Windows Phone: ListBox and ScrollViewer performance improvment

Read some intressting facts from the Windows Phone Performance team blog about performance improvments for the ListBox and ScrollViewer with Mango for Windows Phone: Listbox – ScrollViewer performance improvement for Mango and how it impacts your existing application? - Silverlight for Windows Phone Performance team blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Silverlight 5 goes to desktop application platform

With the new version Silverlight 5 (beta available) the sandbox of an Silverlight app will be nearly destroyed. If you run your Silverlight application in elevated trust mode as out-of-browser application you can access now to the whole local file system and using P/Invoke to call a Win32-Api function. This will give us as developers a total new scope for Silverlight applications. We can now concept Silverlight applications that have native access to local resources like scanners, 3rd party applications and the whole file system – I love this, because the necessity of using WPF nearly disappears.

Pete Brown give us a flavour of new Silverlight applications that uses several operating windows:

Silverlight 5: Working with Operating System Windows - Pete Brown's 10rem.net

Windows Phone 7– A taste of Mango for developers

The Mango update for Windows Phone 7 was announced at the Mix11 for end of 2011. But the capabilities of Mango are coming a little bit earlier to developers next month with the new Windows Phone tools.

Jese Liberty has now published a few code samples and decriptions for a few key features that will come with Mango.

SQL Server CE

Coming in Mango–Sql Server CE | Jesse Liberty

Access to Calendar and Contacts

Coming in Mango–Query the Contacts List | Jesse Liberty

Silverlight 4 as the new base brings

Coming in Mango–Implicit Styles | Jesse Liberty

Coming In Mango–ICommand | Jesse Liberty

Notifications - Reminders and Alarms

What’s Coming In Mango–Reminders | Jesse Liberty

Windows Phone 7: GPS emulator

In your Windows Phone device you have a built-in Assisted GPS (aGPS), which can be used to access location informations by using the System.Device.Location namespace. The GeoCoordinateWatcher class supplies location data based on latitude and longitude coordinates. This is nice, but if you want to develop such an application it is necessary to emulate the GPS sensor.

In this Windows Phone Team Blog a very good article can be found to achieve this goal.

Debugging Windows Phone 7 device traffic with Fiddler

Eric Law on his MSDN blog has detailed a method using Fiddler to watch your phone's data traffic over WiFi (so this won't help with that 3G issue). Primarily this is a great tool for developers to make sure their app is not using excess data in any way but it can also be useful for those who just want to know what's going on.

Debugging Windows Phone 7 device traffic with Fiddler - Fiddler Web Debugger - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

Windows Phone recipes – Open source projects

Windows Phone recipes are open source (MSPL) projects aimed at helping Windows Phone developers with their Windows Phone applications. Recipes are usually common patterns for topics that require some attention. The idea is to provide a sample with some reusable code that can be reused later and modified to fit other similar scenarios. Developers are more than welcome to use them as is, or to change them as they see fit.

Windows Phone Recipes – Helping the Community

Windows Phone 7: Some links

• Marketplace Reporting is available and first payements will start: Marketplace: Reporting ist da, erste Zahlungen im Januar - LIFE IN MOTION - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
• Activate more than three developer devices for a Marketplace account: WP7: Mehr als 3 Entwicklergeräte freischalten–wie? - LIFE IN MOTION - Site Home - MSDN Blogs
• How to detect if Zune is running during ChooserTasks: Kodierer [Coder]: Windows Phone Unplugged - How to Detect the Zune Software - Rene Schulte - Coding .Net and Silverlight with C#
• Some nice Windows Phone 7 tutorials: eugenedotnet blog | All about Windows Phone 7 and other Microsoft technologies.
• Windows Phone 7 and Cloud Connection: Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide

Windows Phone 7: Customize live tiles, push notification

Found a good article of Chris Koenig about customizing the tiles with Windows Phone 7 Push Notification Services:

Customizing WP7 Push Notification Tiles « Development « Chris Koenig

Windows Phone 7: Recording the microphone

Description and sample project for recording something with the Windows Phone 7 microphone.

