Here are the submissions for the small lockscreen-competition announced on Facebook on April 12 2013. Please be aware that the ordering is not related to the submission date or any current status in the competition. It's simply a list to make sure we don't forget anyone, which means if you can't find your picture in the list and submitted it to the Facebook group earlier, please contact me and make sure your image is included in the competition.

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In this post there's no code whatsoever, it's just a simple but nice feature of Windows Phone 8 that I think create some great first impressions of the awesomeness of Windows Phone. It's all about creating a wide image that then is used as background for both the ordinary lock-screen as well as the Kids Corner lock-screen. It will give a nice transition when swiping to the Kids Corner.

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So here is a very basic and very "vanilla" looking login screen which could be leveraged for any Windows Phone application with some customization of logos and possibly colors as well. But there is a major issue with the proposed design and I wonder if you can spot it without me explaining? Can you spot it?

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When developing Windows 8 apps you might decide that Portrait mode is not useful in your app. There's lots of reasons why that might be the case but you still need to be careful when making that decision. The fact is that you can't really force your application to be run ONLY in one orientation or the other, you can only tell the runtime to "prefer" one orientation (or some). This is done by simply opening the package.appxmanifest in the "Solution Explorer" and in the tab "Application UI" check the appropriate checkboxes for "Supported rotations". What this preference is actually doing is telling devices that have hardware-support for realizing when your device is held in either direction to disregard that option. The user can however manually "force" the display to rotate by using the Display Properties in the Desktop which would cause all applications to run with a specific rotation.

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To keep your users aware of the fact that there's asynchronous actions in progress, the indeterminate progress bar is a common practice. One thing I've noticed is that when you add a ProgressBar element to a page in your Windows 8 page, the color of the indeterminate state is static meaning that there's no public property that you can use to set a specific color. One approach might be to retemplate the entire control, but it's a bit drastic when there's actually an easier approach.

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A minor but yet irritating bug in Windows Phone (which Microsoft also could have fixed very easy in my opinion) is apparent when getting notified about updates to applications in the Marketplace hub. When navigating to the list of available updates you might see something like the screenshot below (sorry for the Swedish UI elements):

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One of the managed solutions for building DirectX games on Windows 8 and still adhere to the Metro-application requirements seems to be the SharpDX framework. If you've spent years educating yourself in managed languages and the .NET runtime or maybe doesn't feel like switching entirely to the native environment of proper DirectX applications for Windows 8, SharpDX could be the path. Currently there aren't a lot of tutorials to help you get started but I hope to help there in the coming weeks or so. The first thing you need to do is get the environment configured for development and build and here is a short guide that I hope will help.

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The www.coderox.se website have just been migrated to use Umbraco CMS. Umbraco was chosen based on its strong community and other successful implementations.

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So this is a short update (or actually a new version) of the previous post. I wanted to see if I could leverage XAML and actually found a similar solution with less code, but just slightly larger in file-size:

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Yesterday I decided to evaluate how far I could go in creating a minimal application in Windows Phone, my goal was the following:

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