Scott Logic / Altogether Smarter

Colin Eberhardt
Blog

Colin Eberhardt

I am Technology Director at Scott Logic and am a prolific technical author, blogger and speaker on a range of technologies.

My blog includes posts on a wide range of topics, including WebAssembly, HTML5 / JavaScript and data visualisation with D3 and d3fc. You'll also find a whole host of posts about previous technology interests including iOS, Swift, WPF and Silverlight.

I'm board member of FINOS, which is encouraging open source collaboration in the financial sector. I'm also very active on GitHub, contributing to a number of different projects.

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Resources

White Paper: Thinking differently - the cloud as a value driver

The Financial Services industry is having to change and adapt in the face of regulations, competition, changes in buying habits and client expectations. This white paper encourages the industry to look at public cloud not as a tool for driving down costs, but as a vehicle for technical and business agility.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Apr · 1 min read
Cloud

Serverless Rust with AWS Lambda and WebAssembly

In this post, I look at how WebAssembly can be used to create serverless functions and demonstrate an AWS Lambda function written entirely in Rust.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Oct 2018 · 5 min read
Tech
Faster Fractals with Multi-Threaded WebAssembly
When WebAssembly was released a couple of years ago it was an MVP (Minimal Viable Product), one significant feature that was missing from the MVP was threads. The WebAssembly threads proposal is now quite mature and available in both the tooling and Chrome. This blog post explores the internals of this feature, the new instruction set, and how it supports multi-threaded applications.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Jul · 13 min read
Tech
Build your own WebAssembly Compiler
Have you ever wanted to write your own compiler? ... yes? ... of course you have! I've always wanted to have a go at writing a compiler, and with the recent release of WebAssembly, I had the perfect excuse to have a go.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  May · 20 min read
Tech
Building a better D3 axis
Recently we've been looking at enhancing the D3 axis component to implement a number of common features including more flexible label placement (e.g. positioning labels between ticks) and rotation / offset of labels to avoid collisions. This blog post demonstrates some of these features and how they were implemented.
Andy Lee
Andy Lee, Colin Eberhardt · 9th  May · 6 min read
Resources
White Paper: Thinking differently - the cloud as a value driver
The Financial Services industry is having to change and adapt in the face of regulations, competition, changes in buying habits and client expectations. This white paper encourages the industry to look at public cloud not as a tool for driving down costs, but as a vehicle for technical and business agility.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Apr · 1 min read
Cloud
Maintaining global state in AWS Lambda functions with Async Hooks
This post looks at how the experimental Async Hooks API can be used to support global state within AWS Lambda functions. Considering that this is an experimental API it's worth treating with caution, but it does provide an interesting potential solution to a common problem.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Mar · 8 min read
Tech · Video
Tools, Bots and Automation for better Open Source Projects
With open source projects, we often work with strangers, people we may never speak to, let alone meet. Creating a quality product, with such a disparate team can be quite a challenge. This talk takes a look at how tools and automation are a critical component when creating a successful open source project.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Dec 2018
Tech
OpenFin Layouts added to StockFlux
We've updated StockFlux, our OpenFin demo app, to make use of the recently-released OpenFin Layouts APIs. This blog post takes a quick look at the features we've added, and the APIs used.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt, Marzio Superina · 3rd  Dec 2018 · 2 min read
Tech
Realtime crypto charting with JPM Perspective and d3fc
Perspective is a streaming pivot visualization engine which uses WebAssembly. This blog post explores its capabilities and creates a custom cryptocurrency visualisation using d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Nov 2018 · 6 min read
Cloud
Serverless Rust with AWS Lambda and WebAssembly
In this post, I look at how WebAssembly can be used to create serverless functions and demonstrate an AWS Lambda function written entirely in Rust.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Oct 2018 · 5 min read
Tech
Building a Complex Financial Chart with D3 and d3fc
When it comes to creating complex bespoke charts, of all the JavaScript visualisation / charting frameworks, D3 is the clear winner. This blog post takes a step-by-step look at the process of of building an ‘advanced’ financial charting using D3, with additional components from d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Sep 2018 · 16 min read
Tech
The future of WebAssembly - A look at upcoming features and proposals
WebAssembly is a performance optimised virtual machine that was shipped in all four major browsers earlier this year. It is a nascent technology and the current version is very much an MVP. This blog post takes a look at the WebAssembly roadmap and the features it might gain in the near future.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jul 2018 · 10 min read
Cloud
Sleeping Lambdas and AWS Step Functions
With AWS Lambda you pay for execution duration, which means that sleeping or waiting during execution has a direct impact on your bill! This blog post takes a look at how to make AWS Lambda functions sleep, without incurring costs, via AWS Step Functions.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jun 2018 · 9 min read
Tech
Transpiling WebAssembly to support Multi Return Values
The WebAssembly specification is evolving, with many new features on the way. This blog post makes one of these future features available today, multi value returns, using the Babel approach of transpiling.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  May 2018 · 10 min read
Tech
Writing WebAssembly By Hand
WebAssembly is a new language for the web, although unlike JavaScript it's not a language you are expected to use directly. However, it is actually possible to write WebAssembly directly by hand and it turns out this is an educational and enjoyable process, which I will explore in this blog post.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Apr 2018 · 13 min read
Resources
White Paper: The Web Assembles
WebAssembly is a new runtime for the web; a fast and efficient compilation target for a wide range of languages that could have a far-reaching impact on the web as we know it. This paper looks at at the performance limits of JavaScript and how WebAssembly was designed to tackle them.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt, Chris Price · 24th  Apr 2018 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
WebAssembly - and the Death of JavaScript?
This talk, from JSMonthly, looked at what's wrong with the way we are using JavaScript today and why we need WebAssembly.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Feb 2018
Tech
Writing a CHIP-8 emulator with Rust and WebAssembly
Over the past couple of months I’ve been exploring the potential of WebAssembly. I wanted to try my hand at creating a more complex WebAssembly application, which is why I’ve been spending my evenings working on a CHIP-8 emulator ... and learning Rust!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Dec 2017 · 12 min read
Tech
Developing Bristol Pound - An Open Source React Native App
A few weeks ago the new Bristol Pound mobile app was launched, allowing users of this local currency to find vendors, view transactions and make payments on both iOS and Android. This post describes our experience of writing this application using React Native.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt, Georgiana Ginghina, Chris Meehan · 22nd  Nov 2017 · 9 min read
Tech
Migrating D3 Force Layout to WebAssembly
In this blog post I'll take a look at a real-world application of WebAssembly (WASM), the re-implementation of D3 force layout. The end result is a drop-in replacement for the D3 APIs, compiled to WASM using AssemblyScript (TypeScript).
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Oct 2017 · 12 min read
Tech · Video
Serverless JavaScript
JavaScript is the dominant force on the web and increasingly the desktop too, but what about on the server? This talk looks at server-side JavaScript within the context of serverless architectures, a cloud-computing pattern with zero configuration, automatic scaling and a pay-per execution model.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Oct 2017
Tech
Exploring different approaches to building WebAssembly modules
In this blog post I'll explore the various different ways you can create WebAssembly modules, using Emscripten, LLVM and AssemblyScript, comparing the tooling and performance.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  Oct 2017 · 10 min read
Tech
Asynchronous Recursion with Callbacks, Promises and Async.
Creating asynchronous functions that are recursive can be a bit of a challenge. This blog post takes a look at various different approaches, including callbacks and promises, and ultimately demonstrates how async functions result in a much simpler and cleaner solution.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Sep 2017 · 11 min read
Tech
Creating a Market Profile Chart with D3
Market profile charts are relatively complicated and specialised charts used by financial traders. This blog post looks at how to render a market profile chart using D3.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Aug 2017 · 7 min read
Tech
cla-bot a GitHub bot for automating Contributor Licence Agreements
A few months ago we contributed a project, ContainerJS, to the Symphony Software Foundation, an organization that fosters open source and collaboration within financial services. The Foundation has various legal requirements that must be adhered to, including that all contributors (i.e. committers) sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). Unfortunately as...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Jul 2017 · 2 min read
Tech
Mapping UK place name endings (With command line cartography tools)
Place names in UK and Ireland are very much influenced by their surroundings, with endings such as -hill, -ford, and -wood quite clearly referencing local geography. This blog post uses the new NDJSON command line tools for processing, transforming and joining datasets to create an optimised visualisation.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Jun 2017 · 8 min read
Cloud
gifbot - Building a GitHub App
This post takes a look at the recently launched GitHub App platform, that allows developers to create integrations and services which can be shared with others. The post describes the development of gifbot, a simple and fun App!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  May 2017 · 8 min read
Cloud
Developing a GitHub Bot with AWS Lambda
This blog post describes the process of creating a GitHub bot, hosted as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda function, that performs various checks on pull requests.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  May 2017 · 14 min read
Tech
Interactive and Responsive Small Multiples with D3
Small multiples repeat the same basic chart, typically with the same axes, to display different slices of a dataset. They are an excellent way of showing rich multi-dimensional data, without becoming a dense mess of lines. This post looks at how to implement small multiples with D3 and d3fc.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Apr 2017 · 11 min read
Tech
Visualising London Marathon Training Data From Strava
I downloaded an analysed the training data for 1,000 athlete who ran the London Marathon in 2016. From this data I've learnt that people put in ~30% less mileage than popular plans suggest, Sunday mornings are a firm favourite for long runs, and that Saturday morning parkruns are very popular!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Feb 2017 · 4 min read
Tech
Visualising London Marathon Strava Data
I recently downloaded run data for the 7,190 athletes who recorded their London Marathon on Strava, a popular platform for runners and cyclists. This blog post visualises and analyses the data in various interesting ways.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jan 2017 · 4 min read
Tech
Our most popular Tech Blog posts of 2016
OK, I’m a bit late; I intended this for the start of January, but this time last year I wrote a post on our most popular 2015 technical blogs. Here I am again!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jan 2017 · 1 min read
Tech
Semantic Versioning is not enough
A few days ago the roadmap for future Angular releases, starting with v.4 in March 2017, was unveiled. It once again made me re-visit my personal doubts about semantic versioning, the underlying issue being that it is great for computers, but bad for humans. Considering that people are the primary...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Dec 2016 · 5 min read
Tech
A Journey Through Sound Synthesis with AudioKit
For the past four years I’ve been an author on Ray Wenderlich’s website which provides tutorials for iOS developers. I don’t do much native iOS development these days, However, I do like to keep my skills up to date. As part of this team I sometimes find myself being assigned...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Nov 2016 · 1 min read
Resources
White Paper: Unstoppable HTML5
A white paper which takes a looks at the continued growth of HTML5 and how it is now a viable solution for desktop application development.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Oct 2016 · 1 min read
Tech · Video
Time Travel and The Future of HTML5 Productivity
In this talk I'll review how the functional programming style of frameworks such as React, ImmutableJS and Redux have paved the way for novel techniques that once again support rapid development cycles
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jul 2016
Tech
Recursive Pattern Matching and Transformation of JavaScript AST
I’ve recently been playing around with the JavaScript Abstract Syntax Trees (AST), with the aim of transforming some JavaScript code into various other languages (Java, C#, Objective-C). As part of my research, I looked at how Babel performs AST transforms. If you’re not familiar with Babel, and the plugins which...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Jun 2016 · 10 min read
Tech
Six tips for cleaner javascript promises
This blog post shares a few quick tips and patterns that I've been using to structure JavaScript promises; keeping them clean, simple and readable.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Jun 2016 · 12 min read
Tech
Applying redux reducers to arrays
The redux pattern provides a simple (and strict) pattern for managing state; a single store holds the state while a reducer applies actions, evolving the application state. As your app becomes more complex, you can split up your reducer into separate functions, however, what if you have multiple instances of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  May 2016 · 9 min read
Tech
Automating Expenses With the Mondo API
Mondo Bank has recently moved into public Beta, sending out 1,000 cards to trial customers each week. I received my Beta card a few days ago, and have been using it ever since. This blog post takes a quick look at the Mondo API and how I used it to automate expense claims!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Mar 2016 · 7 min read
Tech
Binding with Bond
Swift Bond is a binding framework that removes the mundane task of wiring up your UI. In this tutorial, which was originally published on Ray Wenderlich's website, I introduce the concepts of Bond and demonstrate how to use it to rapidly build an iOS app.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Feb 2016 · 1 min read
Tech
Angular 2 Time Travel with Redux
This post looks at integrating Angular 2 with Immutable.js and Redux, a popular Flux store implementation. It also demonstrates that the functional approach, encouraged by these technologies, allow for powerful concepts such as time travel, where you can replay actions and application state.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Jan 2016 · 11 min read
Tech
Angular 2 with Immutable.JS
Angular 2.0 introduces a component-based approach to building applications, where the rendering can be optimised by selecting a suitable change detection strategy for each component. This post looks at how the OnPush change detection strategy works quite elegantly with the concept of immutable objects as enforced by Immutable.js.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Jan 2016 · 8 min read
Tech
Most popular Tech Blog posts of 2015
Most popular tech blog posts of 2015
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Jan 2016 · 1 min read
Tech
Creating an Angular 2 build with Gulp, TSLint and DefinitelyTyped
From my perspective Angular 2 is a great improvement over Angular 1. The framework is simpler, and as a result your code is more concise, making use of modern JavaScript concepts. However, this does come at a cost; with Angular 2 the required tooling is really quite complicated.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Dec 2015 · 14 min read
Tech
Building a todo list application with Angular 2.0
This blog post takes a step-by-step approach to building a simple todo-list application with Angular 2.0. Along the way we'll look at web components, dependency injection, TypeScript, bindings and the Angular 2.0 change detection strategy which combine to make a much more elegant framework to its predecessor.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Dec 2015 · 16 min read
Tech
Rendering ASCII Charts with D3
A few days ago Bloomberg published their list of 50 companies to watch in 2016, and for some reason they decided to publish the entire report in ASCII! I thought it would be a bit of fun to see if I could use D3 to create my own ASCI charts
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Nov 2015 · 8 min read
Tech · Video
Geeking out about React Native
ReactJS, Virtual DOM, JSX, a hackable editor, ES6 modules, classes, arrow functions, node, iOS, native-UI, flexbox, idempotent functions… In this talk I’ll be geeking out about all the seriously cool tech that makes ReactNative possible.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Oct 2015
Resources
White Paper: HTML5 Migration – Get started with a Little Bang
This white paper explores and addresses the importance of migrating complex business applications from Flex and Silverlight to HTML5. It highlights the risks involved in delaying your migration and provides a solution that tackles cost concerns at the same time as delivering an early return on investment. The paper covers:...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Oct 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
Improving Grunt Performance
JavaScript builds are getting more complex and time consuming. This blog post shares a few steps I took to improve the performance of one of our project's grunt build, hopefully some of the tools I used will be of use to others.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Oct 2015 · 6 min read
Tech
MVVM With ReactiveCocoa 3.0
This is my final article on ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RAC3), where I demonstrate some more complex RAC3 usages within the context of an application built using the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  May 2015 · 8 min read
Resources
White Paper: Making Technology Disappear
Creating omni-channel experiences in enterprise is more often than not a challenge in terms of strategy and mindset rather than technology. This white paper outlines a twinned design and technical approach that ensures focus is squarely on users and the contexts within they use a system.
Graham Odds
Graham Odds, Colin Eberhardt · 8th  May 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
ReactiveCocoa 3.0 - Signal Producers and API clarity
My previous blog post took a first look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0 (RC3), where I described the new Signal interface, and the pipe forward operator. In this blog post I continue my exploration of the RC3 APIs and turn my attention to signal producers. I also discuss a few points around the overall clarity of the new ReactiveCocoa APIs.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Apr 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
A First Look at ReactiveCocoa 3.0
This blog post takes a look at the new ReactiveCocoa 3.0 swift interface, which introduces generics, a pipe-forward operator and an interesting use of curried functions.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Apr 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Retrospective on Developing an application with React Native
I've been building a React Native app for the past few months, which was published as a tutorial yesterday. A number of people have asked about my thoughts and opinions about React Native - which I am sharing in this blog post.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Mar 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Introducing React Native
A few months ago Facebook announced React Native, a framework that lets you build native iOS applications with JavaScript. I've been spending the past couple of months building am app with this framework, which I have finally been able to share!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Mar 2015 · 1 min read
Tech
Implementing React.js in Swift
This blog post explores the novel approach taken by the React.js team, where the UI is expressed as a function of the current application state, and re-implements it with Swift.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Mar 2015 · 12 min read
Tech
Exploring KVO alternatives with Swift
Swift has access to all of the Objective-C APIs, which means that anything you could do with Objective-C you can now do with Swift. However, there are times when it is worth exploring a better, pure-Swift, alternative. This post explores the pros and cons of KVO versus a couple of Swift alternatives.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Feb 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Implementing Events in Swift
Swift does not have a built in eventing mechanism. This post explores a few different ways events can be implemented in Swift and how to avoid problems of retain cycles and closure reference equality.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Feb 2015 · 6 min read
Tech
SVG layout with Flexbox for simpler D3 charts
This blog looks at how CSS flexbox layout can be applied to SVG in order to simplify the task of constructing charts with D3. This approach has been made possible by the JavaScript flexbox implementation that Facebook recently open sourced to support ReactJS Native.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Feb 2015 · 9 min read
Tech
Exception Handling in Swift
Swift doesn’t support throwing exceptions, nor does it support catching them. This wouldn’t be a problem if you could develop iOS apps in pure Swift, but unfortunately at the moment you cannot. When developing an app most of the APIs you’ll be working with are Objective-C APIs that have been...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Jan 2015 · 7 min read
Tech
Tearing Down Swift's Optional Pyramid of Doom
This blog post looks at a few techniques that can be used to remove the deeply nested if-let statements that are a common sight in Swift code.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Dec 2014 · 7 min read
Tech
Swift Initialization and the Pain of Optionals
Swift's strict initialisation process results in a number of practical issues, leaving developers scratching their heads. This post explores a few solutions including two-phase initialisation, the use of optionals and lazy properties.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Nov 2014 · 5 min read
Tech
Binding mutable arrays with ReactiveCocoa
This post describes a binding helper that allows you to bind arrays directly to table views with ReactiveCocoa. In this update to my previous post, the helper is extended to support mutable arrays.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Nov 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
Mandelbrot Generation With Concurrent Functional Swift
This post show how the simple task of computing a Mandelbrot set can be split up across multiple threads (and processors) using functional techniques.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Oct 2014 · 10 min read
Tech
Jekyll Pagination and Infinite Scroll
Recently I updated the Scott Logic blog to implement infinite scrolling using a combination of Jekyll pagination and jScroll. Both of these components are quite fussy about their respective configuration, meaning that integrating them took longer than expected. I thought I'd share my solution in this blog post, hopefully saving others from the hours I spent digging into jScroll code or cursing Jekyll!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Oct 2014 · 4 min read
Tech
Swift and the curious case of AnyObject
Swift, as I am sure you are aware, is quite a strict, safe and strongly-typed language. However, because the language needs to maintain Objective-C compatibility it has some rather curious features, and the behaviour of `AnyObject` is one of them!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Sep 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
Functional Swift and Memoization
This post is a continuation of my previous which looked at implementing Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques. Here I look at how memoization can be used to cache the return value of a function in order to improve performance.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Sep 2014 · 11 min read
Tech
Swift By Tutorials is Published
Apple released the first public beta of the Swift programming language just over three months ago. Within days of the release myself and Matt Galloway started working on our book Swift by Tutorials, which as of yesterday is finally finished and shipping!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Sep 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
The Game of Life with Functional Swift
This blog post shows an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using functional techniques in Swift. This results in code which is a clear and concise representation of the game’s logic. I also take a closer look at ranges, intervals, the pattern match operator, ~= and how local functions help...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Sep 2014 · 11 min read
Tech
Swift Adoption Statistics
It was just two months ago that Apple took us by surprise in releasing the Swift programming language. This blog post reflects on the first few months of Swift adoption.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Aug 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
MVVM, Swift and ReactiveCocoa - It's all good!
This blog post looks out how Swift makes the combination of ReactiveCocoa and MVVM even better ...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Jul 2014 · 5 min read
Tech
A Statistical Comparison of the iOS and Android Stores
A few months ago I published a blog post which showed the results of analysing the meta-data of 75,000 apps from the iTunes App Store. This blog post continues the analysis by adding 60,000 Android apps into the mix.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Jul 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
MVVM with ReactiveCocoa
I've recently had a two-part tutorial published on Ray Wenderlich's website that details how ReactiveCocoa can be used to implement the MVVM pattern within iOS applications.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jul 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Swift Sequences and Lazy Evaluation
In this blog post I want to take a quick look at the Swift Sequence protocol, which forms the basis for the for-in loop, and see how this allows you to write code that performs sequence operations that are only evaluated on-demand.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jun 2014 · 7 min read
Resources
White Paper - HTML5 At Enterprise Scale
Moving from desktop or plugin technologies (Flex, Silverlight, Java Applets) to HTML5 is a challenge for developers of large-scale enterprise applications. This White Paper discusses the challenges and offers potential solutions.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  May 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Binding to a UITableView from a ReactiveCocoa ViewModel
This blog post presents a simple utility class for binding ReactiveCocoa ViewModels to UITableViews without the need for the usual datasource / delegate boiler-plate.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  May 2014 · 9 min read
Tech
A Colour Analysis of the Apple App Store
This blog post presents the result of analysing 250,000 screenshots from the Apple App Store, looking at hue, lightness and saturation histograms for each category.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Apr 2014 · 8 min read
Tech
A Statistical Analysis of the Apple App Store
The App Store continues its rapid growth, with approximately 300,000 apps added each year. I decided it would be fun to download as much app metadata as possible in order to see what patterns and trends I could find. This blog post describes the results.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Mar 2014 · 9 min read
Tech
Simulating Accelerometer and Location data for iOS
This blog post looks at how to simulate accelerometer and location data so that you can test iOS apps without the need for a physical device. The simulated data is provided by an interactive UI which allows you to rotate the phone and mark paths on a map which can then be replayed.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Mar 2014 · 7 min read
Tech
ReactiveCocoa - The Definitive Guide
It feels like everyone in the iOS community is talking about ReactiveCocoa at the moment. In this blog post I talk briefly about what ReactiveCocoa is and the 'Definitive Guide' which I wrote for raywenderlich.com
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Mar 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
PropertyCross 1.3 Released
PropertyCross has just announced a v1.3 release, which includes two new frameworks, a number of updates and an improved build system.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 31st  Jan 2014 · 2 min read
Tech
iOS 7 By Tutorials In Print
The book, iOS 7 By Tutorials, which I contributed four chapters to, is now in print.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Jan 2014 · 1 min read
Tech
Understanding JavaScript Object Creation Patterns
This article explores the various ways you can create objects with the JavaScript language, and through this exploration finds that there is much to learn about the language!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Nov 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
An Interactive Tab Bar Controller Transition
This blog post looks at creating an interactive tab bar controller transition, where you can swipe left and right to navigate between the tabs. The transition itself is a 'paperfold' effect - very pretty!
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Sep 2013 · 9 min read
Tech
Creating a custom flip view controller transition
With iOS 7 Apple introduced a new set of APIs for creating custom View Controller transitions. In this blog post I look at how to create a custom 'flip' transition, giving the impression of a turning page.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Sep 2013 · 8 min read
Tech
iOS 7 by Tutorials - the first iOS 7 book - is published
For the past four months I have been hard at work writing four chapters for a book, iOS 7 by tutorials. Just yesterday, as the iOS 7 NDA was lifted, the book went on sale.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Sep 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Windows Phone App Studio - Shows Potential ...
A couple of days ago Microsoft announced Windows Phone App Studio, a web based tool for the rapid creation of Windows Phone applications. In this blog post I take this new technology for a spin to see what it's capable of, and the interesting potential it has for creating 'personal' apps.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Aug 2013 · 5 min read
Tech
New iOS Article - How To Make a Custom Control
My latest iOS development article has been published on Ray Wenderlich's site, this time I look into how to develop custom iOS controls. The article describes the creation of a 'range' slider control, and covers topics such as API design and using Core Graphics for rendering. Interestingly, iOS developers have...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Jun 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
ReversiEight - A Windows 8 Reversi Game
For the last six months or so I have been deeply immersed in a combination of iOS and HTML5 development. Now I don't want my C#/XAML skills to get too rusty, so over the weekend I decided to write a simple Windows 8 Store App. You can see the results...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  May 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
HTML5 - It Just Got Real - Slides
A couple of days ago we hosted a one-day conference, HTML5 - It Just Got Real, at the Royal Society buildings in London. As promised, we have made all of our presentations available online.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  May 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Enhanced Windows Phone 8 Map Gestures
This blog post describes the addition of a two-finger rotation and three-finger pitch gesture to the Windows Phone 8 Map control. You can see these gesture in action below: The WP8 release replaced the image-tile based Bing maps with a fully vector-rendered map from Nokia. Being vector-based, this map can...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Apr 2013 · 6 min read
Tech
Comparing KendoUI and Knockout (with a bit of jQueryMobile on the side)
This blog post compares the same twitter search application written with both Knockout and Kendo in order to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each framework. Introduction I've always been a big fan of Knockout, most likely because it reminds me of Silverlight (rest in peace). For my thoughts on...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Apr 2013 · 9 min read
Tech
HTML5 - It Just Got Real - A One-day Conference in London 14th May
Announcing a one-day conference at the Royal Society, London UK, on the 14th of May. Just a few years back I wrote a white paper titled "Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide ..." with the help of a couple of my colleagues, comparing the strengths and weaknesses of the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Mar 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Windows Phone 8 Running App Article wins CodeProject competition
I've just received an email from those nice folks at CodeProject letting me know that my article 'A Windows Phone 8 Run Tracking App in 100 Lines of Code' has just won the Best Mobile article of January 2013 award.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Feb 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Linq to Objective-C
In the past few months I have been immersing myself into the world of iOS development. Whilst the Objective-C language takes a little getting used to, with its odd syntax and memory management rules, it is certainly a fun platform to develop for. I do miss a few C# language...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Feb 2013 · 10 min read
Tech
CodeProject MVP 2013
Earlier today I received an email informing me that I have been awarded a CodeProject MVP for the year 2013. I am very grateful to CodeProject for this award - it is a very popular website for developers, with around 10 million members, and thousands of authors. It is an...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jan 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
CodeProject Article on Xamarin Cross Platform Development
Yesterday I published a new article on CodePrioject: Property Finder - a Cross-Platform Xamarin MonoTouch Mobile App This article looks at how you can write a cross-platform mobile application with a shared C# code base using Xamarin MonoTouch. The application that is described in the article, a property finder, is...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Jan 2013 · 1 min read
Tech
Introducing PropertyCross - Helping you select a cross-platform mobile framework
Introduces a new open source project that helps developers choose a suitable cross-platform framework
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Dec 2012 · 7 min read
Tech
A Multicast Delegate Pattern for iOS Controls
This blog post introduces a simple pattern for adding multicasting capabilities to existing iOS controls. Adding multicasting allows for improved clarity and code re-use. Colin Eberhardt is CIO at ShinobiControls, suppliers of highly interactive and fun charts, grid and UI controls for iOS developers. Most iOS controls have a concept...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Nov 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
Ray Wenderlich and My Adventures in iOS
The technologies that we use to write applications for our end users are changing at a frightening pace! Over the past few years the title of my blog has changed from "Adventures in WPF" to "Adventures in .NET", and more recently to the very generic "Adventures in Technology". The latest...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Nov 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Integrating Knockout and jQueryMobile
This blog post looks at the issues regarding integration of KnockoutJS and jQueryMobile, and provides a simple worked example - a Twitter Search application - where the two technologies play nicely together! The code for this blog post can be found on github. You can also try it out on...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Oct 2012 · 7 min read
Tech
Clearer - A Gesture-Driven Windows 8 To-Do Application
A couple of days ago a published a new article on CodeProject, this latest article tackles the migration of a gesture-drive application from Windows Phone to Windows 8: "I had fun porting my gesture-driven to-do list application to Windows 8, and had an interesting journey along the way. There are...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Oct 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Gesture-Driven To Do List Article Wins CodeProject Monthly Competition
I have just found out that my article "A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List" won first place in the July 2012 best mobile article category. Thanks CodeProject, looking forward to receiving my collection of goodies - especially the new mouse mat! (Why not check out my latest article, a HTML5-based...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Aug 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Property Finder - A Cross-platform HTML5 Mobile App
A while back, when PhoneGap for Windows Phone was still in beta, I created Property Finder, an application for searching UK property listings. This application successfully made its way into the Windows Phone Marketplace, making it the first WP7 PhoneGap app. I recently developed the Property Finder application further in...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Aug 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Book Review: iOS Programming for .NET Developers
A couple of weeks ago Josh Smith published his latest book, "iOS Programming for .NET Developers", which seeks to ease the transition from .NET to iOS developers. As someone who has many years of .NET experience, and more recently a desire to develop for 'the other side', I thought this...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Jul 2012 · 5 min read
Tech
A Gesture-Driven Windows Phone To-Do List - Complete Example
Over the past few weeks I have been working on a Windows Phone to-do list application, inspired by the iPhone Clear app. I have just published the final application over on codeproject. You can see it in action below: Pop over to CodeProject for the full sourcecode and implementation details....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jul 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
An Introduction and Thoughts on Developing iOS Applications with MonoTouch
This blog post describes the creation of a simple twitter search application for iOS, based on a similar application I wrote for Windows Phone a few months back. In this blog post I'll used the MonoTouch platform, which allows you to write iOS applications using C#. This blog posts describes...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Jul 2012 · 13 min read
Tech
The Higgs Boson, Comic Sans and my 15 minutes of Twitter fame
