I created a quick video to help you get started with using Jounce. The video starts with a blank slate, steps through installation of Jounce and the creation of a sample view model for a simple contact record that includes validation. You can access the video directly at http://vimeo.com/jeremylikness/jounce-getting-started, or view it below: ...

Many thanks to the attendees of my presentation tonight covering Developing Cloud Enabled Windows Phone Applications with Windows Azure.  I apologize once again for the technical network-related gremlins that decided to attack us tonight…hopefully the workaround covered the necessary ground and everyone was able to see the concepts I was ...

While writing Chapter 14 of my book, Designing Silverlight Business Applications: Best Practices for Using Silverlight Effectively in the Enterprise (Microsoft .NET Development Series) I focused on an area that is quite common with line of business applications: extremely large data sets. In the example I generated almost 1,000,000 contact rows to ...

I had a great time talking about the Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone at the Windows Phone Camp event in Cambridge, MA earlier today.  I have posted the slide deck here for those who are interested in getting at the web links it contains. If you missed the event and/or are interested in other Windows Phone Camp events, more ...

Once again speculation and worry has developers around the world biting their fingers and lamenting the end of a new era. It almost seems developers want to stick a fork in their Silverlight development because so many are latching onto the hype wagon, calling .NET ''legacy'' and refusing to see the bigger picture. Microsoft announces a new ...

Tomorrow is the start of the major event that has been hyped as heralding the most significant changes to Windows in the past 15 years (the last was when Windows 95 was announced). There has been a lot of speculation around what will happen tomorrow. Some people claim it will be the death of Silverlight and even managed code, while others hope to ...

Many thanks to the organizers and attendees of this year’s Vermont Code Camp.   This event continues to set the bar for excellence, and a ton of credit is due to Julie Lerman, Rob Hale, and the rest of the volunteers who all clearly work quite hard to pull it all together. I have uploaded the code and content from my “What’s New in ...

Every now and then a question comes up concerning a missing DataContext.  The questions usually center around a ViewModel being set to a View properly, but then developer can not bind some command or property to a FrameworkElement.  And typically the FrameworkElement in question is nested within an ItemsControl’s ItemTemplate or other ...

Now that I have upgraded my phone to the Windows Phone 7.1 Developers’ Preview, one of the features I’ve been anxious to try out is Custom Ringtones – the default tones and the ones provided by AT&T are “interesting”, but they’re just not “me.”  Windows Phone 7.1 (AKA Mango) supports custom ringtones – but how do you go about making that ...

One of the “interesting” things about Silverlight apps running on Windows is that on touch/tablet systems, textboxes in Silverlight do not display a popup button to use for bringing up the Windows onscreen keyboard when they have focus, whereas native applications do. WPF / Native Window following a “Touch” in a textbox Silverlight ...