Blend under the hood.

Visual State setters and triggers

The point before was to animate everything mostly using Object Key Frames when we wanted to go from Collapsed to Visible.But there was nothing in between collapse and visible.Now we have setters to do they work and simply eliminate the animation.
Triggers on the other hand will give the developer control on when will the VisualState when the MinWindowWidth or MinWindowHeight is set to any given value.

Demo

I will be walking through a small demo how to make the full use of such the VisualState.StateTrigger and see the experience.

I will be using Blend 2015.

Creating a New Project

Adding new assets[rectangle]

Creating three Visual States and then placing the rectangles wherever I want them to look like in that particular video state

Renaming Visual State to ensure that we have different Visual State for different screen sizes to use it

Setting Visual State for Phone and likewise for Tab and Desktop.

And we have the dynamic UI rendering with Adaptive Triggers.

Hope you had nice time reading the article. Thanks for your time and patience.