I was recently alerted to a conference coming up in London this September that you may find of interest.
Windows Phone Fast Application Switching–Don’t Panic!
With Mango, the Windows Phone application life cycle changes, and that is a good thing, 
because the change allows for Fast Application Switching (FAS). With FAS, the user can start a new application and then return to your application without seeing the “resuming…” screen and without a discernable pause.
Getting ready for FAS is the most important step you can take, because FAS will make your application more responsive. But you only get this extra responsiveness if you test whether you are returning from the Dormant vs. the Tombstoned state.
Windows Phone Toolkit–Date and Time Pickers
A Windows Phone From Scratch Mini-Tutorial
You have seen the Date and Time pickers in the built-in applications and you can add 
them to your own applications with shockingly little work.
To start, follow the directions from yesterday’s posting on how to install the Toolkit. Create a new application, and change the content control to a StackPanel (rather than a Grid). Add two TextBoxes as prompts, and after the first TextBox drag in a DatePicker and after the second drag on a TimePicker.
Posted in Data, Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Toolkit, WindowsPhone
Tagged Mini-Tutorial
1 Comment
Windows Phone Toolkit AutoCompleteBox
A Windows Phone From Scratch Mini-Tutorial
The Windows Phone Toolkit offers a number of useful controls that you can use right out of 
the box. This is the first in a sub-series of mini-tutorials on the Windows Phone Toolkit.
From this link you can download either the tools in the toolkit or the source-code. The latter comes with an excellent sample program that exercises all the tools. Since there is no documentation to speak of other than the sample program, I’ll walk through implementing many of the controls.
Yet Another Podcast #44–Charles Petzold
Talking with Charles Petzold about writing, computers and his career. 
Charles Petzold is the author of numerous books, including Programming Windows, Code, The Annotated Turing, and Programming Windows Phone
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic – Arthur C. Clarke
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
LINQ Pad vs. Visual Studio for Learning LINQ
A LINQ Tutorial
As noted in numerous other postings, I’m convinced that LINQ is an essential aspect of 
serious Windows Phone (or virtually any .NET) programming. One of the great tools to come along for learning and working with LINQ is LinqPad, created by Joseph Albahari.
In my forthcoming book Programming Reactive Extensions and Linq we use LinqPad for virtually all the exercises, as I do for many example postings here. It is important to be able to translate form LinqPad (which strips down a program to its essentials) to Visual Studio, where you will almost certainly be doing the bulk of your serious programming.
In this posting we’ll take a LINQ query, examine it in LinqPad and then migrate it to Visual Studio. Along the way we’ll look at how you can interact with a database file in LINQ and how you can set the datacontext for a LINQ to SQL query.
Yet Another Podcast #43–Sean McKenna and Windows Phone Data
Talking with Sean McKenna, Senior Program Manager on the Windows Phone Application 
Platform Team, about structured data, databases and much more.
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
Windows Phone Fundamentals–3 Ways To Handle Events
One potential area of confusion for programmers new to Silverlight and Windows Phone is 
that there are (at least) three distinct ways to handle events.
- Name the event handler in the Xaml
- Name the event handler in the constructor
- Use an anonymous delegate via a Lambda expression
Let’s review all three. To do this, we’ll need a new application with a TextBox, a Button and a TextBlock. When the button is pressed the text from the TextBox (entered by the user) will be written into the TextBlock and the TextBox will be cleared.
Posted in Essentials, Languages, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone
Tagged Mini-Tutorial
9 Comments
Removing the BackStack Entry in Windows Phone
A reader correctly complained about my posting on Sending Messages Between Pages that the “dialog” box I had created was in the BackStack. If you were to go through the dialog and then later hit the hardware back-key you would be “dragged through” the dialog box on your way back through the pages. Fail.
To fix this you’ll want to call NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry().
Getting Organized–Again. Top Tips
One thing that I’ve learned in my attempt at getting organized is that whatever 
works today may stop working after a while. But even more deadly than fleeting fads is the woulda’ coulda’ shoulda’ effect in which you set out with good intentions but…
Here’s what I know: if an organizing approach is painful I am just not likely to keep it up. And by painful I mean even a tiny bit. The problem is, it really is easier to just coast, to let things pile up… of course if it weren’t I wouldn’t need organization ideas in the first place. So, I look for the least painful solutions I can find.
Posted in Community, Opinion
5 Comments
Yet Another Podcast #42–Colin Blair and RIA Services
Talking with Colin Blair, Microsoft MVP, about RIA Services and WCF 
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
Posted in Data, Patterns & Skills, Podcast
Tagged YapCast
Comments Off on Yet Another Podcast #42–Colin Blair and RIA Services
Windows Phone–Sending Messages Between Pages
Last week I began work on prototyping a new application as part of the Full Stack series. 
In this application I would like to open a dialog box, retrieve some information from the user, and return that information to the calling page.
There is a dialog box in Windows Phone (System.Windows.MessageBox) but unfortunately it cannot retrieve data entered by the user. No problem, I’ll create a new page, put in a label and a textBox and two buttons (OK and Cancel). The only issue is how do I get the data entered on page 2 back to page 1 (the calling page)?
Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone
Tagged Mini-Tutorial
6 Comments
