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Despite its detractors, Microsoft has of late has embraced OpenSource with a vengeance. Much code is now available on GitHub under the Microsoft moniker for developers to tweak, extend, debug and contribute. opensource.microsoft.com is the central location for it.
The previous post outlined in an XAML UI using a ListView how to display a List of instances of a class of public properties using data binding. Layout and padding issues were examined as well as binding to a dictionary of objects. This article covers programmatically adding elements of a collection to an XAML UI.
I had a Dictionary of values that I wanted to display in an XAML UI as part of a UWP app. My initial foray was to use a ListView with a binding to the dictionary ListView.ItemTemplate/DataTemplate. The dictionary was then bound to the ListView’s ItemsSource. The problem with the ListView is that there is a lot of padding between items vertically and within items.I wanted to compact the rows of data vertically though as if I had manually placed each dictionary item (key and values) in a grid of rows of TextBlocks in a row (one row for each item). This article discusses my trials and tribulations with this issue and includes my final solution.
The last leg, of 8, of the world Build tour was held in Sydney this week. What can I say .. it was great. A lot of new and coming Creators features were covered, Insight into the latest Windows technologies was dished out. Here are some of the highlights and summary links.
Universal Windows(10) Apps settings is easy. Its simple to specify as part of the build, save them to storage, get them back and modify .. I mean dead easy! 
It was simple enough to get access to a Microsoft SQL Server from a Web Service when all were running on the same machine. You use Windows Authentication. But when the services are both running locally, with the user running a Windows 10 Universal app that calls the web service, they won’t be logged in an so the web service needs credential for the SQL service.
I’m creating a Windows 10 Universal Phone App that talks to a Web Service to post an entity (object) in Microsoft SQL Server running on the same machine as the Web Service. Initially did all including the app on my laptop using localhost as the network target. Solved the SQL Server credentials .. OK. But when I switch to using the laptop’s system name or its IP address (all still running on same machine) got Network Access Required error.
In developing a Universal Windows app, when you add an existing XAML and its Codebehind page, they often end up unlinked in the Solution Explorer. This limits the ability to autogenrate event handlers in the codebehind page for UI elements.Spaso Lazarevic has a good solution that involves a little editing of the project file.
In my previous blog Windows 10 (including IoT) USB HID device identification was covered in detail. This included an app that takes the relevant IDs for an HID device and checks whether it is present on the system. Two of the IDs could be looked up via a menu as they come an HID Usage table. The menu data was loaded from a JSON (text) file and translated using Linq to a list that is the Xaml data source binding for the menu. This blog demonstrates the mechanism for loading JSON data from a text file into an Xaml ComboBox.
Human Interface Devices (HID) are supported in the “headful/headed” (viz. headless) version of Windows 10 IoT. Anything that takes users input for an app is an HID device, and can include devices such as screens that provide feedback to the user. Traditional HID devices are the mouse and keyboard, whereas gaming devices such as joystick, XBox controller and steering wheel are also HID devices. A barcode scanner or credit scanner are also be HID devices, A system with just a few push buttons to control it has those pushbuttons as a trivial HID. Technically the HID protocol was developed as a protocol for the USB-HID class such that devices that conform to that class do not need a specific driver.