Category Archives: Essentials

Yet Another Podcast #58–Julie Lerman and EF/CF

Talking with  Julie Lerman about Entity Framework and Code-First.  Julie’s blog Julie’s Book website Microsoft Entity Framework Developer Center EF Team Blog Domain Driven Design Listen | Yet Another Podcast Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

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Playing A Sound, Simplified

Windows Phone Tutorial In a previous posting I discussed how to play a sound using a background process.  That is great when you need the sound to continue playing even if you leave your application. But much of the time … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #56–Jeff Blankenburg: Evangelist

Talking with Jeff Blankenburg about his 31 Days of Mango series and what it means to be a Microsoft Evangelist.  Jeff’s web site Migrating to Windows Phone 31 Days of Mango e-Book 31 Days of Mango Windows Telephone App Listen … Continue reading

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Vibrating the phone

Windows Phone Tutorial A little vibration added to your application can be just the haptic feedback needed. It turns out that vibration is absurdly easy to add; so much so that discussions of adding vibration typically come with the caveat … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Binding Formatting

Windows Phone Tutorial When you are binding data there are additional properties that allow you to format the display and to handle errors and null values. The StringFormat property allows you to add any standard .NET format string that matches … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 3 Comments

DecryptR Part 2

In a recent post, I discussed the DecryptR application I have been toying with.  While the fundamentals are working, there is much to do.  Today I’ll make a few minor improvements. First, let’s set the font in the list box … Continue reading

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Yet Another Podcast #55–David Plat on Why Software Sucks

Talking with David Platt, author of Why Software Sucks about software design, both good and bad David’s Web Site   Listen | Yet Another Podcast Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

Posted in Books, Essentials, Observations, Opinion, UI | Tagged | 2 Comments

DecryptR–A Glass House Application

  Periodically, I like to build a “glass house” application – that is one which I document as I go, hiding nothing and showing all the thinking that goes into the application as well as the raw, not ready-for-production code … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills | Tagged | 4 Comments

Context Menu

Windows Phone Tutorial The Silverlight For Windows Phone Toolkit is a magnificent collection of controls and utilities for writing Windows Phone applications.  Unfortunately, there is little or no documentation, and the samples, while wonderful, are quite complex.  At times, it … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Toolkit, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

Beautiful Page Transitions (Practically) Free

Windows Phone Tutorial I don’t just mean you don’t pay for the code, or the control, I mean we’re talking about 2 minutes of effort.  No joke. Step 1 is to download the November Windows Phone Toolkit and install it

Posted in Animation, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Toolkit, UI, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 4 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #54–Damian Edwards on ASP.NET

Talking with Damian Edwards and Jon Galloway about the evolution of ASP.NET Web Forms, what’s coming in the new Preview and the three UI platforms built on top of ASP.NET Core. Damian is the Program Manager responsible for ASP.NET Web … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, MVC, Patterns & Skills, Podcast, Visual Studio | Tagged | Leave a comment

Test Driven Development–Testing Private Values

Jon Galloway and I are embarking on the next phase of our Full Stack project and building a Pomodoro timer.  We are (at lest for now) doing this using Test Driven Development.  This immediately raised an interesting issue, which I … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Patterns & Skills, TDD | Tagged , | 14 Comments