Marcel Meijer Blog – Knowledge is power, sharing knowledge is strength

Xbox One Development (2)

With the new Windows 10 Update the DEV mode on the Xbox One has also been changed. You now are just like with Windows IoT Core able to look at the device via a webapplication. This application gives you the abilities to uploaden, stopp, start etc apps. It look rather complete.

Besides this there is also a new Dev Companion app for Windows 10. This app is more focused on the developer compared to the ‘normal’ Xbox app. In fact it does not more than a Remote Desktop connection to your Dev Xbox One.

Together it looks like this.

Pretty nice! When developing for the Xbox One. You need a big monitor to handle all the screens Winking smile

Xbox One Development

By Marcel Meijer

You now can develop, build and deploy apps to your own Xbox One. In the Xbox One app store you need to search for Developer Activation and you get an app. After the install, you get an activation code. This one needs to bee entered on the URL; https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/XboxDevices. Your Xbox is now a developer Xbox(see NB).

More information can be found here. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-apps/uwp-on-xbox

Just like developing for Windows Core IoT it is very easy. In Visual Studio select File –> New –> Project and then Windows –> Universal. With Run choose for Remote Machine and find your Xbox One on your network. The Xbox and your development PC have to be on the same network.

Then you can run your app! It will take a little while before it really opens on the Xbox. The cursor can be moved with the Xbox controller.

I like it a lot!

Pushing a button just happens with the X button on your controller.

The code is normal .NET Universal App code.

Notabene: After installing the Developer activation app, your Xbox is not able to run the installed games. You need to disable the Developer mode to make it a normal Xbox again. You can switch back and forth at your will.

Happy programming!

OneNote Tip: Copy Text from Picture

By Marcel Meijer

You probably know it, via Bing/Google or other search engine you find a nice pciture with a very strong text. You don’t want to use the picture just the text. Ofcourse you can type it over, but if you are not like me very handy with typing, it takes a while.

OneNote has THE solution for it.

In a OneNote page you paste the picture.
Then a right click on your mouse on the picture.
Choose for the menuitem “Copy Text from Picture”
And choose paste some where else.

Top Feature! Very handy!

Windows 10 on Raspberry PI 2

By Marcel Meijer

The beauty of Windows 10 it runs on your Raspberry PI 2 as well as on your computer/laptop. An Universal Windows App for your laptop with Windows will run without many changes on a Raspberry PI 2.

It is fairly easy. In Visual Studio make an Universal Windows App. Press F5 to run the app locally and test it. That takes a while, but it will run as expected.

To run the same app on the Raspberry PI you need to follow some steps. Your computer is a x86/x64 solution Platform device. A Raspberry PI is based on ARM technology just like many mobile devices.

After choosing the solution Platform ARM Visual Studio will select Device. That is correct for a Mobile phone or tablet, but for a Raspberry PI you need to choose for Remote Machine.

After that you need to add some connection data of the Raspberry PI. Most of the time the Raspberry PI is also detected automatically.

Press F5 again. Visual Studio will build, package and Deploy.

Without any changes tot the code the same app runs on a Raspberry PI 2. Fun! One OS for all devices.

In the movie below I show it live.

Windows10: XBox ONE streaming

By Marcel Meijer

If you are the proud owner of a Xbox One and your PC is updated to Windows 10, than this is one of the new possibilities.

In the start menu there is a new tile called Xbox. If you click on this, you log in with your Xbox account (which is your Microsoft Account). In the app you see your status, your friends, your achievements etc, just as you would on your Xbox One.

But if you click here, you will see all Xbox One’s in your network. You can even turn on your Xbox One remotely.

After selecting the correct Xbox and clicking on Stream, you make a kind of RDP connection to your Xbox. Your PC needs a Xbox controller. If you are close enough to your Xbox, you can still use the Xbox controller on the Xbox while streaming.

Not everything is possible, for example Netflix cannot, but playing a game will.

Back to your PC, press ESC.

Cool he.

Windows 10: Hello Windows

By Marcel Meijer

With Windows 10 a new way of logging in is added. With Windows 8 you could login with your Microsoft Account, a PIN code or(especially handy for Tablets) a Picture password. With a fingerprint reader you also could login with your fingerprint.

Now there is also logging in with you face added. You need a Real Sense camera for this. There are already some laptops available with this camera build in. It should be possible later to login with a Kinect Sensor v2.

In this small (Dutch) movie a small impression.

Cool he!

.NET on Raspberry PI 2

By Marcel Meijer

In a previous blogpost I told about Windows 10 IoT Core. This is great, because you can program in C# and you can add a Graphical user interface to it. But most of the IoT devices will not need user interaction or attached to a Monitor. The most IoT devices collect data and give that to others or keep track of an environment and are only expecting control information.

There may be enough reasons to use Windows 10 IoT Core, but it is not necessary for a Microsoft environment. Also on NOOBS (New Out of the Box Software) OS you definitely can use .NET.

For a couple of years the Mono project is going on and there lies the key of multi platform.

On your Raspberry PI 2 you can do: sudo apt-get install Mono-complete. With that you get Mono installed on your Raspberry.

The powerful Owin makes it possible to host a ASP.NET website on it.

The result:

Besides a website you can also host WebApi.

The result:

Pretty handy. I also have an example where a Raspberry PI 2 puts data on an Azure Storage queue. Because there is more on this, I will get back to that at a later moment.

Project Oxford

By Marcel Meijer

During the //Build/ Conference they showed a very nice demo; the Photo site (http://how-old.net/).

Project Oxford (http://www.projectoxford.ai/) is the base of this app. This API offers a lot of possibilities. The best part, you can use it yourself.

There is a fully documented API available. These API’s are for free for now, but it is a lot of fun to play with it.

Azure Machine Learning is used for the learning of the API. There is a nice free e-book about Machine Learning. Very readable and gives you some basis knowledge of Machine learning.

During the last Ignite Conference there was a second keynote. Done by the Technology and Research department of Microsoft. They showed what they did the past years. Like PowerBI and the translation machine of Skype etc. There was a funny demo about Data analyze and historical data.

When you are in Big Data or likes it, then I suggest you watch the second keynote (Ignite KEY02 The Next Era of Computing: Seeing the Future Before It Happens).

During a IoT Hackaton we connected a Raspberry PI 2 to a camera the photo’s were passed through this API. It worked. Unfortunately we could not use Windows 10 IoT Core yet.

Windows 10 Development: Small and Big Screens

By Marcel Meijer

With Windows 10 and the fact that it runs on every device, the Universal app as we know in Windows 8.1 is gone. That makes it easier, but also more complex in another way.

Previous you had a project for Windows Phone and the windows in this project are for small screens. Now every size of window is in one project even in one XAML file, you have to deal with that in one way.

Lucky the Windows 10 development SDK has some useful resources. Like a RelativePanel. On a RelativePanel the controls have a relative position to other controls. Way better than before, where you had to play with margins and absolute positions. Which let to strange behavior on different screen sizes etc.

Another powerful one is SplitView, then you have a Content and a Pane part. Most of the time we have a master detail on a window.

But this is not helpful if manipulation is done by coding stuff in events in the Code behind. Because that is not the way to do it anymore in a XAML / MVVM world. There is a nice solution for.

The VisualStateManager, which contains VisualStates with StateTrigger and StateSetters.

From a VisualState you set what the MinimalWidth or Height should be and with the Setters you specify what will happen.

In my SDN evaluation app example it looks like this. With the first the minimal width is 720 and from the second the alternative. This will also work on a Windows Phone with Windows 10, where you hold the phone in landscape or portrait.

As you noticed I have added a hamburger menu, I think a control would be better. It is a toggle button with the Font (Segoe MDL2 Assets) and a Glyph.

It works nice, but I hope they make it a bit better.

Nice session on Ignite: BRK2310 From the Small Screen to the Big Screen: Building Universal App Experiences with XAML

(disclaimer I am no XAML expert, I know a little)

Windows 10 IoT Core

By Marcel Meijer

Since the //Build/ conference is a technical preview of Windows 10 for Raspberry PI 2 is available. With that the promise of Microsoft (Windows on all devices) becomes reality.

There will be 3 versions of Windows 10 IoT available: For Industry Devices, Mobile Devices and Core. Installing Windows 10 IoT Core on a Raspberry PI 2 very easy.

More information on http://windowsondevices.com and demos http://ms-iot.github.io/content/win10/StartCoding.htm.

While installing you will see these screens pass by. The first startup of Windows 10 IoT Core takes a bit longer, some additional setups are being done. No worries next time the startup is fairly fast.

When finished you see this.

In this early version some functions are not ready yet, but that will change soon.

On a Windows 10 machine with Visual Studio 2015 you can make a ‘normal’ Windows Universal App. This app can be deployed to your Raspberry PI 2 and the standard debug/F5 experience will just work.

In the IoT makers world a lot of components are available and most will work on the Raspberry PI 2 with Windows 10 IoT Core too. Have a look at the examples on http://windowsondevices.com.

I have ordered some components and soon I will post more on these experiments. This is fun Knipogende emoticon !