wintellect-blogs|Feb 2, 2011

Tombstoning Pivot Controls in Silverlight for Windows Phone

If you’re a Windows phone developer, you’ve figured out by now that tombstoning is an essential part of the application lifecycle, and that every application must be architected with tombstoning in mind. What is tombstoning? In short, while Windows phones are perfectly capable of running several applications at once, only OEMs can write apps that…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 1, 2011

Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #2

Phone developers sometimes bemoan the fact that Silverlight for Windows Phone lacks syndication classes such as SyndicationFeed and SyndicationItem. In the desktop versions of Silverlight, these classes simplify the task of consuming RSS feeds, as well as other types of feeds such as ATOM. It’s a well-documented fact that you can work around this by…
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missing-export|Jan 31, 2011

The Visual State Manager Explained

This evening I presented a talk that dove into the details of Silverlight’s Visual State Manager. I enjoyed the talk and had a terrific crowd with some very good questions. The deck explains much of what I went into with the talk, including exactly how the VSM works from when and how it starts and…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 31, 2011

A Matter of State, Part 3

The previous 2 posts discussed using the Page and Application State Dictionaries to restore state following the application being tombstoned, as well as some other potential uses for the Application State Dictionary.  This final post in the series will cover the user of Isolated Storage from Windows Phone applications. Isolated Storage Basics Isolated Storage provides…
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missing-export|Jan 28, 2011

A Matter of State, Pt 2

The previous post discussed using the Page State Dictionary to restore a page’s state when navigating back to that page following the application being tombstoned. This post will discuss the use of the Application State Dictionary, and the final post in the series will discuss using Isolated Storage. The Application State Dictionary The Application State…
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wintellect-blogs|Jan 27, 2011

Random Cool Things

In the last week or so, there’s been a number of interesting emails pass through my inbox. So interesting in fact, I wanted to make sure to share them. Aren’t those Code Metrics for .NET in Visual Studio great? I find them very helpful to give me interesting insights into code as I’m in the…
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Blogs|Jan 26, 2011

Using Home Server? Be Careful with the WHS V1 Update Release 2 (KB981089)

As I always have Process Explorer running in tray area, I noticed that with my computer doing nothing, the CPU icon was showing constant 10%-12% CPU utilization. It was one of the many SRVHOST.EXE processes, and running the RPC Endpoint Mapper Service and the Remote Procedure Call Service. Looking at it deeper, I saw there…
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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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missing-export|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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