Email a stack trace when things blow up in Windows Phone

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone From Scratch

Jon Galloway and I have been working together on The Full Stack project.  This week, we’ve beenEXCEPTION banging our heads together trying to figure out why our Windows Phone application crashes on testing when submitted to the Marketplace, yet  it tests fine on my PC and on my phone.

We finally decided that we needed some debugging information from when it crashes and that the best way to do that would be to catch the exception that we are presuming is being thrown, and get a stack trace. But how to get that to us?

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Posted in Essentials, Full Stack, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 8 Comments

Breakpoints on Xaml in Silverlight 5

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Silverlight 5 MiniTutorial

Silverlight 5 Beta brings the enormously useful ability to set a break point in your Xaml BreakPoint where you have a data binding.  This can greatly simplify debugging and fixing binding issues.

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Posted in Data, Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Silverlight 5 | Tagged | 4 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #32–Kent Quirk and Game Development

Posted on April 26, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Talking with Kent Quirk, Game Developer and author about creating great computer, KentWryPortraitRed  phone and on-line games.

 

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Posted in Podcast | Tagged | 1 Comment

Implicit Data Templates (Silverlight 5)

Posted on April 21, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A Silverlight 5 Mini-Tutorial

A new feature in Silverlight 5 is the Implicit Data Template, which allows you to target Implicit Data Types a  data template for a specific data type.  Thus, you might create a class hierarchy of Messages, Direct Messages and Replies (with the latter two derived from the first) and then modify how they are displayed in, e.g., a list box, based on the type of the message.

[Click on image for full size]

Pete Brown has a beautiful walkthrough of this idea here, my walkthrough will be much simpler, just enough to show you how it works and to hint at the potential it offers.

In the figure above, direct messages are printed in red, and replies have the original message appended to the message (e.g., in reply to message 5).

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Posted in Data, Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, Silverlight 5 | Tagged | 8 Comments

Silverlight 5–Rich Text and Overflow

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A Silverlight 5 Mini-Tutorial

In Silverlight 5 we introduce a new element, RichTextBoxOverflow.  This allows one Overflow RichTextBox to have its contents “overflow” into another – excellent for multi-column presentation.

[Click on image for full size]

What is particularly nice here is that as you adjust the size of the browser window, the text reflows freely between the two RichTextBoxes, with the Overflow box picking up the extra.

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Posted in Mini-Tutorial, Silverlight 5 | Tagged | 1 Comment

Silverlight 5–Combo box type ahead

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A nice, small feature in the new Silverlight 5 Beta is the ability toCombobox type ahead in combo boxes.

This makes choosing from long list far simpler.

You can see this at work by whipping up a very quick Silverlight 5 application.

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Posted in Data, Essentials, Silverlight 5 | Tagged | 9 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #31–Laurent Bugnion Live at Mix

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Talking with Laurent Bugnion live at Mix about Silverlight 5 and the next generation of Laurent Windows Phone, code-named Mango.  Laurent is the author of Silverlight 4 Unleashed, the MVVM Light Framework, and he is a leading voice in the Silverlight Development Community.

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Mix, Silverlight and Windows Phone

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A very exciting time at Mix this year, especially if your focus is Windows Phone or Silverlight.   On the Windows Phone front, the next release, code name Mango was announced.  Mango brings Windows Phone fully up to Silverlight 4, and will include over 1,500 new API calls and a number of features that will make programming the phone easier and faster.

Silverlight 5 Beta was released on the second day of Mix. Silverlight is a maturing product, and many of the enhancements shown reflect the key role Silverlight continues to play in the creation of Rich Internet Applications.  Not least among the new features is support for full 3-d objects.

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Posted in Full Stack, Languages, News, Opinion, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

Tombstoning and MVVM

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

We’re working pretty hard to get the Who Is That (Full Stack) Windows Phone application tombstone_istock ready. Today I took a look at tombstoning and realized that this was not going to be quite as easy as I thought… and worse, the problem was  MVVM.

The key problem is that the easy way to handle tombstoning is with Page State, which is not available to the ViewModel, but it is the ViewModel that knows what is to be stored.

I came up with a solution, but be warned, this is a first attempt and may not be the best way to handle this.

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Posted in Data, Full Stack, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 15 Comments

LinqPad, Linq Queries and IEnumerable

Posted on April 7, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

This posting is part of an on-going series on LINQ – a critical tool for both Windows Phone and Silverlight Programmers. LinqPad

I recently discovered LinqPad, a free utility developed by Joseph Albahari that supports Linq to Objects, Linq to SQL, Linq to Entity Framework and Linq to XML.   You can use it to query virtually any source that you can query using LINQ in a C# program (e.g., oData, etc.)  And you can use it to test any C# expression, statement or program. 

[Click on image for full size]

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

About This Blog and Recent Changes

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Due to a virulent attack on this blog by a very nasty bit of Malware, I was forced to take extreme measures, which included changing themes, and reinstalling every post and page.

As you will see, there will be rough spots, and a bit of weirdness in the messages, that I’ll be fixing as I can, over the coming weeks. (Anyone know how to take my bio out of the bottom of each page??) 

I very much appreciate your patience during this process, and I’m completely dedicated to maintaining the highest signal:noise ratio, with a minimum of disruption.

Thank you again.

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Posted in Community, Opinion | 6 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #30 Abby Fichtner–Microsoft Evangelist

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Abby-Curlz-BW-SquareAbby Fichtner is a Microsoft Evangelist specializing in startups in the New England area.  She joined Microsoft recently after a fateful discussion with Jesse at CodeMash 2010, and discusses Startups, Agile programming and being a Microsoft Evangelist.

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Posted in Community, Opinion, Patterns & Skills, Podcast | Tagged | 2 Comments