April 2010 Entries

Be careful when installing the Blend Windows Phone 7 Add-In

There was a small issue today with the release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (April 2010 Refresh) refresh. The issue is that the Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone (April Refresh) is not compatible with Blend 4.0.20408.0, which was the public RC (release candidate). A few days ago, the Blend team released a fix for an issue that was sometimes causing a crash when Blend was starting up. This new release (V4.0.20421.0) was not very well announced however, and many people (including ......

Crowdsourcing MVVM Light Toolkit support

Considering the number of emails that are sent to me asking for support for MVVM Light toolkit, I find myself unable to answer all of them in sufficient time to make me feel good. In consequence, I started to send the following message in response to support queries, either per email or on the MVVM Light Codeplex discussion page. Hi, I am doing my best to answer all the questions as fast as possible. I receive a lot of them, however, and cannot reply to everyone fast enough to make me happy. Due ......

Small change in MVVM Light Toolkit templates for Blend 4 RC

Ah, the joy of new releases… You will find that the MVVM Light Toolkit works fine with Visual Studio 2010 RTM and Blend 4 RC except for a few adjustments: Blend templates The path to the Expression Blend 4 project templates changed. If you start Expression Blend 4 RC now, you will likely not see the MVVM Light templates in the New Project dialog. New Project dialog with MVVM Light To restore the templates, follow the steps: Open Windows Explorer Navigate to C:\Users\[username]\Documen... ......

Using commands with ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton in Windows Phone 7

Unfortunately, in the current version of the Windows Phone 7 Silverlight framework, it is not possible to attach any command on the ApplicationBarMenuItem and ApplicationBarButton controls. These two controls appear in the Application Bar, for example with the following markup: <phoneNavigation:PhoneAp... <shell:ApplicationBar x:Name="MainPageApplication... <shell:ApplicationBar.Me... <shell:ApplicationBarMen... Text="Add City" /> <shell:ApplicationBarMen... ......

MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 for Windows Phone 7

He he I start to sound like Microsoft… Anyway… I just released a service pack (SP1) for MVVM Light Toolkit V3. Why? Well mostly because I worked a bit more with the Windows Phone 7 tools that were released at MIX0, and I noticed a few things that could be better in the Windows Phone 7 template. Also, I only found out at MIX that you can actually install custom project templates for Visual Studio Express. For some reason I thought it was not possible. The best way to solve these issues is through ......

Sample code and slides for my TechDays10 (Belgium) talks

The source code for my MVVM talk titled “Understanding the MVVM Pattern” given at TechDays 2010 in Antwerpen, Belgium, is available online. It is actually the same code than the MIX10 one, but I added the Windows Phone 7 MVVM Light application (available in the folder titled “Mix10.MvvmDemo2-End”. Note: before unpacking the zip file, you should right click on it, and select properties / Unblock. I also published the slides for my two talks: Understanding the MVVM Pattern A day in the life of a WPF/SL ......