Published on Sunday, December 11, 2011 11:25:00 AM UTC in
Programming
Now that the final version of Silverlight 5 is released, I've gone through all my posts and articles that were based on the beta or RC version and updated the code or text where applicable. I've also fixed links so they now point to the final documentation. As a convenience, I have compiled a complete list of the changes I've made - which gives you an idea what has changed in the final release compared to the beta/RC versions.
Published on Thursday, December 8, 2011 10:49:00 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
To me personally, NuGet is one of the greatest additions to a .NET developer's life during the last years. It's simple to use, makes your life easier, and simply works. I like how quickly it is adopted by customers, friends and public projects, and extensively used everywhere. However, I often see that people do not know about all the available features and sometimes even create custom solutions to problems that are already solved by built-in options. In this post, I randomly pick three features you should know about when you're working with NuGet, and create your own packages.
Published on Thursday, December 1, 2011 5:40:00 PM UTC in
Programming
Someone recently asked me about how to use the same code base for both Windows Phone and a .NET application. This is a topic that people become more and more interested in it seems. It has the potential to save time and maintenance costs, but it can also cause you quite some headache. In this post I'm going to talk about your options regarding code sharing between multiple platforms, using my open source library PAARC as an example.
Published on Sunday, November 20, 2011 7:07:50 PM UTC in
Programming
Similar to the idea behind my project "Your Last About Dialog" (YLAD) I have created an implementation of a generic options/settings dialog for Windows Phone. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to set up such a dialog, but at the same time keep all options to extend and customize it when required. The features in detail are:
Published on Thursday, November 17, 2011 4:22:00 PM UTC in
Programming
One of the attendees of my recent webinar on sockets programming for Windows Phone (you can watch it online on Silverlight Show here) brought up a rather complex issue in the Q&A session that I then took offline for further review. As it turns out, what he was facing is not one, but even two bugs in (desktop) Silverlight's multicast client implementation. At first I thought this may be a problem with Silverlight 5, but amazingly everything described here seems to be valid for Silverlight 4 too. I don't know whether this also affects Windows Phone, but since the platforms presumably share that code it's likely.
Published on Thursday, November 10, 2011 3:49:00 PM UTC in
Programming
I have strong faith in Microsoft's code quality. When I run into problems and errors in my components, I always assume I did something wrong. Why shouldn't I? In almost all cases it indeed is me who has done something wrong - apparently I'm very good at screwing up :). Unfortunately, in some cases it's not me.
Published on Friday, November 4, 2011 8:52:19 PM UTC in
Tools
& Programming
Inspired by a blog post from Jeff Wilcox back in July (here), I started creating a generic about dialog for Windows Phone based on his initial ideas and design. Over time I improved the code more and more, created new features and avoided pitfalls, and eventually added localization support. At this point I think it's a pretty handy piece of code that is also interesting for others to use in their applications, and it has proven to be robust and reliable by multiple applications in the Marketplace that use it. Remembering my own "reinventing the wheel" issues with about and help screens, I hope that this addition will indeed be "your last about dialog", serving all your requirements. Included features:
Published on Thursday, November 3, 2011 5:42:58 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
Shortly after I got my Windows Phone I had the idea of creating an app that lets me remotely control my desktop computer. The reason for that was that lazy me needed to use a clumsy and error-prone full-size wireless keyboard and mouse when I wanted to surf the web from my couch, using the small media PC connected to my TV set. Wouldn't it be nicer to use the much more handy mobile phone as input device? Unfortunately the RTM version of Windows Phone was missing some networking features for that – using web services or http wasn't what I was looking for. The Mango release changed that, because TCP/UDP socket support was added to the platform.
Published on Thursday, October 27, 2011 1:33:43 PM UTC in
Programming
When you're developing an application or component that does some sort of background processing, you are often in need to dispatch messages back to the UI thread, for example to report progress to the user, to otherwise manipulate UI elements, or to execute any logic that is bound to the UI thread by platform limitations or similar circumstances. On Windows Phone, a simple way to do this is to use the globally accessible Deployment.Current.Dispatcher object that allows you to post messages to the UI thread. More flexible methods capture the current (dispatcher) synchronization context, if applicable, and use that to post messages, for example. No matter what method is used, there's a subtle problem with that which can come quite unexpected. I don't dare to call this a bug (yet); I think it is simply a side effect and logical consequence of how the application lifetime is handled on the phone, however if you're not prepared for it, it can cause a lot of confusion.
Published on Tuesday, October 18, 2011 5:24:52 AM UTC in
Programming
Logging and Tracing on the phone is somewhat limited because your options of logging targets are. Popular targets like databases or the event log are not available at all or only work in the emulator (console), and others like log files are rather inconvenient, because your only option is to write to isolated storage. Luckily, all common logging frameworks offer additional options that can be used from Windows Phone too, in particular remote targets like writing to a web service. NLog introduced experimental support for Windows Phone back in January and finally included it in the official 2.0 release in July. Unfortunately, an important feature of logging to a web service is broken. Here is how to fix that.
