WP7
There are 21 entries for the tag
WP7
I have been working on a Windows Phone application for the user group that I help to run and have been experiencing head ache after head ache. The problem isn’t the Windows Phone development itself. The issues are with the external web service APIs that I am trying to use for sites like SlideShare and Box.net. The main issue is that while there is a lot of documentation and examples for the output of the APIs, the input format is sketchy at best. The web service for SlideShare, for example, requires...
Posted On Wednesday, May 09, 2012 1:20 PM | Feedback (0)
In a previous post I talked about using the JSON to LINQ features of JSON.NET. Thanks to Bil Simser I was able to do some testing of the deserialization capabilities of this library. The key was his hint to leverage the json2csharp web site. Below is the C# representation of the search results for a Twitter query created by putting an example of the search result into this site. public class Url{ public string url { get; set; } public string expanded_url { get; set; } public string display_url {...
Posted On Friday, January 13, 2012 12:28 PM | Feedback (0)
My first Windows Phone app, Little League Coach, has just been released into the marketplace. If you have ever helped coach a team where every player bats every inning this app should help keep your sanity. It is a simple application to allow little league coaches to manage the lineup for a game as well as keep track of batter rotation. As a bonus it tracks pitches and outs during an inning. Here are a few screen shots from the application. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone 7,WP7,Windows Phone Marketplace...
Posted On Wednesday, December 21, 2011 8:40 AM | Feedback (0)
A co-worker was showing me an in phone scripting environment on the iPhone and I knew I had seen one mentioned for the Windows Phone before. TouchDevelop is an app from Microsoft Research that allows you to create small applications that do a wide variety of operations including using most of the capabilities of the device. So could this be a fun way for us geeks to waste some time while waiting for our oil to be change or a table to open up at your favorite restaurant? So what does this language...
Posted On Tuesday, December 20, 2011 8:29 AM | Feedback (0)
The main way that Twitter provides feeds is through JSON. Unfortunately the version of the .NET Framework that is on the phone does not include the System.Runtime.Serializatio... namespace. Rather than trying to brute force the JSON feed I have been looking into using the Newtonsoft JSON.NET library. The first thing that I ran into with JSON.NET is that the documentation is severely tilted to the serialization side with almost no mention of deserialization. This would have been my preferred approach...
Posted On Wednesday, December 14, 2011 7:27 AM | Feedback (2)
This week I spent three day with close to 30 of my new best friends doing lots of Windows Phone coding and helping each other with our application. The sessions were lead by Jeff Blankenburg and Dave Bost who and kept the atmosphere light. This included us finding out a lot about Dave’s tastes in music. While most of the time was spent working on our individual apps we saw how an app is submitted to the market place and what you can prep your app for the market place using the Marketplace Test Kit....
Posted On Friday, December 09, 2011 7:02 AM | Feedback (0)
2011 has been an amazing year in which I ended up working on an exciting number of projects. SharePoint has continued to be the hottest requested technology that I deal with. At the same time Windows Phone 7 has put Microsoft back in the mobile market and I will be finishing off the year additionally writing for this platform. At the same time the old standards of WinForms and ASP.NET have not left our market space. Ultimately, the IT market is still on fire and I am looking forward to great things...
Posted On Friday, December 02, 2011 4:06 PM | Feedback (0)
While looking for a free alternative to Sketchflow I landed on the Cacoo web site. Any developer who decides to use the free Visual Studio tools may find themselves doing the same search. The base functionality of Cacoo is free although there are certain features that have fees attached to them such as extended stencils and templates. Cacoo doesn’t seem to have a template for WP7. It does have templates for iOS and Android development so I started with the Android template and started modidfying...
Posted On Monday, November 21, 2011 4:21 PM | Feedback (0)
I have seen a lot of articles about gestures but they require third party libraries or complex coding approaches. What I am going to present here isn’t strictly elegant or necessarily the best approach, but this is the way we would catch this type of event when we were still dealing with message loops. For the app that I have been working on I need to take action on the double-tap of a list item. The first question you have to ask your self is what a double-tap really is. It is in simplest terms...
Posted On Friday, October 07, 2011 12:22 AM | Feedback (1)
Even though this is one of the simplest tips it is one of the hardest to find someone who has documented it. So instead of just telling you I am going to take a quick sidebar first. I wouldn’t want you to feel you got jipped by stopping here. One thing that happened when I finished running the Mango update on my Samsung Focus was that the apps that I was testing forced me to uninstall them. Now it turns out that this wasn’t that the SDK needed to be upgraded, but that the device had to be reregistered....
