New Series on WP7 Dev From Scratch

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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.

Posted in WindowsPhone | 1 Comment

Navigation 101–Cancelling Navigation

Posted on February 10, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone From Scratch #32

 

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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns & Skills | 1 Comment

Creating An Application Bar–Don’t Panic

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone From Scratch #31

 

The application bar sits at the bottom of your Windows Phone application and Common Propertiesprovides 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.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blend, Essentials, Mini-Tutorial, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

The Full Stack: The Client Side

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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

Posted in Full Stack | Tagged | 3 Comments

Yet Another Podcast #23 – John Stockton

Posted on February 7, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Talking with John Stockton about the current state of Silverlight – and how newJohn Stockton Silverlight programmers are coming up to speed.

 

John works for Avanade

 

 

Listen | Return to Yet Another Podcast

Call in comments:  1-347-YAP-CAST

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Posted in Community, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 2 Comments

Isolated Storage

Posted on February 4, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone From Scratch #30

 

An essential ingredient in storing the state of your application, especially when IsoStorage 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 ]

Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns & Skills | 3 Comments

Windows Phone Design Guidelines

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

A fellow team-member has put together this terrific Cheat Sheet on WP7 Design Guidelines.  Highly recommended.

Posted in Essentials, Patterns & Skills, Styles and Templates, Tools and Utilities, WindowsPhone | 1 Comment

Life Cycle: Page State Management

Posted on February 2, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone From Scratch #29

In previous postings, I’ve discussed the Life Cycle of a Windows Phone application and SavingState 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

Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns & Skills | 2 Comments

The Full Stack: Entity Framework To Phone, The Server Side

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

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

Posted in Data, Full Stack, Patterns & Skills, WindowsPhone | Tagged | 1 Comment

One Man’s Communication Journey Through the Internet

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

I saw recently that a buddy had celebrated his fifth year of blogging.  Very cool but it made me, of course, start to wonder when I started blogging.  Now, so much depends on what you mean by blogging.  Because blogs didn’t come out of nowhere, they evolved out of prior technologies.  For example, before I had a blog I had a threaded discussion that was part blog, part comments and part conversation.

Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns & Skills | 8 Comments

Yet Another Podcast–Bill Wagner

Posted on January 31, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

Effective C# and much more with Bill Wagner

    Listen | Return to Yet Another Podcast

    Call in comments:  1-347-YAP-CAST

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    Posted in Essentials, Languages, Patterns & Skills, Tools and Utilities | Tagged | 2 Comments

    Reactive Extensions–Observable Sequences are First Class Objects

    Posted on January 30, 2011 by Jesse Liberty

    Windows Phone From Scratch #28Reactive

    In yesterdays’ posting on Asynchronous programming with Reactive Extensions I  created a browser application that reacted to user input into a TextBox.

    You will remember that the observable was created from the TextChanged event as demonstrated in the following bit of code (the throttle was used to avoid picking up any changes in the text until the user paused in entering new text),

    var keys = Observable.FromEvent<KeyEventArgs>(
   search, "KeyUp" )
   .Throttle( TimeSpan.FromSeconds( .5 ) );

    Then we subscribed to the observable collection and had to reach into the text box to obtain the changed text:

    keys.ObserveOn( Deployment.Current.Dispatcher ).
         Subscribe( evt =>
{
  txtSearching.Text =
     "Searching for... " + search.Text;
  txtLoading.Visibility =
      System.Windows.Visibility.Visible;
  webBrowser1.Navigate( new Uri(
      "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" + search.Text ) );
} );

    This is fine as far as it goes, but we can go further.  Because observable sequences are first class objects we can provide operators over them using generic extension methods; which is exactly what was done by the creators of the Rx framework.

    Continue reading →

    Posted in Data, Mini-Tutorial, Patterns & Skills, Reactive | Tagged | 1 Comment