In a previous post I mentioned I’m working on an app that plays videos. The app is pretty simple and fits a specific need I have. Once it’s in the Windows Store I’ll give the full details on it. In the meantime I want to share some tips and tricks I learn along the way that might help you with your app.

In the aforementioned previous post I showed you how I customized the appearance and behavior of the FileOpenPicker for picking only videos. Today’s tip has to do with how to get a bitmap image I can use in the UI of my Windows Store app from a file’s thumbnail. Essentially what I need to do in my app is have a small image of the video being played that I can display in an AppBar. Fortunately it’s pretty easy to do in a three step process:

1. Get the thumbnail from a StorageFile
2. Clone the stream of the thumbnail
3. Create a new BitmapImage and set its source to the thumbnail’s cloned stream

Here’s the code:

Like I said, pretty easy! Hope it helps.

I’m currently working on a Windows Store app that plays videos. I know you’re probably thinking, “Um, dude, there’s already an app for that called Video.” Yes, I know there is, but my app is for a very specific use case. I don’t want to share what that is until it’s in the store, so please be patient. However, I do want to share little tips and tricks I learn along the way that might help you in developing your Windows Store apps.

Similar to the Video app, I want users to be able to select which video they want to play within the app. Obviously this means I need to use the FileOpenPicker, but I want to do three things as part of the user experience with the FileOpenPicker:

1. I want the FileOpenPicker to display thumbnails of files
2. I want the FileOpenPicker to start in the user’s video library
3. I want the FileOpenPicker to allow users to select only .mp4 and .wmv files.

A little trial and error along with some Bing-Fu led me to implementing this simple solution:

It works like a champ and meets my requirements. I hope it helps you.

One of the luxuries we as developers now have is the ability to pretty much assume that our users (and apps) will be connected to the Internet. Of course we need to plan for some offline scenarios, but for the most part we know a connection will be present. With that said, I believe we have a responsibility to our users to respect the type of connection they’re on. What do I mean by “type of connection”? I’m talking about the ability for a user to flag a connection as “Metered”. This allows the user to let apps know that “Hey, this connection is costing me money, please be careful if you happen to be using it.” For example, in my Radio Soma app I let the users select how they want the app to behave when a metered connection is in use via the following page:

In this case, when the user wants to stream music over a metered connection the app will prompt them first to confirm they want to continue streaming music. Users appreciate having this kind of control and it shows you’ve put some thought into your app and that you care about your user base.

Setting this type of functionality up is easy to do, so I thought I’d spend the remainder of this post showing you how I did it for Radio Soma.

The first thing I did was to create the following enumeration for potential connection state values:

Next I created a new class and added three events to it that can be fired when various connection changes occur:

I then added two fields to the class to keep track of the last know connection state and to provide access to roaming settings.

Following the fields I added three properties to the class. The first just me to use the class as a singleton; which is all that I need as I don’t require multiple instances of this class floating around in my application and causing chaos. The MeteredConnectionPrompt property is used to keep track of whether or not the user wants to be prompted when streaming music over a metered connection. Lastly, the IsConnected property lets the app know whether or not an internet connection is present. You’ll undoubtedly notice the empty catch{} block. I found that every now and then an exception would be thrown if a connection wasn’t present. I simply chose to bury the exception and return a value of false in this case. Not my proudest moment, but it works.

I needed a couple of methods for quickly accessing data stored in roaming settings. While I could have just used these inline in my Load() and Save() methods coming a little later, I prefer separate methods as it allows me to easily add and remove roaming settings within the class.

Next are the Load() and Save() methods which interact with roaming settings to retrieve and persist the value of the MeteredConnectionPrompt property.

Now comes the most important method, GetNetworkInformation(). In this method I determine if a connection is present, and, if so, what type of connection it is, raising the appropriate events along the way.

Finally, I add the constructor for the class. In this case it’s marked as private because I’m using the class as a singleton. I also have an event handler for the NetworkStatusChanged event from the NetworkInformation class.

You can view the full source here:

I’m currently working on a Windows Store App that plays videos. One of the features I want in the app is the ability to right-click a video file in File Explorer and open it with my app. Similar to what you can do with the Video app today:

Doing so with a Windows Store app is very straightforward. Once you’ve create the app in Visual Studio, double click the Package.appxmanifest file in Solution Explorer.

Click the Declarations tab in the manifest and select File Type Associations from the Available Declarations drop down and click the Add button.

Now you’ll just need to set a few options and you’re good to go. In my case I added a logo that will display when the user right clicks a file and added wmv and mp4 as supported file types.

Once I deploy the application to my machine, I can right click on a wmv or mp4 file and see my app as an option for opening the file.

However, I’m not quite done. I need to give my app the ability to do something with the specific file when it’s opened in this manner. To do so, I start by opening the App.xaml.cs file from Solution Explorer.

I then override the OnFileActivated method and add my app specific code. In my case I just want to ensure a file has been selected, set an application level variable and navigate to the page for playing videos.

That’s all there is to it!