A common desire for a mobile application is showing a welcome / login type screen initially when an account is required and the user first runs the app. My past two Windows Phone apps have not needed this but my current one does. I thought it would be very simple and straightforward; just check some…
Windows Phone: App Config Settings – Thinking Outside the Box
File this post under the OCD, late night, crazy category. I just started a new Windows Phone application and have been working on a client for a service my app depends on. I wanted to test out the service interactions but with unit tests of my WP7 class library, not via building out a user…
Upgrading to Windows Phone Mango Beta 2 – Is that All?
<Rant> The development experience may be pleasant for Windows Phone but the setup and upgrade process could sure use some smoothing out. On iOS I hate having to download and install a new version of XCode for each new SDK release (even minor updates) but at least it is pretty straightforward. I am sure that…
CodeStock 2011 App for Windows Phone 7
The most excellent CodeStock conference is just around the corner on June 3-4th and I’m really looking forward to it. Michael Neel and company have done a great job with this Knoxville-based developer / IT / entrepreneurs conference and it has come a long way in a short time since its inception in 2008. It…
WP7 In-app Searching, Filtering Part II
In my first post on WP7 in-app searching / filtering I presented a quick, first pass solution to this task. Justin Angel left some good suggestions in his comments and I wanted to enhance this feature a bit now that I’ve finally had a little bit of time to return to Windows Phone development. This…
WP7 In-App Searching, Filtering
Update: Part II builds on the below. A first pass attempt Yesterday I was searching for some examples of searching and filtering data in Windows Phone 7. I was a bit surprised I did not find anything really; when I asked on the WP7 Forum, the result was the same. So last night I spent…
Read More Another WP7 Navigation Approach with MVVM
There are various ways to navigate between views in a Windows Phone 7 application. The first example you typically see is an event wired into a View’s code-behind that calls NavigationService.Navigate(uri). How do we navigate using an MVVM pattern though? There are various ways to do that both manually and using an existing MVVM framework,…
Read More WP7 Orientation Based Scrolling
The main home view for my WP7 app has 7 main menu items in a ListBox and scrolling is not needed when the phone is in Portrait orientation. However I noticed that although a scrollbar does not appear, the ListBox was still scrollable in Portrait mode anyway. At first I set the ListBox’s VerticalScrollBarVisiblity to…
Read More Basic Windows Phone 7 Diagnostics
In preparing an error handling solution for my Windows Phone 7 application, I wanted to collect some basic diagnostic data including basic memory use, phone, and app details. Also for WP7 Marketplace certification, an app cannot consume more than 90 MB of memory, unless the phone has more than 256 MB of memory. See section…
Read More Windows Phone 7 Error Handling, Reporting
I decided to create a a basic error handling infrastructure with an Error Window for my Windows Phone 7 application with the following in mind: Informing user of a problem Displaying a user-friendly error message in Release mode Displaying a developer-friendly full error message in Debug mode Offering a more robust window than MessageBox API…
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