Written by Let me introduce you a new feature of Internet Explorer 11 which is available in your Windows 8.1 apps too : the MutationObserver. This object lets you observe the changes on any HTML element of your DOM.
#WinRT : how to easily get the dominant color of a picture
“Content before Chrome” is the Leitmotif of Windows Store Apps. You’ll usually end up using a lot of images in your app and getting the dominant color of a picture may actually be useful. My first attempt to achieve this was to get the bytes of the picture and calculate the average value. There is actually an easier and faster solution using the Windows Rutime API.
Windows 8.1 : let’s discover the Scheduler of #WinJS
Windows 8.1 comes with a new feature in the WinJS SDK : a scheduler. Let’s see what it is and how to use it!
In Windows 8, every job is nearly done as soon as you execute it. You could play with the msSetImmediate function but it was still a little mode “hack” than “code”.
With Windows 8.1, the SDK introduce a scheduler used by the whole WinJS framework. This scheduler helps you to define what is important (animations, visual feedback, manage user input) from what can be delayed (background work, data processing not used immediatly).
The goal is to let you build application which reacts immedialty to the user will.
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Windows 8.1 #XAML new theme management in your Windows Store Apps
Did you remember Windows 8 ? The theme of your app was set once at the launch and you could’nt change it dyamically or set once by control. This was really annoying in some case like Settings Flyout where you often wanted to set the opposite one of your app.
This was good old times and these issues are gone in Windows 8.1 : youpi !
Let’s digg a little more 
[WinRT] How to get the language code actually used to resolve a resource
I am working on an app with a lot of different languages. This is really great because there is a lot more chances that the user get the app in its spoken tongue. You can read more on this topic on MSDN.
Then I wanted to get a basic information : the language used by the app. Let’s say that the user is spanish and that I didn’t translate my app for this tongue then the app could be in english because it’s the one tongue matching the best its preference. The “english” won’t necessary be the first language declared in my manifest but the best one for the user.
By using a ResourceLoader object, you can get any string in the right language but I didn’t find an easy way to get the actually used language.
By digging into the WinRT APIs, I found a way to get this information and it could help you.
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Win8/XAML : how to create a TextBlock with clickables hyperlinks in it
Xaml is really powerful and you can build nearly any user interface you want with it.
However it can be hard sometimes and in this post I will describe how you can create something I first thought it will be easy : a wrapping text with hyperlinks in it.
Something like this :
As you will read, this is not as straightforward as I thought.
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Miscellaneous : how to receive readable .wav voicemail messages on you Windows Phone
I am a great fan of my Windows Phone and yesterday I found one missing feature. Since I do not have visual voice-mail (because I am using the french operator “Free Mobile“), I wanted to try one of Free great service: send me each voicemail message by mail.
Each time I have a new message, I receive an email with the wav audio file linked: fantastic ! Well in fact, it’s not because my Windows Phone 8 seems not to be able to read this file. Yes… no need to tell me this format created by Microsoft and IBM exists since 1991.
What I wanted to share with you is a free solution, while Microsoft is fixing the issue.
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WinJS : use the same data in the zoomed out and zoomed in view.
The Semantic zoom let you display your data in a zoomed out and zoomed in way. It’s really fine when your data is grouped but sometimes you need to display a non-grouped data just in a different way with a different template.
For example, we did it in the Larousse Illustré Windows 8 app to display media in a different way when zoomed in than zoomed out :
This is exactly the same data but shown in a different fashion. The user choose the one it prefers.
But, if you try to set the same data source to the both listview in your semantic zoom, your app will crash.
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WP Toolkit : Adding a item in the SelectedItems collection of a LongListMultiSelector actually adds 2…
A quick blog post about a bug I encountered today with the LongListMultiSelector : adding 2 items in its SelectedItem property actually adds 2 items (twice the same) in the SelectedItem collection.
This is quite boring because it also raises the SelectionChanged event twice and can mess up your business logic.
Let’s see how to fix this temporary (I hope!) issue :
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[WPDev] CustomMessageBox + OnNavigatedTo + Navigate = Exception !
The Windows Phone Toolkit is really useful.
Yesterday, while I was updating my ConsoTracker app, I met a strange bug using the CustomMessageBox : it was raising a nullReference exception.
Let’s see what was the issue and how to “fix” it.
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