Context Menu

Windows Phone Tutorial

The Silverlight For Windows Phone Toolkit is a magnificent collection of controlsContextMenu 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 is difficult to tease out how to use a control; how to “just make it work.”

As I have done in previous mini-tutorials, this posting will show one of the toolkit controls stripped down to its bare essentials.  Creating a context menu, and responding to the user’s choice in the menu turns out to be wicked easy.

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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

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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 Damian EdwardsASP.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 Forms at Microsoft.

 

Listen | Yet Another Podcast

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Test Driven Development–Testing Private Values

Jon Galloway and I are embarking on the next phase of our Full Stack projectMadScientist_iStock_000000257229XSmall 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 think I’ve found a solution for but would be eager to hear how others deal with this issue.

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

A Dozen Windows Phone Videos… And Counting

Video #12 was recently posted to The Mango Videos on Channel 9 – this a short video on Reminders in Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango).

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Yet Another Podcast #53–Scott Hanselman on Blogging

Talking with Scott Hanselman and Jon Galloway about creating great blogs Hanselman and how to avoid those things that make a blog “suck.” 

Scott’s a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, and has one of the most popular technical blogs on the ‘net.  He is also the host of Hanselminutes and co-host of This Developer’s Life

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Spiking the Pomodoro Timer

I recently wrote about the beginning of phase 2 of the Full Stack project, in which we are PomodoroTimer building a Pomodoro timer (see also).  To get started, I decided to “spike” a quick and dirty version, if only to explore some of the technical challenges of the project. 

In the next couple postings I will walk through some of the spiked code, starting with an exploration of the timer. 

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Yet Another Podcast #52–Peter Torr on Windows Phone Multitasking

Peter Torr joins Jon Galloway and me to discuss multi-tasking, background agents, the backstack and other new features in Mango.

 

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Posted in Background Agents, Essentials, Mango, Multitasking, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 3 Comments

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

Suddenly I’m talking to a lot more inanimate objects.

I recently pulled a muscle in my shoulder, and  I’m not supposed to type Thus DragonDictate and I have become good friends. DragonDictate is almost magical, I speak in the words appear in front of me.

The problem of course, is that small recognition errors, such as the one in the previous sentence, are very hard to detect when editing your document. Computers do a good job finding spelling errors, but distinguishing when you mean in and when you mean and, appears to be beyond its ken. That’s fair enough because it’s almost beyond mine.

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Posted in Community, News, Observations, Opinion | 1 Comment

Cost vs. Size of Books

My newest book, Programming Reactive Extensions and LINQ, is released. I’m BalancingStones very  excited about this book, and believe that it provides high-quality information that would otherwise be hard to find, clear explanations, and useful examples.

Paul Betts and I worked hard to ensure that the signal-to-noise ratio in the book was very high, and that there was no fluff or filler.

We took great pride in being able to present two fairly complex inter-related technologies (Rx and LINQ)  in a relatively short book. Naively, I thought that the book being small would be a prime selling point.

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Posted in Books, Community, Observations, Opinion, Reactive | Tagged | 21 Comments

New Mini-Tutorial Video Series

I’m very pleased to announce that I’m starting a new video series based on my mini tutorials about Windows phone mango. These will all be posted on Channel 9 and you can also find them listed alphabetically on my Windows Phone Videos page.

The first of the series is on animation for Windows phone without code…

Find links to the rest of the series here.

First six videos:

 

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Posted in Animation, Blend, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 4 Comments

The Full Stack, Phase 2–Overview

Windows Phone Tutorial

Last year Jon Galloway and I launched the Full Stack experiment,in which we Pomodoro video-documented the creation of a nontrivial application.

Today we begin the second phase of this experiment, building a new application that will have implementations or related applications on the following platforms:

  • Windows phone 7.5
  • ASP.net MVC
  • HTML 5/JavaScript
  • Windows 8

For this phase not only will we be creating a video-documentation record, but I will also be documenting all of my progress and all the work that I’m doing in this series of blog posts.

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Posted in Background Agents, Blend, Data, Essentials, Full Stack, Linq, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Multitasking, MVC, Patterns & Skills, SL Unit Tests, Toolkit, UI, Visual Studio, WindowsPhone | Tagged | Leave a comment