Cost vs. Size of Books

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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 | 22 Comments

New Mini-Tutorial Video Series

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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:

 

Posted in Animation, Blend, Mini-Tutorial, 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 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.

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

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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 from the Internet. If you wish to use local audio you must copy it to isolated storage.

While this may seem intimidating at first, the actual steps are straightforward and the process is relatively simple.

 

Continue reading →

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

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 it is happening”. Can you kindly elaborate this further?

The answer comes in two parts. 

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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 SWturningheadshot programming in the post-//build world, exciting opportunities in learning new platforms, his forthcoming books and courses and much more. 

Listen | Yet Another Podcast

Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

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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 on Background Agents, I looked at the creation of a Periodic Task.  The process for creating Background Audio is surprisingly similar.  Once again you create a foreground project and then add a dedicated Audio Playback Agent project to the solution.  The Agent has once class: AudioPlayer, which manages changes to the state of the player and user actions. 

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 Resuming Phone Mango.  In this, part 2, I’ll provide links about one of the most important new features for Windows Phone Mango: Fast Application Switching.

In Windows Phone 7 there was a noticeable delay when switching among third party applications (that is, the applications that are not built into the Operating System), because applications that were switched out of memory were tombstoned. 

With Mango, this delay can usually be avoided, because of a new dormant state in which the memory and state of the application is preserved, and thus there is no need to restore state programmatically. 

Every application should be updated to take advantage of Fast Application Switching, which is okay because it is quite easy to do, as I show in FAS – Don’t Panic and in FAS Made Easy.   [ If you prefer watching a video to reading blog posts, check out this presentation at Mix 11. ]

As an additional resource, here is an article that goes in depth into the Execution Model for Windows Phone.

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

Migrating From WP7 To Mango–Getting Started

Posted on October 6, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A Windows Phone Mini-Series

There are hundreds of great new features in Mango, and Windows Phonemango with a leaf and a slice programmers will want that transition to be as smooth as possible.  Margaret Parsons and I have been busily collecting links to articles, videos and blog posts that will help with the transition. We’ll be presenting them here as a mini-series on Migrating From Windows Phone 7 To Mango.

Continue reading →

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Background Agents

Posted on October 5, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone Tutorial

Mango brings a number of new features to support background processing; many of which I’ll be covering in coming days and weeks.  The most general of all of these is the Background Agent.

Background Agents come in two flavors:

  • PeriodicTask
  • ResourceIntensiveTask

Continue reading →

Posted in Background Agents, Mango, Multitasking | Tagged | 5 Comments

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 RobCameron of Pro Windows Phone 7 Development.

Listen | Yet Another Podcast

Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST

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

Drag and Drop in 30 Seconds

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

If this doesn’t convince you that it is worthwhile to learn Blend and Behaviors…

  1. Open a new phone project in Blend and drag a shape onto the artboard (e.g., an ellipse).
  2. Click on Assets –> Behaviors and drag  MouseDragElementBehavior onto your shape
  3. There is no step 3.  Run the program.

Note that if you try this with a  Button or other control it won’t work.  But if you put that control inside a Border and then drag MouseDragElementBehavior onto the border, you can then drag the border.

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