Writing a Proper Wave File - CodeProject

Windows Phone 7: Video Player with MVVM pattern

If you plan to implement a video player for Windows Phone 7 you could found a good solution using the MVVM pattern here: Windows Phone 7 View Model Style Video Player - CodeProject

Windows Phone 7: Create custom Pushpin for Bing maps

Good article about creating a custom Pushpin for Bing maps, that I used for my Runner’s app:

How to Create a Custom Pushpin Control Template in Expression Blend for Windows Phone 7 Bing Maps - Nick Harris .NET

Windows Phone 7: No forward navigation

Information forward navigation at Windows Phone 7:

Navigation Stack on Windows Phone 7 - Peter Foot - APPA Mundi

“While Windows Phone uses the same NavigationService and page-based model as “regular” Silverlight, one area the documentation doesn’t make clear is that although the APIs seem to support both Back and Forward navigation in reality there is no forward navigation on Windows Phone. This means when you navigate to a new page and then return Back to the previous page you can’t call NavigationService.GoForward() to return. CanGoForward will always return False. In the documentation for System.Windows.Controls.Frame (the base class of PhoneApplicationFrame) GoForward is described as:-

“Navigates to the most recent entry in the forward navigation history, or throws an exception if no entry exists in forward navigation. For Windows Phone this method will always throw an exception because there is no forward navigation stack.”

(my use of bold)”

Windows Phone 7: Handle Back button for a open popup

If you are pressing the back button in your Windows Phone 7 app with an opened popup, the NavigationService will leave the current page and navigate back to the previous page on the navigation stack.

To close the popup instead of navigating, you can use this: Handling the “Back” Button with a Popup Open on Windows Phone 7 | Toetapz's Blog

Windows Phone 7: Using threading for heavy operations

For developers of Windows Phone 7 apps it is important to know all existing concepts of scheduling tasks on Windows Phone 7. At Windows Phone 7 the core threads are the Compositor Thread which interacts with the GPU and the UI Thread. The UI Thread is the main thread, where all your code will normally be executed. But the UI Thread have to handle some important events of the OS and is responsible for the layout management. Therefore it is not a good idea to do heavy actions in the UI thread, because then your app will loose very quickly the “smooth” experience of Windows Phone 7.

The normal way is to create for this heavy operations (parsing JSON, rendering bitmaps, etc.) a new thread directly or using the  BackgroundWorker class. An alternative way you can found at

Scheduling tasks on Windows Phone 7 | .NET Zone.

Instead of using the direct ways for new thread creation, you could use the built-in scheduling mechanism which are in the namespace Microsoft.Phone.Reactive. The Scheduler class in this namespace allows you to defer execution of pretty much everything you need. You can either directly operate with Scheduler or via IScheduler, that will get a thread instance from Scheduler.

Windows Phone 7 – Integrate your App in standard picture viewer

With Windows Phone 7 you can integrate your own application seamlessly into the Windows Phone built-in photo viewer. The key to this feature is the Extras.xml file.

You have to place a new xml file with the name Extras.xml to your Windows Phone 7 project root. Set the properties to Copy to Output Directory and select Copy always.

   1: <Extras>

   2:   <PhotosExtrasApplication>

   3:     <Enabled>true</Enabled>

   4:     <StorageFolder>Incoming</StorageFolder>

   5:   </PhotosExtrasApplication>

   6: </Extras>

For the StorageFolder attribute you can choose your own name.

More informations you could find here: How to: Create a Photo Extras Application for Windows Phone

Windows Phone 7: Virtualization of the List control

One fantastic feature of Silverlight is that you can "virtualize" the UI objects needed to render a list, reducing the amount of memory and CPU necessary to load large lists. So you can bind a ListBox to 1.000.000 items, but you create only ListBoxItems for the first 100 items. This helps you to make your Windows Phone 7 App a little bit quicker if you want to work with large data lists.

The only thing you have to do is to derive your data source from IList. This fact triggers Silverlight to do data virtualization.

More informations about this feature you can found at Peter Torr’s Blog:

Virtualizing Data in Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Applications - Peter Torr's Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs

High performance apps for Windows Phone 7

Here you could some very good tips to build high performace apps for Windows Phone 7 with Silverlight.

At compiledexperience.com they have a lot of new samples of Windows Phone 7 applications.

Drag & Drop with Silverlight 4

In our new project we use the new Drag and Drop features of Silverlight 4. This new feature increase the usability of any Sliverlight application.

More informations could be found on Tim Heuers blog: Silverlight Toolkit adds DragDrop targets!

