Category Archives: Essentials

DecryptR–A Glass House Application

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

  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 | 5 Comments

Context Menu

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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 | 5 Comments

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

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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 | 1 Comment

Test Driven Development–Testing Private Values

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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 , | 13 Comments

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

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Peter Torr joins Jon Galloway and me to discuss multi-tasking, background agents, the backstack and other new features in Mango. Peter’s Blog Back Means Back   Listen | Yet Another Podcast Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

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

The Full Stack, Phase 2–Overview

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone Tutorial Last year Jon Galloway and I launched the Full Stack experiment,in which we 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 … Continue reading →

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 | Comments Off on The Full Stack, Phase 2–Overview

On Comments

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

I received this email today:  I bought your book “Teach yourself C++ in 1 Hour a Day” and on page 37 you say  that “The bottom line is that comments should not say what is happening, they should say why … Continue reading →

Posted in Essentials | 3 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #51–Shawn Wildermuth: //build, Xaml Programming & Beyond

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Talking with Shawn Wildermuth & Jon Galloway about the //Build conference, Xaml programming in the post-//build world, exciting opportunities in learning new platforms, his forthcoming books and courses and much more.  Shawn’s Blog Shawn’s Book Shawn’s Company Listen | Yet … Continue reading →

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Background Audio

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone Tutorial When you are playing audio in your application you may not want that audio to stop when the user switches to another application.  Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) brings Background Audio using the BackgroundAudioPlayer. In my previous post … Continue reading →

Posted in Background Agents, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Multitasking, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 10 Comments

Migrating From WP7 to Mango–Fast Application Switching

Posted on October 7, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A Windows Phone Mini-Series In part 1 of this series, I provided links to downloading and installing Windows Phone Mango.  In this, part 2, I’ll provide links about one of the most important new features for Windows Phone Mango: Fast … Continue reading →

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Migration, Multitasking | Tagged | 1 Comment

Yet Another Podcast #50–Rob Cameron: What’s New In Windows 7.5 (Mango)

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Talking with Rob Cameron, Architect Evangelist for Microsoft, and APress author of Pro Windows Phone 7 Development. Listen | Yet Another Podcast Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Migration, Podcast, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment