I’ve moved!

I’ve moved my blog over to GitHub pages: rafvb.github.io

You can read up on the hows and whys of my move in my post Moved.

Hope to see you on my new blog!

Guitar Fretboard Teacher: Release 2 in the store now!

Great news: release 2 of my app Guitar Fretboard Teacher is now up in the Windows 8 store!

It’s a big update, that adds a main menu where you can now choose between theory or practice.

 

The theory contains a lesson on the musical alphabet.

You can practice this theory in the musical alphabet quiz or test your knowledge of the notes on the fretboard.

More theory and exercises will be added in the future!

Guitar Fretboard Teacher is a free download, so why not give it a try…

Enjoy, and if you have any problems, questions or requests, let me know!

Guitar Fretboard Teacher

My second Windows 8 app is now available in the store!

Guitar Fretboard Teacher helps guitar students by testing their knowledge of the notes on the guitar neck. The first release is pretty simple and contains only the fretboard quiz.

For now, it only supports standard tuning and notes up to the 12th fret. I’ll make this configurable in one of the next releases.

Theory on the notes of the fretboard is something I’m also planning on adding pretty soon, so stay tuned for that.

Hope you enjoy the app! If you do, let me know 🙂 If you find any problems or have a feature request, you can also contact me.

You can still download my first app, ClearWriter, and I’ll continue to develop that one too.

ClearWriter version 3 in the Windows Store

Version 3 of my Windows 8 app ClearWriter is up in the Store now!

It’s a minor update with some bug fixes, but most importantly you can now print from the app.

I expected printing to be something pretty simple to code. Boy was I wrong 🙂
The existing SDK sample isn’t that clear and a bit too complicated.
I tried to strip it and keep it as simple as possible, but there’s still a lot more work to do to get it as clean as I want.

If I find the time, I’ll write a blog post about the implementation!

MakePri errors in Windows 8 project

While working on my Windows 8 app project called ClearWriter I got the following error:

“MakePri.exe” exited with code -1073740940.

I was working with the resw files, localizing my app, so I expected MakePri to be involved with the resource creation.

After excluding my resw files and including them one by one, I found the incorrect resw file. Apparently I had a Resource name that ended with a dot. Removing this solved the error.

I tried to reproduce the error for this blog post, but now I got the following error when I inserted the dot:

Error 1 Processing Resources with error: The parameter is incorrect. MakePri
Error 2 Unspecified error occurred. MakePRI

Showing all Windows 8 apps in the store

I was a little surprised when I opened up the Windows 8 Store for the first time. I had a specific app I was looking for, but could not find it by just browsing.

The amazing search charm to the rescue I thought, but still no results…

Hmm, something strange was going on. The number of apps in each category was surprisingly low.

After some digging I found the following setting under Settings > Preferences: Make it easier to find apps in my preferred languages. Flicking it to No solved the problem!

 

The store has this setting turned on by default, which means it only displays apps for your country-specific and/or language-specific locale (which you can define in your control panel).

For those of you looking for my ClearWriter app in the store, but not being able to find it, check this switch…

My first Windows 8 App: ClearWriter

I am experimenting with the development of Windows 8 Apps. So far it has been an interesting journey and the result is a (for now) very simple app called ClearWriter.

I wanted to create something that doesn’t need a lot of business logic, but allows me to experiment with the different contracts and the global design of a Windows 8 app.

That’s why I created a full screen writing app.

The “content over chrome” logic behind the Windows 8 Apps fits perfectly for ClearWriter. You just focus on your writing, nothing else.

I wanted to push the app to the store as quickly as possible, to get feedback from users, so for now functionalities are limited, but I’m working on that.

Here is a list of the current functionalities:

• Distraction free writing
• White or black color scheme
• Associates with .txt files
• Sharing from the app

Some functionalities that are on the backlog:

• Printing
• Searching
• Word count
• Support for Markdown
• Focus on the current sentence

ClearWriter is translated in English, Dutch, French and German and is free to try for 7 days. It can be downloaded from the store. If you like the app, and want to support its further development, you can buy it for only € 1,19.

If you have any questions concerning the app (feature requests, improvements, bugs, questions about the development) feel free to ask them here, or mail them to clearwriterapp@gmail.com.

In future posts i’ll document some interesting parts of the development process of ClearWriter.

Disable single-click file open in Visual Studio 2012 Solution Explorer

One of the first things I do when I install a Visual Studio 2012 is disable the preview tab. This is the single-click file open in the solution explorer.

Each time I have a hard time remembering where the setting is, so this is a reminder for myself:

TOOLS > Options > Environment > Tabs and Windows > Preview Tab > Single-click opens files in the preview tab in: Solution Explorer

Uncheck…

More Agile Manifesto Wallpapers

The wallpapers I made for the Agile Manifesto got a few views, so I made some new ones for the 12 principles. Only one size again, if you want a different size, that would be easy to make, but just let me know in the comments!

 

If you have dual monitors, why not stick the manifesto on your left monitor and the 12 principles on the right? 🙂

 

Enjoy!

Agile Manifesto Wallpapers

As an agile developer the Manifesto for Agile Software Development is used to guide you in your agile workflow. Since it holds such a big importance for us, I thought I’d make some wallpapers so we can stick them on our desktop and get a constant reminder of these core values.

I’ve made two of the manifesto (a clean one and an outer space one). The size is 1024 x 768. Let me know if you like them!

If there’s interest I can make them on different sizes too. I can also make them for the twelve principles, again if you would like to see that.