Category Archives: Mini-Tutorial

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 | 5 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 … Continue reading

Posted in Animation, Blend, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 3 Comments

The Full Stack, Phase 2–Overview

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

Background Audio Part II: Copying Audio Files To Isolated Storage

Windows Phone Tutorial In a previous article I showed how to use the audio background task agent to run the audio even when your application is no longer in the foreground. In that article we used audio that was downloaded … Continue reading

Posted in Background Agents, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 4 Comments

Background Audio

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

Drag and Drop in 30 Seconds

If this doesn’t convince you that it is worthwhile to learn Blend and Behaviors… Open a new phone project in Blend and drag a shape onto the artboard (e.g., an ellipse). Click on Assets –> Behaviors and drag  MouseDragElementBehavior onto … Continue reading

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

Adding Icons to the DateTime Picker

Windows Phone Tutorial If you just add a DateTime Picker (from the Windows Phone Toolkit) to your application, it will work but its icons will be very unsatisfactory – just a pair of X’s.  To get the proper icons, follow … Continue reading

Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, UI | Tagged | 5 Comments

Windows Phone WCF OData Client

Windows Phone Tutorial In a recent posting I showed how to create a quick OData service using Entity-Framework Code-First and SQLCE4.  In this posting I’ll show how to create a simple Windows Phone client to interact with that service.

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

Creating an OData Server Quickly

Windows Phone Tutorial There are numerous ways to access data from Web Services.  To explore these we need a simple server that exposes data we can interact with from a Windows Phone Application. To facilitate this, we’ll build an ASP.NET/MVC … Continue reading

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

DataBinding to Custom Properties

Windows Phone Tutorial In a recent three part mini-series I showed how to create a Xaml program from scratch.  In the third part of the series I showed how the values are computed for display, but I glossed over how … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

Building a Windows Phone App From Scratch–Part 3 of 3

Windows Phone Tutorial In Part 1 of this mini-series we created the layout for a calculator. In Part 2, we filled in the event handlers for the buttons.  In this third and final part we’ll review the code for the … Continue reading

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

Building A Windows Phone App From Scratch–Part 2

Windows Phone Tutorial In Part 1 of this mini-series we created the layout for a calculator. In this part, we’ll take a look at the event handlers required to make the buttons works.  When the user clicks a button an … Continue reading

Posted in Data, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | Comments Off on Building A Windows Phone App From Scratch–Part 2