Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

Windows Application Development Cookbook

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Need to ensure you can always create the best Windows apps regardless of platform? What you need are solutions to the biggest issues you can face, so you can always ensure you’re making the right choices and creating the best apps you can. The book starts with recipes that will help you set up the integrated development environment before you go ahead and design the user interface. You will learn how to use the MVVM design pattern together with data binding, as well as how to work with data in different file formats. Moving on, you will explore techniques to add animations and graphics to your application, and enable your solution to work with multimedia content. You will also see how to use sensors, such as an accelerometer and a compass, as well as obtain the current GPS location. You will make your application ready to work with Internet-based scenarios, such as composing e-mails or downloading files, before finally testing the project and submitting it to the Windows Store. By the end of the book, you will have a market-ready application compatible across different Windows devices, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Reading data from a light sensor

Does your smartphone have a lighter screen if you are outdoors in a sunny place and a darker one in case you are using it at night? It is a really nice feature that makes its usage significantly more comfortable for your eyes. Can you apply the same mechanism to your application and adjust the design depending on lighting conditions? Of course! You will learn how to do it in the current recipe.

As an example, you will prepare a simple page with the Audio icon as the logo and the Let's play music! title. Its design will be adjusted depending on the current lighting condition, as shown in the following rules:

  • If the light value is high:
    • Background color will be set to white
    • Foreground color will be set to black

  • If the light value is medium:
    • Background color will be set to gray
    • Foreground color will be set to black

  • If the light value is low:
    • Background color will be set to black
    • Foreground color will be set to light gray

Getting ready

To step through this recipe...