It's been a busy Twitter day for me. A reasonably inane tweet that I posted this morning pointing out that the announcement of the (potential) Higgs Boson discovery was written using the much derided Comic Sans font has been retweeted thousands of times, and has been the top tweet for...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Jul 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application Part Two - drag re-ordering
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about a todo list application which uses gestures to achieve its basic functions, a left swipe deletes an item, while a right-swipe marks it as complete. In this blog post I am adding re-ordering which is initiated via a tap-and-hold gesture and performed...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Jun 2012 · 9 min read
Tech
A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8 - An Update
My blog post from yesterday "A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8" sparked a bit of furious debate on Twitter. I think it is fair to say that I was not the only one who was quite concerned about the impact of aligning the developer experience of Windows Phone 8...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Jun 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
A Developer Perspective on Windows Phone 8
This blog post takes a look at what Windows Phone 8 (WP8) means for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers and the Microsoft development platform in general. This has been a big week for Microsoft; Monday saw them unveil the new Surface tablet that runs Windows 8. This was followed up...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jun 2012 · 3 min read
Tech
Microsoft Surface vs. Apple iPad - a Visual Comparison
In this post I present a graphical comparison of the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad tablets
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jun 2012 · 2 min read
Tech
A gesture-driven Windows Phone to-do application
This blog post describes the implementation of a gesture-based todo-list application. The simple interface is controlled entirely by drag, flick and swipe: So far the application supports deletion and completion of tasks, but not the addition of new ones. I'll get to this in a later blog post! Introduction -...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Jun 2012 · 13 min read
Tech
Introducing the jQuery Mobile Metro Theme
This blog post introduces the new jQuery Mobile Metro theme and demonstrates how to create a web UI that detects the device it is being viewed on, to render a Metro UI on WP7 and iOS on other devices
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Apr 2012 · 10 min read
Tech
WPF Charting Performance Comparisons (the Battle Continues)
This blog post presents a thorough analysis of the performance of various WPF Charting components. The results show that a new class of charting solutions, which use raster-based graphics as opposed to retained mode vector graphics, provide a considerable performance advantage
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Apr 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part Two)
Introduction This is the second post in my series about databinding in Silverlight and WPF. In the first post I looked at how you wire-up UI controls to a model in the absence of a databinding framework. I showed how databindings can be created in code-behind, removing the need for...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Apr 2012 · 8 min read
Tech
KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight - a new CodeProject article
I have just published a new article over on CodeProject called "KnockoutJS vs. Silverlight". It demonstrates the implementation of the same application using both frameworks, and seeks to answer the question "Which is better, Silverlight or Knockout?" It's a bit of an epic (6,500 words). I hope people find it...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Apr 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Everything you wanted to know about databinding in WPF, Silverlight and WP7 (Part One)
OK, so the title is a little ambitious, but there is nothing wrong with setting yourself lofty aims! Because of the depth of this topic I have decided to split this tutorial up into a series of blog posts, each of which explore a different aspect of the binding framework....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Apr 2012 · 10 min read
Tech
Developing a GWT TodoMVC application
This blog post describes my experiences of developing a simple Todo application with Google Web Toolkit (GWT), that I have contributed to the JavaScript TodoMVC project, which compares the implementation of the same application with various JavaScript frameworks. This blog discusses why I chose GWT, the compromises and benefits of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Mar 2012 · 8 min read
Tech
Plotting Circular Relationships Graphs with Silverlight
I have just published a new article on codeproject, which describes the creation of a Silverlight custom control for plotting the relationships between a network of nodes. Head over to codeproject and take a look! Visualisation of Eurozone Debt You can see the control in action below, where it is...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Mar 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Slides and code from my WPUG talk on PhoneGap
Yesterday I presented a talk at the London-based Windows Phone User Group on the development of cross-platform mobile applications using PhoneGap. Here are my slides from the presentation: And here is the twitter search application I demoed: PhoneGapTwitterSearch.zip You can also try out Property Finder on your phone. Thanks to...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Feb 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
Visualising StackOverflow Tag Relationships with Silverlight
UPDATE: I have posted the sourcecode for this control on codeproject. Recently I have been wondering about the wealth of information that can be gleaned from the 2.5 million programming question on Stack Overflow. A few weeks back I found a tag trending tool, which can be used to measure...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Feb 2012 · 2 min read
Tech
The Gradual Decline in Silverlight Adoption
Around one year ago I made the prediction that Silverlight would have an overall adoption of 81% by the end of 2011. The adoption statistics are now available and indicate that my predictions were wrong by more than 10%, with Silverlight adoption reaching just 67% at the start of this...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Feb 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
WPUG Talk: Developing cross-platform mobile applications with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7
In a couple of weeks I will be giving a talk on using PhoneGap for cross platform mobile application development at the WPUG #NotAtMWC12 event on Tuesday, February 28, in London. This post gives a brief overview of my talk and a video.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Feb 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
A Simple Pattern for Creating Re-useable UserControls in WPF / Silverlight
This blog post provides step-by-step instructions for creating a user control, which exposes bindable properties, in WPF and Silverlight. The post covers dependency properties, and how to manage DataContext inheritance. When building user interfaces you will often find yourself repeating the same UI patterns across your application. After all, users...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Feb 2012 · 8 min read
Tech
WP7 PhoneGap Backbutton Support Re-visited
About a month ago I published an article which demonstrated how to create a WP7 application using static HTML pages and PhoneGap. Whilst PhoneGap makes the packaging of HTML / JavaScript / CSS and images into a breeze, one thing it doesn't do is provide correct back-button support. Correct back-button...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jan 2012 · 2 min read
Tech
Windows Phone 7 - Browsing your Photos via Bing Maps
The Windows Phone 7 camera gives you the option to record the location where a picture was taken (under Settings => applications => pictures+camera). With this feature turned on, each application has their latitude, longitude and altitude stored as part of the standard EXIF data. I thought it would be...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Jan 2012 · 6 min read
Tech
Proud to be a CodeProject MVP 2012
I have just received an email from Chris Maunder, co-founder of CodeProject, informing me that I have been awarded CodeProject MVP status for 2012.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Jan 2012 · 1 min read
Tech
FastClick for WP7 - Improving Browser Responsiveness for PhoneGap Apps
I recently released an update of the HTML5 / PhoneGap application I wrote a few months ago to the marketplace. This update fixed the location detection issue, where the marketplace certification process failed to detect that the application was using geolocation data via the browser (this issue has been fixed...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  Jan 2012 · 4 min read
Tech
A Festive and Fun Windows Phone 7 Maze Game
Last night, with my Christmas presents all wrapped and a lack of any decent programmes (festive or otherwise) on television, I had a few hours to kill, so decided to create a festive-themed WP7 game ... Ever since I first started writing code for Windows Phone 7 I have wanted...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Dec 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
A Metro Themed PowerPoint Template
Over the weekend I mentioned on Twitter that I had created a Metro-style PowerPoint template. There were a few requests to share, so hence this blog post. Scroll to the bottom to download the PowerPoint file. So why create a Metro-style PowerPoint presentation? A couple of reasons, firstly, the templates...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Dec 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
A Simple Multi-Page Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap Example
This blog post shows how you can use PhoneGap to create Windows Phone 7 applications that are comprised of multiple, simple HTML pages, whilst meeting the Marketplace certification requirements. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Dec 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
A Windows Phone 7 Slide View with Page Pips
A popular user-interface in the iOS world is the UIPageControl which renders a small set of dots to indicate the number of pages, with the current page highlighted in some way. This is often used in conjunction with a UIScrollView to navigate between pages in a multi-page layout. Windows Phone...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Dec 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
Handling the back-stack in Windows Phone 7 PhoneGap applications
Recently I have been researching the use of PhoneGap for creating HTML5 Windows Phone 7 applications. I have written an introductory post on the subject and also managed to have a HTML5-based application accepted into the marketplace. The Windows Phone 7 execution model has a few unique features (when compared...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Nov 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
Pushpin Clustering with the Windows Phone 7 Bing Map control
This blog post provides a simple utility class that will cluster pushpins on a Bing Map control. This utility provides a way to achieve great performance with 1000s of pushpins. The Bing Map control for Windows Phone 7 is a versatile control, allowing you to provide your users with an...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Nov 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
Suppressing Zoom and Scroll interactions in the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser Control
This blog post describes a simple helper class that can be used to supress scrolling and pinch zoom of the Windows Phone 7 WebBrowser control. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Developers of Windows Phone...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  Nov 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
The Untimely Demise of the Plugin (and how LOB developments will suffer)
It has been another interesting week for HTML5 and front-end technologies. We have seen Adobe abandon work on mobile versions of the Flash plugin, news of Silverlight 5 being the last version of the Microsoft plugin and more recently an announcement that Adobe will no longer develop Flex, its enterprise...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Nov 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
An Introduction to Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 Metro
With the new Metro UI, Windows 8 has firmly embraced the tablet form-factor, with the interface tailored for touch and multi-touch interactions. Many of the Metro concepts familiar to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) developers are also present in Windows 8. Watching the vieos from the //build/ conference you can see...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Nov 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
Property Finder - the first HTML5-based Windows Phone 7 Application
Last week I submitted Property Finder, a simple application that searches for properties based in the UK, to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. I was happy to receive confirmation that this application had been certified and published just two days later. You can download the application from the marketplace now....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Nov 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
Tombstoning with PhoneGap for Windows Phone 7 (and KnockoutJS)
A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about how the recent announcement of PhoneGap support for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) which makes it possible to develop HTML5-based applications. In my previous blog post I showed the development of a simple HTML5 / JavaScript application which PhoneGap wraps up...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Oct 2011 · 9 min read
Tech
Codeproject September Competition - Scored a Double!
I have just received an email from Codeproject - my article on XAMLFinance, a cross platform Silverlight, WPF and WP7 application, has won Best C# and Best Overall article competitions for September. Having narrowly missed out in the monthly competitions a few times, I am pleased to have scored a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Oct 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Adding Error Bars to Visiblox Silverlight Charts
Having spent a number of years studying Physics at university, I have had the importance of error bars well and truly drummed into me! Within physics, or any experimental science, there are always going to be errors in the measurements you make. The more repeat measurements you make, the more...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Oct 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
Paging Data from the Server with Silverlight
This blog post provides an implementation of IPagedCollectionView which allows paging of data from the server. An IPagedDataSource is introduced that allows any paged data source to be plugged in, with the standard controls such as DataPager making it easy to create paging applications. With web-based applications, bandwidth constraints often...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Oct 2011 · 7 min read
Tech
WinRT Transitions - Creating Fast and Fluid Metro UIs
This blog post looks at the new concept of 'transitions' that WinRT, within Windows 8, introduces. This concept makes it very easy for you to create a fluid and interactive UI without going anywhere near storyboards! I have to admit it, I am a big fan of the Metro Design...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Oct 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
Using ObservableCollection with WinRT (via a little shim!)
WInRT introduces a new interface for collection change notification, IObservableVector, which means ObservableCollection no longer works with this framework. In this blog post I will show how you can use ObservableCollection, via a simple adapter, within you WInRT applications. <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Path=MyCollection, Converter={StaticResource ObservableCollectionAdapter}}"/> Developers are slowly starting to get...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Oct 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
A Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) MVVM Tombstoning Example
In this blog post I look at the new application lifecycle model that Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) introduces, and show how to handle the various lifecycle events in a simple MVVM application. In a previous blog post I described the development of a simple Windows Phone 7 application using the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  Oct 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
Developing Windows Phone 7 HTML5 apps with PhoneGap
This article show the step-by-step development of a Windows Phone 7 HTML5 application using PhoneGap. It also looks at how viable this approach is for cross-platform mobile development. Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a Technical Architect for Visiblox, suppliers of high-performance WPF and Silverlight charts. Introduction...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Sep 2011 · 14 min read
Tech
Building Windows Phone Apps - a free WP7 eBook
I've just had an email land in my inbox from Microsoft's Mike Ormond, announcing that the Windows Phone 7 book that I contributed a couple of chapters to (Introduction and Tools), has finally been published! This is a collaborative book with contributions from Pete Vickers, Andy Gore, Mike Hole, Gergely...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Sep 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
XAML Finance - a cross-platform WPF, Silverlight, WP7 application
I have just published a new article on codeproject which describes the development of XAMLFinance, a cross-platform application for the desktop (WPF), web (Silverlight) and phone (WP7). Head over to codeproject to read about the development of this application and download the sourcecode. Regards, Colin E.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Sep 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
TweetSearch - A Cross platform Metro UI WinRT and Silverlight Application
With the Windows 8 preview release earlier this week, developers are now faced with a whole new and exciting Microsoft stack. The Windows 8 architecture has something of a split-personality, incorporating a completely new runtime, WinRT together with the older Win32 and .NET framework. However, these sit on different sides...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Sep 2011 · 9 min read
Tech
Windows 8 - An OS of two halves.
In this blog post I take a look at Windows 8 on the outside, from a user perspective; and on the inside, from a developer perspective to see how it will change the way we develop with Windows on tablets, smartphones and the desktop when it is released next year....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Sep 2011 · 7 min read
Tech
Dart - will Google make HTML5 applications viable?
Just a few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost "Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?", where I described some of the issues with JavaScript and how these could be solved by Microsoft if they wrote a C# to JavaScript compiler. Just a couple of days ago it...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Sep 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?
Microsoft's recent change in stance over Silverlight, promoting HTML5 as "the only true cross-platform solution for everything", seems to have sidelined Silverlight as a niche framework. This has understandably caused a great deal of upset and confusion in the .NET development community. Despite this, Microsoft are remaining steadfast and tight-lipped...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Aug 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
Talk on Cross-Platform XAML Applications @NEBytes
I am happy to have been invited by NEBytes to give a talk on cross-platform XAML applications later this month. The event kicks off at 6:30pm on August 17th at Room 120, Claremont Tower, Newcastle University, with the event including both my presentation and a talk on Office 365 by...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Aug 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Implementing a Windows Phone 7 Conversation View Part Two
This blog post describes how to implement a conversation / messaging style application with Windows Phone 7. It covers how to style the speech bubbles and the scrolling of the conversation list view when the phone keyboard is shown. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post which...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Aug 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
Capturing Windows Phone 7 Panorama Images
The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is widely used in applications and to many has come to symbolise the Metro Design Language. Search for panorama images and you will find numerous promo-shots of Windows Phone 7 applications which display the panoramic contents of the application hub, with an image of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jul 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
Implementing a Windows Phone 7 Conversation View
This blog post looks at how to to create a conversation view, mimicking the SMS messaging interface within Windows Phone 7. This post shows how we can select different DataTemplate for each item in an ItemsControl to achieve this effect. The Windows Phone 7 SMS messaging interface graphically illustrates between...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Jul 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
From Silverlight to HTML5 CodeProject Article
I have just published an article on codeproject which describes the differences in development between Silverlight and HTML5. In order to illustrate the differences, I have re-implemented my Windows Phone 7 JumpList control using HTML5/CSS3. You can see this control in action below: (NOTE: this will look best in a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Jul 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Silverlight UK User Group Presentation on Cross Platform XAML
Earlier this week I presented a talk to the Silverlight UK User Group on cross-platform application development with WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. Thanks to Gergley Orosz for these pictures Thanks to all who attended my talk. Here is a copy of the presentation I gave: You can see...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Jul 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Visiblox MVP Giveaway
Readers of my blog will probably have noticed that I have a keen interest in both charting and performance. My friends over at Visiblox have combined these both to create what is one of the fastest charts for WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone 7, see my recent benchmark blog post...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Jun 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion #8 - AutoCompleteBox Reveal Animation
When I started the Metro In Motion series, I thought I would probably post three or four articles and be done. However, every time I use my Windows Phone 7 I seem to spot a new 'native' fluid UI effect which I would like to use in my own code....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jun 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #7 - Panorama Prettiness and Opacity
This blog post details a simple metro-in-motion behaviour which reduces the Panorama control's contents while the user slides from item-to-item so that they can really appreciate your fancy background graphic! For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll briefly recap. My aim is to provide...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Jun 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #6 - Rolling List Location Indicator
This blog post describes the development of a rolling list location indicator. This indicator mirrors the behaviour seen in the native Windows Phone 7 calendar which rolls from one date to the next as the user scrolls. For those of you who have not been following my Metro-In-Motion series, I'll...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Jun 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
A Simple Windows Phone 7 MVVM Tombstoning Example
This blog post shows how to implement tombstoning within a Windows Phone 7 application that following the Model-View-ViewModel pattern. UPDATE: I have published a update to this blog post to handle the new dormant state in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango). Colin Eberhardt is a Scott Logic technical Evangelist and a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  May 2011 · 13 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion #5 - SandwichFlow
For the past few months I have been writing a Metro-In-Motion blog series which describes how to recreate some of the fluid effects found in native Windows Phone 7 applications within your own applications. So far I have covered fluid list animations, 'peel' animations, flying titles and a 'tilt' effect...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  May 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide...
When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft's perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged. This white paper is intended to help technology decision makers come to...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 5th  May 2011 · 1 min read
Resources
White Paper: Flex, Silverlight or HTML5? Time to decide...
When meeting current and prospective clients the subject of web technology choice often arises. There has been a great deal of confusion and uncertainty out there, even before Microsoft’s perceived change of stance with respect to Silverlight emerged. This white paper is intended to help technology decision makers come to...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt, Graham Odds, Chris Price · 5th  May 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #4 - Tilt Effect
This blog post describes the implementation of a metro 'tilt' effect for Windows Phone 7 which causes element to respond to user interactions by tilting in 3D So far in the "Metro In Motion" series I have covered fluid list animations, 'peel' animations and flying title. In this blog post...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 3rd  May 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
ViewModel INotifyPropertyChanged Code Generation
This blog post describes a novel method of generating boiler-plate MVVM code using codesnippet automation. You simply add attributes to your view model classes and the code is generated for you! Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) has become the de facto pattern for Silverlight, WPF and WP7 applications, providing code that is easily...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Apr 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
A Fast Loading Windows Phone 7 NavigationList Control
This blog post describes a Windows Phone 7 NavigationList control, a list control designed for navigation pages. The NavigationList renders twice as fast as a ListBox and has a slightly simpler API. A few months ago I blogged about the relative performance of the Windows Phone 7 emulator versus the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Apr 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
MIX11 - A Tale of Two Keynotes - As Told By Twitter
The annual MIX conference, where Microsoft showcases the latest and greatest technologies to the development community is now coming to an end. For many, the highpoints of the event are the keynote presentations, where Microsoft unveils their latest tools and technology. The keynotes are broadcast live across the internet and...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Apr 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Gartner Predicts a Promising Future for Windows Phone 7 Developers
Yesterday Gartner released its latest mobile smartphone sales predications, with the figures showing a dramatic turnaround in their predictions for the Microsoft Windows Phone 7 platform. The latest predictions are charted below (I find this much easier to visualise this data in a chart versus the tabular form which Gartner...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Apr 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #3 - Flying Titles!
In this blog post I look at how to implement the fly-out fly-in effect seen in native Windows Phone 7 applications. This effect is seen in the native mail application; when you click on a message, the title flies out of the list then flies back in as the title...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Apr 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #2 - 'Peel' Animations
This blog post is part #2 of my Metro In Motion series. In this post I demonstrate how to implement the animated 'peel' effect seen when native Windows Phone 7 applications exit. In my previous blog post I discussed how the Metro Design Language that heavily influences the Windows Phone...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Mar 2011 · 6 min read
Tech
Metro In Motion Part #1 - Fluid List Animation
This blog post presents an attached behaviour that gracefully slides the contents of a list into view when used in conjunction with a Pivot control, emulating the Windows Phone 7 email application. The Windows Phone 7 user interface is based on the Metro Design Language, which favours clear typography, content...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Mar 2011 · 5 min read
Tech
A Silverlight Resizable TextBlock (and other resizable things)
In this blog post I present a simple attached behaviour that uses a Thumb control within a Popup to adorn any UI element so that the user can re-size it. A simple feature that has become quite popular on the web is to attache a small handle to text areas...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Mar 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
CodeProject Article on WP7 Jump List
I have just published a new CodeProject article on developing a Windows Phone 7 jump list control. Enjoy! Regards, Colin E.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Mar 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
MVVM Charting - Binding Multiple Series to a Visiblox Chart
This post describes a method of using attached properties to bind a ViewModel which contains multiple data series to a Visiblox chart without any code-behind. The Visiblox chart supports databinding in both WPF and Silverlight, where the X and Y values for each datapoint are bound to properties on an...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Mar 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
Google Sky on Windows Phone 7
This blog post shows just how easy it is to use Google Sky as a tile source for Bing Maps, bringing the universe to Windows Phone 7! Personally I think mapping is one of the most exciting forms of application for mobile devices - the fantastic imagery available from Bing...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Feb 2011 · 2 min read
Tech
My DDDHack Entry
At the weekend my wife was having a 'girls night out', which gave me an excellent excuse (and roughly four hours) to spend working on a DDDHack entry. I selected the RSSReader project as a starting point with the aim of turning it into something which resembled a more usable...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Feb 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Windows Phone 7 Performance Measurements - Emulator vs. Hardware
This blog post presents a few performance measurements that detail the relative performance of ItemsControl, ListBox and manual addition of elements to the UI. These performance measurements are also compared when ran on the emulator and the real hardware. My early experiences of moving from the WP7 emulator to the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Feb 2011 · 2 min read
Tech
A Circular ProgressBar Style using an Attached ViewModel
This blog post describes how to re-template the Silverlight ProgressBar control to render a circular progress indicator. This approach uses an attached view model to circumnavigate some of the limitations of the ProgressBar design. This blog post describes the creation of the following funky styles for the ProgressBar (and a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Feb 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight + WPF)
Both WPF and Silverlight have a property TextTrimming="WordEllipsis", which trims the text that a TextBlock displays based on the available width. This blog post describes a simple method for automatically showing the full text as a tooltip whenever the text is trimmed. This is presented as an attached behaviour and...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 31st  Jan 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
Windows Phone 7 DeferredLoadContentControl
This blog post describes a simple content control that can be used to defer the rendering of its contents in order to provide a better user experience on Windows Phone 7. I think anyone who has made the transition from Emulator to Hardware with developing for Windows Phone 7 has...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Jan 2011 · 3 min read
Tech
A Navigator Control For Visiblox Time Series Charts
In this blog post I will describe the creation of a simple range selector UserControl, which can be used alongside a Visiblox chart to create an interactive navigator for time series data. Whether you are studying finance, politics, meteorology or sociology you are sure to encounter time series data. Time...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jan 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
A Windows Phone 7 Jump List Control
This blog post presents a Windows Phone 7 Jump List control that I have developed.This post describes the API in detail and includes full sourcecode. Feel free to use and enjoy! The video below shows the control working on the emulator, the video further down this page shows it working...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Jan 2011 · 8 min read
Tech
#ukfuel - another Twitter / Bing Maps Mashup!
A few weeks ago I blogged about a Twitter / Bing Maps mashup that I had created for tracking snowfall in the UK via the #uksnow twitter hashtag. Last week I spotted a number of people in the uk who were using a new hashtag #ukfuel for tweeting fuel prices...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Jan 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
Automatically Showing ToolTips on a Trimmed TextBlock (Silverlight)
Silverlight 4 added TextTrimming="WordEllipsis", which trims the text that a TextBlock displays based on the available width. This blog post describes a simple method for automatically showing the full text as a tooltip whenever the text is trimmed. This is presented as an attached behaviour. UPDATE: I have updated this...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Jan 2011 · 4 min read
Tech
#ukfuel - a Twitter / Bing Maps Mashup for Tracking Fuel Prices
A few weeks ago I created a Silverlight version of the #uksnow Twitter mashup, which plots twitter users snow reports on a UK map. Yesterday I spotted a new geographically encoded hashtag, #ukfuel. Twitter users are using this hashtag to share local fuel prices across the UK. The format of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Jan 2011 · 1 min read
Tech
#uksnow #silverlight The Movie! - Happy Christmas.
It's Christmas Eve and time for some fun! A few weeks back I published an article on Reactive Extensions where I created a Bing Maps / Twitter mashup that plotted the geolocation of #uksnow twitter tags. This twitter hashtag was popularised by Ben Marsh and is used by us weather...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Dec 2010 · 3 min read
Tech
A Simplified Grid Markup for Silverlight and WPF
The WPF / Silverlight syntax is long and cumbersome. This blog post describe a simple attached property that allows you to specify row and column widths / heights as a simple comma separated list, e.g. RowDefinitions="Auto,,3*,,,,2*" The Grid is probably one of the most useful and versatile layouts that Silverlight...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Dec 2010 · 5 min read
Tech
Visiblox Charts vs. amCharts Quick Charts
Around one week ago I published an article which compared the performance of Visibox charts to a few of its competitors. The results indicated that Visiblox was the fastest chart, with DynamicDataDisplay coming in a very close second. UPDATE: I have published a more up-to-date and extensive test of WPF...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Dec 2010 · 2 min read
Tech
Visiblox, Visifire, DynamicDataDisplay - Charting Performance Comparison
A few weeks ago I published a blog post which compared the performance of the Visiblox charts and the Silverlight Toolkit charts. The results indicated that the Visblox charts are considerably faster than the Toolkit charts, however Microsoft's David Anson did point out that the Toolkit charts were not designed...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Dec 2010 · 10 min read
Tech
Silverlight 5 Adoption Predictions
The announced launch of Silverlight 5 has got the developer community all excited about improved media capabilities, MVVM support, printing and 3D, but how will Silverlight adoption evolve throughout 2011. In this blog post I look at historic data and use this to predict a 76% adoption of Silverlight 5...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 6th  Dec 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups
The following are a couple of examples to accompany my codeproject article on Reactive Extensions. You can read all about them, and download their source from the codeproject page. Twitter Instant A Google Instant style twitter search, type in some text to search Twitter: 'powered' by the following Rx pipeline:...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Dec 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
UKSnow Silverlight Twitter / Bing Maps mashup - Sourcecode available
Just a quick update ... I have published an article on codeproject "Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups" which includes the sourcecode for my uksnow mashup. For the next few days, please let is snow ... Regards, Colin E.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Dec 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
UKSnow Silverlight - An Rx powered Twitter, Bing Maps mashup.
UPDATE: I have published an article on codeproject "Exploring Reactive Extensions (Rx) through Twitter and Bing Maps Mashups", which has the full sourcecode for this mashup. A week ago a colleague of mine posted an interesting article on parallelism in .NET 4.0 which included a few different libraries for asynchronous...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 29th  Nov 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
Adding a Smoothed Line Series (Bézier curve) to a Visiblox Chart
In this blog post I look at how to add a new series type to the Visiblox charts by creating my own series type which renders a smoothed line using a Bézier curve. This blog post describes how to create a new series type for the Visiblox charts, a spline...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Nov 2010 · 7 min read
Tech
Using a Grid as the Panel for an ItemsControl
In this blog post I look at how to use a Grid as the ItemsPanel for an ItemsControl, solving a few of the issues that crop up along the way. The Grid is probably the most useful of Silverlight and WPF's panels (panels are elements which provide a mechanism for...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 15th  Nov 2010 · 9 min read
Tech
Visiblox Charts vs. Silverlight Toolkit Charts - a test of Performance
This blog post compares the performance of the Visiblox and Silverlight Toolkit charts using a simple image processing tool to test and illustrate their differences in performance. The results show that the Visiblox charts are approximately 50 - 100 times faster that the Silverlight Toolkit charts. UPDATE: I have published...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 8th  Nov 2010 · 10 min read
Tech
Does HTML5 mean the end is in sight for Silverlight?
This blog post looks at the fallout after last week's PDC conference where Microsoft were quoted as saying "our strategy on Silverlight has shifted", and the resulting fallout in the developer community. In this post I will describe why I think Silverlight has a future ahead of it and exactly...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Nov 2010 · 6 min read
Tech
Developing a Lookless Silverlight Gauge Control (part 2)
In a previous blog post I described the process of creating a lookless gauge control. I introduced the concept of an attached view model which separates view specific concepts from the control. In this post I demonstrate how this allows for great flexibility when re-templating the control. In my previous...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 20th  Oct 2010 · 9 min read
Tech
Silverlight as an alternative to PowerPoint
Recently I gave a presentation on cross platform application development with Silverlight, WPF and WP7. I wanted to move away from the standard PowerPoint bullet-point driven presentation style, so decided to create a presentation as a Silverlight application running in full-screen mode. This blog post describes the steps I took...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 13th  Oct 2010 · 6 min read
Tech
White Paper: Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 cross platform development
Last week I gave a presentation at a joint Scott Logic / Microsoft event about how WPF and Silverlight are unifying the development platform for desktop, web and mobile. To accompany the talk I wrote a white paper which delves into this subject in a little more detail. You can...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Oct 2010 · 1 min read
Resources
White Paper: Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone 7 cross platform development
Last week I gave a presentation at a joint Scott Logic / Microsoft event about how WPF and Silverlight are unifying the development platform for desktop, web and mobile. To accompany the talk I wrote a white paper, which is free to download, that delves into this subject in a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Oct 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
XAML Finance
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 24th  Sep 2010 · 1 min read
Tech
Templates, or Why I love WPF (and Silverlight Too!)
This post compares the implementation of a simple ListBox layout with Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation. The use of Templates within WPF are a clear winner over the WinForms 'owner draw' route. Application user interfaces are becoming much more graphical, with users expecting a more engaging and 'lively' experience....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Sep 2010 · 6 min read
Tech
Developing a (very) Lookless Silverlight Radial Gauge Control
This blog post describes the development of a lookless radial gauge control. In this post I will explore the use of an attached view model in order to move view specific properties and logic out of the control code in order to give a truly lookless control. Today I had...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Aug 2010 · 10 min read
Tech
Silverlight MultiBinding updated, adding support for ElementName and TwoWay binding
This blog post describes an update to the Silverlight 4 MultiBinding technique I blogged about a couple of months ago to add support for ElementName binding and TwoWay binding. A few months ago I posted an update to my MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4. This technique allows you to perform...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  Aug 2010 · 7 min read
Tech
Exposing and Binding to a Silverlight ScrollViewer's Scrollbars
The Silverlight ScrollViewer exposes readonly properties which indicate the current vertical and horizontal scroll offset, and methods for setting the current offset. In this blog post I demonstrate a simple attached behaviour that exposes these offsets as read / write dependency properties allowing them to be bound to. The Silverlight...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jul 2010 · 5 min read
Tech
A Universal Value Converter for WPF
This post provides a simple IValueConverter implementation that makes use of the framework type converters in order to convert between a large range of source / target types. This converter can be used both within bindings and in code-behind to give more concise property setters. Introduction One of the great...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Jul 2010 · 4 min read
Tech
Modal dialogs in cross-platform WPF/Silverlight applications
This blog post looks at the problem of showing modal dialog windows in applications that target both the Silverlight and WPF platforms. A solution is provided which allows modal dialogs to be written that work well for both technologies. Silverlight is, roughly speaking, a subset of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Jun 2010 · 7 min read
Tech
Throttling Silverlight Mouse Events to Keep the UI Responsive
If your Silverlight application performs intensive updates to the UI during mouse events, the UI can freeze because it is invalidated before it has a chance to render. This post describes a technique for 'throttling' mouse events to ensure that each time an event occurs, the UI has the opportunity...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Jun 2010 · 7 min read
Tech
Silverlight MultiBinding solution for Silverlight 4
In this post I describe an update to the Silverlight MultiBinding solution I presented last year. This update includes support for Silverlight 4, attached properties and multiple bindings on a single object. UPDATE: I have updated this code to include ElementName and TwoWay binding. Grab the latest copy here. MultiBinding...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  May 2010 · 1 min read
UX Design
Ineffective Data Visualisation ... and how to fix it
This blog post looks at a recently published set of charts in a UK newspaper and how they fail to help in the comprehension of the data which they visualise. I will also look at much more effective ways of displaying this same data. At Scott Logic we tend to...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 30th  Apr 2010 · 4 min read
Tech
Binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data via IDictionary (Updated)
In this post I demonstrate a method for binding a Silverlight 3 DataGrid to dynamic data, i.e. data which does not have properties that are known at design time. This technique results in a bound grid which is sortable and editable. This blog post is a bug fix (due to...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Mar 2010 · 5 min read
Tech
Linq to Visual Tree
This blog post demonstrates a Linq API which can be used to query the WPF / Silverlight Visual Tree. You can find a few other Linq to Visual Tree techniques on other blogs, but what makes this one unique is that it retains, and allows queries that make use of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Mar 2010 · 9 min read
Tech
Forcing Event Consumer Cleanup without Weak Events
This blog post describes a simple technique for ensuring that consumers of events unsubscribe their event handlers without the need for weak events. I think the concept of managed memory, where the cleanup of unused objects from the heap is performed by a garbage collector, is a fantastic idea. It...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Feb 2010 · 4 min read
Delivery
Presentation on Agile Development
Last week I gave a presentation on Agile Development for an event hosted by Codeworks and Sunderland Software City. This blog post is a brief review of my presentation and the event itself. The event was titled, "An Introduction to Agile Methodology - Get a Head Start in 2010", which...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Jan 2010 · 4 min read
Tech
My Mix10k entry - Old Skool demo - plus a few tips
This blog post is about my entry to the Mix10k code competition, and old-skool demo, plus a few tips about how to keep you code size to below 10k. The mix10k challenge, where you are given 10k to create a Silverlight / HTML5 application, has been on my mind for...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Jan 2010 · 5 min read
Tech
Rippling Reflection Effect with Silverlight 3's WriteableBitmap
This blog post demonstrates how Silvelight 3's WriteableBitmap can be used to create a UserControl that renders the content of any other Framework Element as a reflection with an animated ripple effect.
