Secondary Tiles– Part 1: Creation

Mango From Scratch

Tiles come in two flavors: Application Tiles and Secondary Tiles.  The secondary tile is SECONDARY always created programmatically, typically based on an interaction with the user.  Secondary tiles are often used to provide user-specific data such as the weather or headlines in the user’s local area.

Secondary tiles are placed on the start page as soon as they are created (and you can even have a secondary tile on Start without having an application tile there.)

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Posted in Essentials, Mango, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Managing Resources with Reactive Extensions

Reactive Extensions

While Reactive Extensions will clean up after itself, it is still your responsibility to manage limited resources, and to dispose of  any unmanaged resources.

You can, however, use a variant on the using statement with Observables.

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Posted in Data, Linq, Mini-Tutorial, Reactive | Tagged | 6 Comments

Full Stack #11–We’ve Been Busy

More on Channel 9

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Mango Announcement

Andy Lees today announced the Mango release, and the availability of the development tools.  Read more here.

Posted in Community, Mango, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

Managing the Back Stack

Mango From Scratch

In a previous posting, I discussed creating Reminders.  One little known feature of ImageCrop reminders is that you can click on the Reminder to return to the original application (the application in which you set the Reminder).  For example, if I set a reminder to write in my blog, when that reminder comes up, I can click on it and return to the application from which I set that reminder; perhaps to set another reminder or to find additional details.

This raises an interesting problem, however.  When I return to the application, as far as Windows Phone is concerned, I’m at the first page. Clicking the back button from here will exit the application, which is almost certainly not what I want.

To see the problem and its solution clearly, let’s create a new application. 

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Posted in Essentials, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #36 Mary Jo Foley

Mary Jo Foley has covered the tech industry for 25 years, and has been following MFJ Microsoft for the past ten years.  She has written for ZDNet, eWeek and Baseline among other publications and web sites and is the author of Microsoft 2.0, How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates era. 

Mary Jo was the author of the At the Evil Empire column and now is the author of the All About Microsoft blog on ZDNet.

We talked about Windows Phone, Silverlight and general trends in the industry.

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Call in comments:  1-347-YAP-CAST

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Persisting an image

Windows Phone From Scratch

In our Full Stack program we need to take a snapshot and persist it to isolated storage, for PicturePicture retrieval at a later time.  This posed an interesting question: how do you put an image into a serializable form, yet reconstitute it to be the source for the Image control.

Let’s simplify the problem and strip it down to its essentials.  In this demonstration program we will interact with the UI shown in the figure.

[Click on the image to see full size]

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Posted in Data, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 23 Comments

The Full Stack–Accidentally Pair Programming and Writing Unit Tests

In this episode of The Full Stack, Jesse and Jon continue their reboot of the windows phone client project. Having set up an MVVM application and decided on using a repository pattern on the phone that mirrors the server’s repository, Jon throws caution to the wind and gives it a shot.

 

Some highlights:

  • Moving to the repository pattern breaks the application workflow causes some interesting changes in how state is maintained
  • Jon and Jesse decide it’s time to start moving towards separate client and server databases with a sync process
  • Jon writes  a buggy save method and actually decides to write a failing unit test before fixing it

Also available on Channel 9

Posted in Data, Essentials, Full Stack, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Reactive Extensions–FromAsync

Reactive Programming

I’ve been struggling with getting my head around the exact relationship between Rx’s approach to asynchronous programming and the traditional Begin/End pattern common in .NET programming.

With the help of Paul Betts I created a side by side example, starting with the traditional approach and then migrating it to Rx using Observable.FromAsyncPattern This, I think, makes the relationship much clearer.

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Posted in Linq, Mini-Tutorial, Reactive | Tagged | 10 Comments

LINQ Deferred Execution–Oops!

A LINQ Tutorial

Deferred execution can be a lifesaver with LINQ but it can have a downside as well.

In this example we set up a LINQ query and then iterate through the results twice. The output may not be quite what we anticipated or want,

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Yet Another Podcast #35–Silverlight, HTML5 and Developers

Part 1 of a conversation with Shawn Wildermuth, president of Agilitrain and author of the forthcoming Shawn book Essential Windows Phone 7 about Mix, Silverlight, Windows Phone, HTML5 and the state of .NET development

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Posted in Community, Data, Languages, Mango, Opinion, Patterns & Skills, Podcast, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

Best Practices For Local Databases

Mango From Scratch

I’ve recently written two posts about coding for SQL CE in Mango (the next release of Windows Phone).  Sean McKenna, who knows more about this than anyone walking the planet, dropped me an email to remind me about a couple best-practices that I ought to be showing in my examples (and will from now on!)

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Posted in Data, Essentials, Linq, Mango, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 11 Comments