Visual Studio 2010 Webcasts und Quick Hits Links

Oliver Scheer hat auf seiner Seite jede Menge nützlicher Links und Webcasts zum Themenkreis Visual Studio 2010 zusammengestellt: o-LIVE-r : Visual Studio 2010 Webcasts und Quick Hits Links

IDE Quick Hits

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Multi-Line Editing

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Intellisense

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Generate from Usage

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Multi-Targeting

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Navigate To

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Extension Manager

VS 2010 Quick Hit: Exportable Breakpoints

Webcasts

Überblick

Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 - Highlights

Anwendungsentwicklung mit Visual Studio 2010

Application Development mit Visual Studio 2010 (Teil 1 von 5) - Agile Software Development mit VS 2010

Application Development mit Visual Studio 2010 (Teil 2 von 5) - Entwicklung einer Windows Forms Anwendung mit VS 2010

Application Development mit Visual Studio 2010 (Teil 3 von 5) - Testing der Windows Forms Anwendung mit VS 2010

Application Development mit Visual Studio 2010 (Teil 4 von 5) - Erweiterung der Anwendung mit dem ASP.NET MVC 2, WF 4 und EF 4 (Part 1)

Application Development mit Visual Studio 2010 (Teil 5 von 5) - Erweiterung der Anwendung mit dem ASP.NET MVC 2, WF 4 und EF 4 (Part 2)

IDE

Visual Studio 2010 - Die Entwicklungsumgebung

Sprachen

C# 4.0 - Neues im Überblick

Neue Features in Visual Basic 2010 - Intellisense, Interop & mehr?

VS 2010 und C++ - Was gibt es Neues?

Die Dynamic Language Runtime - Dynamische Sprachen auf .NET

IronPython im Überblick - Python-Programmierung auf dem Microsoft .NET Framework

Frameworks

Managed Extensibility Framework - Eine Einführung

Windows Workflow 4 - Die Neuerungen

Parallele Programmierung mit .NET 4.0 - Neue Methoden zur Multikern-Programmierung

Neuheiten in ASP.NET 4.0 - Teil 1 - Neue Funktionen in den ASP.NET-Kerndiensten und neue Serversteuerelemente

Neuheiten in ASP.NET 4.0 - Teil 2 - Clientseitige Datenbindung mit ASP.NET AJAX, Verbesserungen der Steuerelemente und neue Funktion der IDE

ASP.NET MVC 2 - Eine Einführung

ASP.NET AJAX - Microsoft AJAX und das .NET Framework 4.0

Ribbon- und Backstage-Programmierung mit Visual Studio 2010 und Office 2010 - User Interface Integration in Office 2010 mit C# 4.0

MFC mit Visual Studio 2010 - Der Ribbon-Designer

Entity Framework 4 - Was ist neu?

WCF Data Services 1.5 - Was ist neu?

Team Foundation Server (Basic Installation)

Team Foundation Server 2010 für Einsteiger und kleine Teams (Teil 1 von 2) - TFS 2010 auf Windows 7 installieren bis zum ersten Check-In

Team Foundation Server 2010 für Einsteiger und kleine Teams (Teil 2 von 2) - Team Build und Version Control Branches einfach gemacht

Silverlight 4 released :-)

Die neue Version von Silverlight 4 kann unter www.microsoft.de/silverlight herunterladen geladen werden.

Silverlight 4 bietet neben erweiterten Funktionen zur Ausführung außerhalb des Browsers, auch Verbesserungen für Entwickler von Enterprise-Anwendungen, wie zum Beispiel die freigegebenen RIA Services, die lang ersehnte Druckerunterstützung und die einfache Integration mit anderen Anwendungen, wie zum Beispiel mit allen MS Office Produkten. So können Inhalte von Listen auf einfache Art und Weise nach Excel exportiert oder per Mail versendet werden.

Unter www.microsoft.de/silverlight findet man alle Informationen zu den neuen Features.

Zu den Top-Features der neuen Version von Silverlight 4 zählen:

• Umfassende Unterstützung für Druck ermöglicht die Erstellung einer virtuellen Druckansicht.
• Vertrauenswürdige Anwendungen: Benutzer können Anwendungen erhöhte Rechte einräumen. Der Zugriff auf lokale Ressourcen ist damit möglich.
• Silverlight 4 hat jetzt Webcam und Mikrofon Unterstützung. Diese erlauben das Senden von Video und Audio in Anwendungen wie zu Beispiel Chat oder Kundenservice. Hierdurch ergeben sich viele Möglichkeiten, wie die Aufnahme von Stimmnachrichten oder Videos, welche dann z.B. per Mail verschickt werden können.