Published on Tuesday, May 1, 2012 11:46:42 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
I've released version 2.0 of my open source component "Your Last About Dialog". This major new release adds full styling support to the about page, which gives you complete control over the visual appearance of the component. This not only includes simple details like foreground and background colors, font sizes and styles, but also much more sophisticated things like the possibility to add page transitions from the Silverlight Toolkit, or control the visibility of the system tray and other details.
Published on Friday, April 20, 2012 6:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
Two days ago, almost one hundred attendees joined my webinar about advanced MVVM topics. I've used some sample scenarios on the Windows Phone platform to demonstrate typical problems (and possible solutions) that you potentially will run into when you apply the MVVM pattern to your applications. In particular, I talked about:
Published on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 5:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
Last week, Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell recorded an interview with me for their show "The Tablet Show". The show focuses on all kinds of mobile devices and covers WinRT/Metro, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and HTML5 development topics. If you haven't heard of it yet, check it out! You can expect the same fun and quality as with their other show ".NET Rocks!", which I'm sure you all know and are fans of :).
Published on Thursday, April 12, 2012 3:30:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the first parts of the series about developing the SilverlightShow Windows Phone app I explained the general development process and the technical details of accessing and optimizing the RSS feeds of the site. Now that we are able to access all of the content from the phone, the next step is to take a look at what was necessary to display what we have to the user while preserving a native look and feel. If you haven't seen the app in action, here is a short video about it.
Published on Wednesday, April 11, 2012 10:00:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the first part of this mini series I was mostly talking about the process of developing the SilverlightShow Windows Phone application, and didn't discuss any of the technical specifics. Today I want to dive into some of the details around downloading and optimizing RSS feeds. I not only want to give you insight into the particular problems we were facing, but also some hopefully useful advice and guidelines should you ever want to develop a similar feature for your own application. If you haven't used or seen the app yet, you can watch a quick intro video here and find it on the Marketplace here.
Published on Tuesday, April 10, 2012 5:50:00 AM UTC in
Philosophical
On the weekend various news sites reported that Windows Phone 8 is now starting to show up in the browser statistics of analytics services (e.g. here on WMPowerUser). To my surprise, this produced some negative reactions and comments. In the above linked article the first response, from a user named Julien, was:
Published on Thursday, April 5, 2012 4:55:00 AM UTC in
Programming
A new requirement has been established in the technical certification section for the Windows Phone Marketplace: Application Testability (5.1.4). Let's take a minute to look at the requirement in detail:
Published on Wednesday, March 21, 2012 12:30:00 PM UTC in
Programming
The guys over at SilverlightShow just released my first article on the creation of the Windows Phone app accompanying their web portal. In this mini-series of articles I share some of the experiences during the development of that said app, and focus on things that you probably don't see that often in other tutorials about Windows Phone on the web. One of the particular goals of the articles is to give you some insights in the development process of a real-world project, what problems you might be facing in such a project and how to deal with them. The first part solely talks about the development process itself, and what steps we performed to get the app development up and running. You can find the full article here:
Published on Sunday, March 11, 2012 12:09:00 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
A few weeks ago, I submitted the official Windows Phone app accompanying the SilverlightShow.net portal to the Marketplace. The app is completely free (also ad-free!) and presents you the content available on this platform. Today I've pushed a first update of the app to the Marketplace for certification, with some improvements to the notification tiles. You can now choose the interval the app goes out to check for updates to optimize battery life on your phone. I've also been eating my own dog food and have improved memory consumption of the involved background agent using the tips of my article series on the topic. If you haven't checked out the app yet, you can find it on the Marketplace here:
Published on Saturday, March 3, 2012 9:35:00 PM UTC in
Tools
Using a bootable VHD has proven to be a simple way to install and experience Windows 8 Developer Preview with its full features, without deleting your current operating system from your computer. If you are interested in using a similar technique for the just released Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then I can confirm that my previously published guide for the Developer Preview is fully compatible with this new release too:
