Xamarin.Tip – Add Easter Eggs to UWP with Key Combos

In a previous post, I talked about adding easter eggs to your iOS and Android applications (using Xamarin.Forms or Xamarin Native) using the shake gesture – allowing us to execute it within the context of the current view we are in whether native or in forms, and then from there execute any bit of code we want!

Check that out here: Xamarin.Tip – Add Easter Eggs on Shake

In this post, I want to give an example of adding the same sort of functionality to your UWP applications. This again is usable whether in Xamarin.Forms or native UWP.

Since nearly all UWP devices are PC’s and not mobile devices, and often don’t have gyrometers, adding this type of feature using a shake gesture just doesn’t make sense. I propose, instead, to use key combos!

Tracking Key Combinations in UWP and Xamarin.Forms

In UWP there are two main things needed to track key combinations – the KeyState and the OnKeyUp method.

Accessing the current KeyState is as easy as:

CoreWindow.GetForCurrentThread().GetKeyState(VirtualKey.Control);

Where VirtualKey.Control can be any key! In this case it is the Ctrl key.

In our UWP Page classes, we can also override the OnKeyUp method which is fired whenever any key is pressed. This means that in this method, we can check the KeyState of any number of keys, and also get the current key that was just pressed. Alternatively, you can do this in the OnKeyDown override depending on how you want it to behave.

Let’s look at a full example of this implemented where we want to fire some Easter Egg off once the Ctrl + E key combo is hit:

MainPage.xaml.cs

// NOTE: this is the UWP MainPage - not the Xamarin.Forms MainPage!
public sealed partial class MainPage
{
    public MainPage()
    {
        this.InitializeComponent();
    }

    private static bool IsCtrlKeyPressed()
    {
        var ctrlState = CoreWindow.GetForCurrentThread().GetKeyState(VirtualKey.Control);
        return (ctrlState & CoreVirtualKeyStates.Down) == CoreVirtualKeyStates.Down;
    }

    protected async override void OnKeyUp(KeyRoutedEventArgs e)
    {
        base.OnKeyUp(e);
        if (IsCtrlKeyPressed())
        {
            if (e.Key == VirtualKey.E)
            {
                await EasterEggAsync();
            }
        }
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Do something with an easter egg!
    /// </summary>
    /// <returns>The developer options async.</returns>
    private async Task EasterEggAsync()
    {
        // DO SOMETHING! 😀
        await DoAnEasterEggThing();
    }
}

Just like in our Android and iOS Shake examples, from here in UWP, we can get reference to our current Xamarin.Forms page and execute with some context by hitting (App.Current.MainPage as NavigationPage).CurrentPage assuming that the MainPage of our app is a NavigationPage.

In another post, we will look at combining these 3 platform methods to give ourselves as developers some tools to make our lives easier while debugging and testing!

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