Posted On Tuesday, October 04, 2011 3:31 PM | Feedback (2)
A listbox can be a very boring display surface, but it doesn’t have to be. Ok, so it may never be exciting. At least we can create a more flexible output. The first element you need to learn about his the ItemTemplate which is in turn composed of a DataTemplate. As this combo implies it is bound to each item/data row. We will start organizing your base layout with a Grid control. Within the Grid you can add a RowDefintions group. A RowDefinition helps when you want components to be stacked for a...
Posted On Friday, September 02, 2011 12:24 AM | Feedback (0)
There are many reasons that you may want to add email capability to your Windows Phone 7 application. There are a number of ways you can communicate information out from an application. The mechanism for sending email from your WP7 application is the EmailComposeTask API. The difference between this API and the one that you would use for an ASP.NET application is that it opens a screen to allow the user to select an account to use and then creates a message which the user then has to send. This makes...
Posted On Monday, August 22, 2011 3:31 PM | Feedback (0)
One of the things that is important to learn when you are developing any application is how it will interact with the environment it lives in. I’m not talking about simply interacting with files or database but with major resources. With WP7 there are a number of things such as the photos, browser, maps and the phone itself that your application may be concerned with. The WP7 development API includes a number of access points to give your application greater reach. These APIs can be found here. They...
Posted On Friday, August 19, 2011 9:04 AM | Feedback (0)
I originally started looking for how to make a TextBox have autocomplete capability. Strangely all the articles said that it couldn’t be done. The last thing you want is for your applications to make your users struggle entering information when every other application gives them a quicker entry method. So what is the solution? The TextBox tag has an InputScope property which if you set it to Text it builds a dictionary list as the user types. For the other InputScope types it mainly changes the...
Posted On Wednesday, August 17, 2011 3:16 PM | Feedback (0)
When you have an application that navigates to more than one level of pages you find situations where you don’t want to go back to the previous page. Originally I was thinking that the answer was to capture the OnBackButton event and force the navigation back to the main page, but through several posts I found that this would not pass certification. Here is a link that really helped to figure out a more appropriate solution. To be a little more complete here is example code that you can use use for...
Posted On Tuesday, August 16, 2011 12:22 AM | Feedback (0)
Almost every example of a Silverlight ListBox that I have found merely shows how to get data bound to it, not what to do once you get it there. What good is a ListBox that you can’t get a reference back from? The quickest practical way is to hold your original datasource and use the index of the selected item as you key back into your data. It isn’t pretty and you wouldn’t want to take this approach with large amounts of data, but then again a mobile device isn’t meant to display large amounts of...
Posted On Monday, August 15, 2011 9:48 AM | Feedback (0)
Often times you want to you need to update a page when you enter it or save information automatically when you leave it. When you look through the events list on the property page you won’t find an event that occurs at those points in the page lifecycle. Intellisense is your friend in this case. The events OnNavigateTo and OnNavigateFrom can be overridden to give your application the required functionality. Below is a sample signature for OnNavigateTo. protected override void OnNavigatedTo(System.Window...
Posted On Sunday, August 14, 2011 1:08 AM | Feedback (0)
The saga goes on. There is always something more to learn. While I thought that ManipulationCompleted would do the trick from me it turned out it won’t. It turns out that if you want to figure out what PanoramaItem you are on when the user navigates between PanoramaItems the SelectionChanged event in conjunction with the SelectedItem on the Panorama works pretty well. private void Panorama_SelectionChanged(o... sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e){ PanoramaItem item = (PanoramaItem)Panorama.Sele...
Posted On Friday, August 12, 2011 4:02 PM | Feedback (0)
Creating a WP7 application with a Panorama page is fairly simple. Teaching it to do tricks is another thing altogether. As with most development controls the key is to learn the event model along with the object model. Knowing what manipulation means, when it happens and what the different levels it occurs at can be a great benefit. This was the case when I wanted to make sure that a particular item was updated before the user got to a particular PanoramaItem. The visibility of a PanoramaItem does...
Posted On Friday, August 12, 2011 6:20 AM | Feedback (0)
Windows Phone 7 development is an exciting topic. I have been exploring WP7 development for a little while now and I figured I would post some of the basic concepts that might be helpful to beginners. So here they are in no particular order. Panorama control I kept seeing references to the Panorama Control. It seems that this was a control that existed separately during the beta for WP7. In the final release this is now incorporated into a page type, so you won’t see the control in the toolbox. So...
Posted On Friday, April 01, 2011 2:04 AM | Feedback (0)
It is that time again. Time to polish up you presentation skills on your favorite language or technology features. The Chicago Code Camp is accepting proposals for presentations. Show everyone in the Chicago area what you know and submit your own. I really enjoyed presenting last year and just had to submit a proposal for this year. This time around my topic is Increasing Collaboration with Windows Phone 7, SharePoint 2010 and Office Open XML. I had a much longer title but the site forced me to shorten...
Posted On Saturday, February 19, 2011 3:04 AM | Feedback (0)