Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip – Navigation

When using the Silverlight for Windows Phone APIs to navigate from one page to another, it is necessary to use the Navigate method on the PhoneApplicationPage instance’s NavigationService property. When making this call, it is important to note the required Uri Syntax, as follows: Navigating to a page in the same assembly: NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Folder(s)/TargetPage.xaml", UriKind.relative));…

Windows Phone 7 Tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling

Yesterday I wrote about an ultra light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework and mentioned that I would deal with tombstoning in a later post. This is the post. Sterling makes tombstoning very easy because it handles serialization of just about any type of object. To show an example, we’ll start with the concept of a…

An Ultra Light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework

I’ve been doing more work on Windows Phone 7 applications. Because of the smaller footprint of the phone and the way the application is hosted, I don’t believe the phone requires the same types of tools and frameworks as the browser. Sharing code and services is something that is obviously important, but while I am…

Disabling the Visual Studio Source Server Security Warning Dialog

The estimable Ed Blankenship posted a must read article for everyone using TFS 2010: Source Server and Symbol Server Support in TFS 2010. Bookmark that article because it’s the one stop shop for all the best practices for symbol server, source indexing, and everything related to them for VS and TFS 2010. Once you get…

Sterling Object-Oriented Database 1.0 RTM

In early 2010 I was working on several Silverlight projects that were driven by the need to provide a working offline solution. Isolated storage was the obvious answer. Unfortunately, serializing 10,000 contacts came with some overhead and I realized quickly that I was following some similar patterns when it came to handling large sets of…

Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #6

Recently I have heard of a couple of cases in which apps submitted to the Windows Phone Marketplace were rejected because they continued running when an incoming phone call arrived. While the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements don’t specifically state than an application must pause when a call arrives, it seems that certain actions…

Parsing the Visual Tree with LINQ

I noticed a project on CodePlex that provides a “JQuery-like syntax” for parsing XAML. It looked interesting, but then I wondered why it would be needed when we have such powerful features available to us in the existing runtime. Silverlight provides a powerful VisualTreeHelper for iterating elements in the visual tree. It also provides a…

Tech Valley .Net User Group Presentation Materials

I have uploaded the content from my Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development with Silverlight talk at the Tech Valley .Net User Group meeting last night in Albany. 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 projects.…

Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #5

Quick: can you spot what’s wrong with this XAML?   <ProgressBar x:Name=”Progress” Visibility=”Collapsed” IsIndeterminate=”True” />   If you answered that setting IsIndeterminant to true on a ProgressBar control in Silverlight for Windows Phone debilitates performance, go to the head of the class! If not, read on. If you use Silverlight for Windows Phone’s networking stack…

Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip – Be Sure to Scope Your SIP

Scope Your SIP – sounds painful, doesn’t it?  Adding on to Jeff‘s series concerning WP7 Silverlight development tips, I figured it worthwhile to add another one.  The SIP is the Software Input Panel – AKA the Phone’s onscreen keyboard.  One of the handy features of the SIP is the ability to customize it to fit…

Real-World Tombstoning in Silverlight for Windows Phone, Part 4

Tombstoning is one of the greatest challenges in writing applications for Windows phones, which is why I decided to devote a series of blog posts to it. In Part 1 of this series, we built a photo-extras application that allows the user to perform simple image-editing chores on photos. In Part 2, we added tombstoning…

Real-World Tombstoning in Silverlight for Windows Phone, Part 3

In Part 2 of this series, we made progress toward including tombstoning support in a photo-extras application by adding OnNavigatedFrom and OnNavigatedTo methods that use a combination of page state and isolated storage to save the state of our app before it’s deactivated and restore that state following reactivation. But we also determined that work…