wintellect-blogs|Jan 26, 2011

A Matter of State, Part 1

The Windows Phone platform offers several mechanisms for preserving your application’s state…the key is knowing which one to use when, and why.  I’m going to try to provide some guidance to help answer those questions. First things first – there are 3 key mechanisms provided for saving application state on the phone (4 if you…
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Blogs|Jan 25, 2011

Install a New Virtual Directory to Default Web Site with WiX

Sometimes the internet is totally awesome and other times it’s a complete morass of “how come I can’t find anything?” Recently, I needed to build a quick installer that did nothing more than install new virtual directory under the ubiquitous Default Web Site. I thought installing a basic web site would have been a very…
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Blogs|Jan 25, 2011

Using the Location Service in Silverlight for Windows Phone

One of the most exciting features of the Windows phone from a developer’s perspective is the location service. The location service is a set of APIs that rely on Assisted-GPS (A-GPS), Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), and cell-site triangulation to expose location data to an application. Simply put, this means that a Windows phone app can…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 24, 2011

Using the Accelerometer in Silverlight for Windows Phone

One of the sensor devices present in every Windows phone is an accelerometer that provides real-time acceleration data in the X, Y, and Z directions. Applications can use that data to determine a phone’s 3D spatial orientation, and to detect changes in that orientation. Under the hood, Silverlight for Windows Phone uses the accelerometer to…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 21, 2011

New Hampshire .Net (Concord) User Group Presentation Materials

I have uploaded the content from my Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development with Silverlight talk at the New Hampshire (Concord) .Net User Group meeting last night in Concord.  The content can be found here, and includes: ·     Presentation slides, which include the reference links I mentioned during the talk. ·     The sample code, broken into 2…
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Blogs|Jan 20, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 4

The first three articles in this series presented three different ways to respond to touch input in Windows phone apps: mouse events, Touch.FrameReported events, and manipulation events. In this, the fourth and final installment, we’ll discuss a means for processing touch input that trumps all three – namely, the GestureListener class in the Silverlight for…
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Blogs|Jan 19, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I described how to build touch interfaces for phone apps using mouse events and Touch.FrameReported events. Part 3 presents yet another way to respond to touch input: manipulation events. Manipulation events originated in WPF, and they’re substantially richer in WPF than in Silverlight for Windows Phone.…
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Blogs|Jan 18, 2011

Jounce Part 10: Visual State Manager

One of the most common questions I get about Jounce is how to handle transitions, since the ContentControl immediately swaps out content. There are some third-party solutions, such as the TransitioningContentControl from the Silverlight toolkit, but Jounce can also handle this right out of the box. Take a look at an example: View example in…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 15, 2011

Sterling Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Database Triggers and Auto-Identity

Sterling changeset 72063 [browse the source code here] introduces triggers. The trigger is a powerful feature that allows you to universally intercept database operations. Their application in Sterling resolves several concerns, including: Validation — prevent a save operation from succeeding if data integrity is compromised, or prevent a delete operation when prerequisites are not met…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 14, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I described how to build simple touch interfaces for phone apps by processing mouse events. Recall that primary touch events – events involving the first finger to touch the screen – are automatically promoted to mouse events by the run-time, and that you can build a UI  that responds…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 14, 2011

Building Touch Interfaces for Windows Phones, Part 1

One of the key hurdles that developers face when transitioning from Silverlight to Silverlight for Windows Phone is learning how to build touch interfaces. While the desktop versions of Silverlight do support low-level touch events, the vast majority of desktop applications eschew touch input and rely heavily on mouse input instead. Building great touch interfaces…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 13, 2011

Windows Phone Won’t Connect? Try This

Lately my Samsung Focus has been giving me a lot of trouble. Specifically, when I connect it to my PC, the Zune client reports that it’s not connected. This means I can’t sync the phone. Worse, I can’t load apps onto it from Visual Studio for testing. After scouring the Web for solutions, I came…
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