Reactive Programming: Posting #5
Talking with Matthew Podwysocki and Bart De Smet about Reactive Extensions.
Bart is a Software Development Engineer – SQL Cloud Programmability Team and actively involved in the design and implementation of Reactive Extensions. Matt is a Senior developer working for Microsoft and contributing to the Reactive Extensions framework.
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Nokia and Microsoft made a joint announcement today that they are creating a strategic partnership which includes (among other points):
There is much more, covered in depth here, but this is a significant announcement for Windows Phone developers and certainly one we’ll all be keeping a close eye on.
Reactive Programming, Posting # 4
Continuing the discussion of Reactive Programming, this posting, based on a video from the Rx team, will create and annotate Drag and Drop using the Rx toolkit. In part 1 we’ll track mouse movements, in part 2 we’ll implement drag and drop on an image.
The documentation group in Developer Guidance just released a set of Windows Phone 7 development articles aimed at guiding the new Windows Phone programmer through all the fundamentals of WP7 development, starting with “Hello World”.
The topics are presented in a recommended order (like chapters of an intro book); however, they are also designed to be modular, so you can skip around to learn about specific tasks and features. The content uses a lot of code snippets along with screenshots, videos, and even embedded Silverlight to demonstrate how the code behaves.
Be sure to check them out.
Let’s go back and look at the fundamentals of Navigation and how you can exert greater control as you navigate from page to page in your Windows Phone application.
Simple navigation, say from one page to the next, can be accomplished by calling on the NavigationService’s Navigate method, passing in the URI of the page you wish to navigate to.
The application bar sits at the bottom of your Windows Phone application and 
provides a set of hopefully not-too-cryptic icons, along with an ellipses (…) that pops open the menu and the text associated with each icon.
Creating these icons by hand requires a bit more artistic skill than I have, so I’ve shied away for a bit, but it turns out that Blend makes creating an Application Bar a relatively trivial exercise.
Part 7 in the Full Stack series in which Jon and I are building an entire application from conception to delivery that includes MVC 3 ASP.NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone.
Also available on Channel 9
Talking with John Stockton about the current state of Silverlight – and how new
Silverlight programmers are coming up to speed.
John works for Avanade
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An essential ingredient in storing the state of your application, especially when 
your application may be tombstoned or, even more extreme, closed, is the ability to create persistent storage – that is to write to the disk so that you can retrieve your data when the application resumes or is restarted.
This is the purpose of Isolated Storage. The term is nearly self-explanatory; this is persistent storage that is isolated from the storage used by all other applications, and further, it is isolated from the operating system itself. It is therefore very safe.
[ Click on image for full size ]
A fellow team-member has put together this terrific Cheat Sheet on WP7 Design Guidelines. Highly recommended.
In previous postings, I’ve discussed the Life Cycle of a Windows Phone application and 
in that context noted the requirement to maintain the page’s state when the user navigates away (so that state can be restored when the user returns)
There are a few practical elements to state management, so let’s devote a few of these mini-tutorials to the exact mechanisms involved
Part 6 in the Full Stack series in which Jon and I are building an entire application from conception to delivery that includes MVC 3 ASP.NET, Silverlight and Windows Phone.
Also available on Channel 9