MotzWrit.es by James Montemagno

Source: programmerryangosling

Source: programmerryangosling

Source: programmerryangosling

Source: programmerryangosling

Well it has been some time since I talked about music. If you know me you know that I am a huge fan of hip hop and rap. Over everything I am a Lil Wayne fan and have been following for since he started with Cash Money Records with the Hot Boys. However I do have a a sweet spot in my heart for a bit more poppy and R&B oriented type of music.

Jeremih, Lloyd, R. Kelly, T-Pain, Trey Songz, Miguel are all fantastic. However all of a sudden Bruno Mars has entered the stage with a brand new album. Bruno Mars isn’t brand new, I mean he release his first studio album in 2010 which did fantastic, featured in tons of remixes, and then completely destroyed it with Lil Wayne in “Mirror”



However now you have a 10 track studio album called Unorthodox Jukebox


His first single “Locked out of Heaven’ to me is an absolute smash hit with a great beat, great lyrics and sold me on buying the album the day it came out. Overall I see why he named it a “jukebox” as he attempts to mix a bunch of different genres together and jam it into a nice little package. From the very first song “Young Girls” you can tell that this album is going to knock it out of the park.

Mars transitions in and out of pop and R&B with ups and downs. Complex songs from joy to loss, it all comes together. He even throws in a little Jamaican flair in there with Show Me which is kind of interesting. One thing you can love with Mars is that he doesn’t use auto tune on anything at all and it is just straight up him. The only thing I can really knock the album for is just being too little of content. Coming in at just 35 minutes on the 10 tracks you can easily run through it multiple times. Apparently Target got an additional 5 bonus tracks, but they are all mostly just remixes of tracks on the album.

Verdict: Recommended

Favorite Track: Gorilla

So if you are a Windows Phone developer then you probably already using the Windows Phone toolkit. It has all sorts of awesome controls and helpers such as HubTile, ListPicker, Navigation Transitions, and just about everything else that SHOULD be included in the Windows Phone SDK. However there is 1 key thing missing that could all be changed by changing 1 “private” method to a “public” method.

Perhaps you have an area of your app where you want the user to select the date or time. Then the WP Toolkit has you covered with the awesome DatePicker and TimePicker controls. Place them in your view, bind up some data, boom as soon as the user click on it you get this awesome page:



That is awesome! However what if you want to put it in the tool bar? So maybe the user can press a little calendar icon and then you don’t have to clutter the UI.



Since the tool bar in windows phone is really special and doesn’t follow any rules, you aren’t actually putting controls down there. They are their own special thing that you don’t get real power over. Instead you have to do code behind for event, and even localize it in the view’s loaded event. Alright fine, so maybe I will put down the DatePicker control and then just invoke it when the user presses the toolbar button…. NOPE #ComputerSaysNo

Why though, no real reason from what I can see to be honest with you. This should be completely possible as basically all you are doing is navigating to a new page and coming back and not doing anything special. I read a lot of posts on how to maybe do it and finally just decided to go ahead and tell you.

1.) Add in the DatePicker. I made the height/width set to 0 because I don’t actually want to display them.



2.) Write some code behind to launch it:



3.) At this point you are like hey James this code doesn’t compile.. and you are correct. The “OpenPickerPage” method is not valid… Or is it?

4.) Download the source code for the WP Toolkit and include the “Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit.WP7” (not you will need to copy the “Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit” folder into your source directory as well as it is a shared code base.



5.) Go into “DateTimePickerBase.cs” and find the “OpenPickerPage” method and change it from private to public



Compile and enjoy!