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 16th  Dec 2009 · 4 min read
Tech
Simple Logging Facade released on codeplex today
Today, Philipp Sumi and I and are proud to announce the release of SLF - the Simple Logging Facade: SLF is a framework with a simple but ambitious mission: To provide every developer with the means to easily plug in logging functionality into her application.As such, it aims at two...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Dec 2009 · 1 min read
Tech
Silverlight 4 beta released leaving Flex behind
This post looks at the speed of development of the two leading RIA frameworks, Silverlight and Flex, giving unequivocal proof that Silverlight is better than Flex ... ! This week at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC), there have been two big news stories. The first is the give-away of a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Nov 2009 · 1 min read
Tech
Helpful extension methods for Show / Hide animations in Silverlight
Today's blog post is a couple of very simple utility methods that I have found myself using again and again ... The animations that Silverlight developers have at their disposal are both varied and powerful. It is easy to get carried away and cover your application with gratuitous animations, which...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Sep 2009 · 3 min read
Tech
Declarative Dependency Property Definition with T4 + DTE
UPDATE I have published a more up-to-date version of this code on codeproject, which allows you to automate the generation of much more than just dependency properties. This blog post describes a technique for specifying WPF / Silverlight Dependency Properties declaritively via attributes as illustrated by the following example: [DependencyPropertyDecl("Maximum",...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 18th  Aug 2009 · 7 min read
Tech
The mini-ViewModel pattern
The construction of a ViewModel is often seen as the standard technique for solving binding problems within WPF and Silverlight. However, the addition of a ViewModel adds complexity to your code. This post describes an alternative method where a mini-ViewModel is applied directly to the problem areas in the view,...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 7th  Aug 2009 · 7 min read
Tech
News on Silverlight adoption from the Silverlight 3 UK Launch
Yesterday myself and Gary Scott (our MD) went down to London for the Silverlight 3 UK launch event. This is the first time I have been to Microsoft's London office so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. The glass-clad arched office exterior, and shiny minimalist interior were certainly stylish,...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Jul 2009 · 2 min read
Tech
Silverlight v3 ClearType Font Rendering - A comparison
Text rendering has been a problem for both Silverlight and WPF for a while. This blog post looks at ClearType in Silverlight v3 and compares it to WPF and WinForms text rendering. Text clarity is something that concerns me quite a bit. In financial applications, often large quantities of both...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 14th  Jul 2009 · 1 min read
Tech
Silverlight 3 UK launch ... and the future of WPF?
A brief article on the launch of Silverlight 3 and why the interest in Silverlight is eclipsing that of WPF. The excitement behind Silverlight has been gaining in momentum throughout this year, with one of the highpoints being the MIX09 conference in March this year where the announcement of Silverlight...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 9th  Jul 2009 · 3 min read
Tech
Silverlight MultiBindings, How to attached multiple bindings to a single property.
This blog posts describes a technique for associating multiple bindings with a single dependency property within Silverlight applications. WPF already has this functionality in the form of MultiBindings, the code in this post emulates this function. UPDATE: Silverlight 4, attached properties and multiple property bindings are all supported in my...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 25th  Jun 2009 · 6 min read
Tech
Exposing Bindings as Properties of a Control
I must admit that the title of this post is not entirely clear, however I couldn't find a way to sum up the content in one short sentence, so we'll dive straight into an example. Let's say for example you have developed a funky little business-card as illustrated above, using...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Jun 2009 · 5 min read
Tech
Dependency Property Performance and Lissajous Figures
A few night ago I was working on a Siverlight control which renders some quite complex Paths, the geometry of which is determined from a number of dependency properties. In order to gain UI coolness points I wanted to animate the dependency properties in order to see a smooth transition...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Jun 2009 · 4 min read
Tech
Silverlight ClipToBounds - Can I Clip It?, Yes You Can!
With Silverlight, Panels do not clip their contents by default. See the following example: Where we have a Grid containing another Grid which itself contains an ellipse, and a Canvas which contains an ellipse: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Grid Grid.Column="0" Background="Blue" Margin="20"> <Grid Background="Yellow" Margin="20,40,-20,20">...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 12th  May 2009 · 3 min read
Tech
Community Credit Prize Winner
Last month was a busy one for me - I wrote quite a few blog posts, with the Silverlight ones proving very popular, and added new article posted to codeproject. I just received an email today notifying me that I was a prize winner in the Community Credit April 2009...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  May 2009 · 1 min read
Tech
New codeproject article on WPF, Silverlight + T4 Templates
I have just finished a new article on CodeProject - Generate WPF and Silverlight Dependency Properties using T4 Templates
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Apr 2009 · 1 min read
Tech
Binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data Part 2 - editable data and INotifyPropertyChanged
UPDATE: This blog post was written with a SL2 DataGrid, for SL3, please see my updated blog post. In my previous blog post I described a method for solving the commonly faced problem of binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data, the form of which is not know at compile...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Apr 2009 · 5 min read
Tech
Binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data via IDictionary
This post demonstrates a technique for binding a Silverlight DataGrid to dynamic data, the structure of which is not know at compile-time ... UPDATE #1: I have extended this technique to add include change notification so that the DataGrid can be made editable. Read all about it in part two....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 17th  Apr 2009 · 7 min read
Tech
Silverlight Dependency Property Code Generation
This blog details a technique for generating Silverlight dependency properties from an XML file via a T4 template. If you just want to grab the code, scroll to the bottom of this article and download the sourcecode or cut and paste the templates. If you want to find out how...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 1st  Apr 2009 · 8 min read
Tech
Adding a Location Crosshair to Silverlight charts (again!)
Silverlight is moving fast. Really fast. The recent MIX09 conference saw the release of Silverlight 3 (Beta) and also a new release of the Silverlight Toolkit. All this change is making it hard for us bloggers to keep up! Just over a month ago I posted an article on this...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 23rd  Mar 2009 · 4 min read
Tech
Silverlight 3 is here! (but is it a flash killer yet?)
Less than 24 hours ago Microsoft's MIX09 conference kicked of in Las Vegas with Silverlight 3 taking centre stage. For those of you who have followed the conference build-up, this comes as no surprise, with twice as many Silverlight sessions (31) advertised than any other technology (WPF has a measly...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Mar 2009 · 2 min read
Tech
Using CSS Selectors for Styling in WPF
When I first encountered WPF I was really impressed by its styling and templating features which are more powerful than anything else I had previously seen for desktop software development. The property-value pairing within styles instantly reminded me of CSS, however the WPF styles lack the most powerful feature of...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 11th  Mar 2009 · 6 min read
Tech
Implementing RelativeSource binding in Silverlight
In my previous post I demonstrated how an the WPF ElementName style binding can be emulated with Silverlight via an attached behaviour. As a brief recap, the technique involved creating an attached property, which when bound, adds a handler for the elements Loaded event. When the element is loaded, the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Feb 2009 · 6 min read
Tech
ElementName binding in Silverlight via Attached Behaviours
As a relative newcomer to Silverlight I was happily greeted by the warm feeling of familiarity when I started developing. It is surprisingly easy to make the transition from WPF to Silverlight developer, with most of the core concepts being just the same. However, there are some parts of the...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 22nd  Feb 2009 · 7 min read
Tech
Styling hard-to-reach elements in control templates with attached behaviours
OK, the title of this blog post is not very snappy, but it is not an easy problem to describe in a few short words. Here's the rub, the WPF DataGrid has a select-all button located in the top-left corner, just like Excel and many other grid controls / applications....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 10th  Feb 2009 · 4 min read
Tech
Adding a Location Crosshair to Silverlight Charts
UPDATE - The March09 update of the Silverlight toolkit is incompatible with the code detailed below. For an up-to-date version see the following blog post. This blog post describes how to add a location crosshair to your Silverlight charts as shown below: The chart itself is rendered using the charting...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 4th  Feb 2009 · 5 min read
Tech
BindingGroups for Total View Validation
Over the weekend Sacha published a new article on codeproject, Total View Validation (does Sacha ever sleep?). This article addresses some of the perceived problems with the WPF binding framework, firstly, that the standard solution of using the ValidatesOnDataErrors property forces you to place validation logic into your bound business...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Jan 2009 · 4 min read
Tech
WPF DataGrid - Committing changes cell-by-cell
In my recent codeproject article on the DataGrid I described a number of techniques for handling the updates to DataTables which are bound to the grid. These examples all worked on the assumption that you want to keep your database synchronised with the DataGrid, with changes being committed on a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 21st  Jan 2009 · 2 min read
Tech
LayoutTransform vs. RenderTransform - What's the Difference?
I have answered a few forum posts about the WPF transforms recently, mostly regarding confusion between RenderTransform and LayoutTransform. This brief blog post illustrates the difference between the two. The WPF layout system comprises, of two steps, followed by the rendering of the user interface (UI): Measure Arrange Render In...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 19th  Dec 2008 · 1 min read
Tech
WPF DataGrid - detecting the column, cell and row that has been clicked
The WPF DataGrid is a very flexible tool, however in its current state certain simple tasks can prove to be rather tricky. A fairly common task when working with DataGrid is detecting which row, or cell a user has clicked on, or whether they clicked a column header. You might...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 2nd  Dec 2008 · 4 min read
Tech
Using BindingGroups for greater control over input validation
In a recent post on his blog Josh Smith described a technique for providing more meaningful error messages when the type conversion process fails within the binding framework. Consider the following problem; you bind an integer property of your object (Age for example) to a TextBox within your user interface....
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 28th  Nov 2008 · 5 min read
Tech
Design time drag-and-drop binding is on its way
In my opinion the lack of decent design-time tool support is currently hampering the adoption of WPF, that and the relatively small number of controls available to the developer out-of-the-box. The later is being addressed to a certain extent by the developer community, notably by Marlon Grech's Avalon Controls Library...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 27th  Nov 2008 · 1 min read
Tech
About
Welcome to my blog, Colin Eberhardt's Adventures in WPF. This page gives a little background on myself and the blog. My name is Colin Eberhardt and I have been involved in software, in a number of shapes and forms, for more than a decade now. I have dabbled in a...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Nov 2008 · 1 min read
Tech
Multiselect DataGrid with CheckBoxes
I am currently very interested in the new WPF DataGrid which was released on codeplex recently. Someone posted an interesting question in the codeplex forums asking about whether it would be possible to configure the DataGrid so that a user can make multiple row selections via checkboxes which are associated...
Colin Eberhardt
Colin Eberhardt · 26th  Nov 2008 · 2 min read