One of the common misconceptions I’ve encountered when developers first start using the Task Parallel Library is that they think Tasks are just fancy threads. This is easy to assume because in a common case, calling Task.Run(…), it actually does run the...

Visual Studio provides a bunch of good code snippets for creating boilerplate code. For example if you type “prop” you get this in intellisense You’ll see a few nice property snippets. prop – creates a basic automatic...

Helpful quick and dirty debugging tip: I never noticed this before, but if you send a large amount of text to MessageBox.Show() on Windows Phone, it doesn’t just truncate it. It allows you to scroll through it all. Very cool. Very unlike the desktop message...

Lets say I have a phone app (or any app really) that needs to make several web service calls at once. For example, imagine the user multiselects three items on a page and then taps the “add favorite” button. I then need to make three calls to the “set...

I got bitten by this not once but twice on Sunday as I hurriedly worked on a new phone app. Can you spot the difference between the the following two lines? Uri uri = new Uri( string .Format( " /View/DataView.xaml?collection={0}&id={1} "...

I have an app in the Windows Phone Marketplace which suddenly saw a spike in Little Watson email reports back to me last weekend. Each one looked like the last so I responded back to each user (always keep the user’s happy!) and went to investigate. The...

I recently had an ObservableCollection which did not currently contain the item I was interested in, but it would sometime in the near future. The questions is how best to get notified that the item is available so I could access its full property set...

Whenever I’m travelling I always have two freshly pinned tiles at the bottom of my start screen. Before I leave, I use my phone to look up the hotel I’m staying at and the location I’m visiting (like a customer’s address) and pin them both to the start...

I’ve gotten rather fond of using the Reactive Extensions for populating my data from the web in my Windows Phone applications. They provide a lot of flexibility and the code stays in a readable form. To demonstrate in a traditional MVVM model, let’s drop...

Just a quick tip for Windows Phone users regarding the onscreen keyboard. Most people I’ve talked to who complain about using an onscreen keyboard have a common issue. They are looking at what they type. This is their biggest mistake. When I first started...

From the App Hub’s news comes information on how to update your Windows Phone to Mango today in order to test those apps you have been building with on real hardware. The Windows Phone Developer team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of...

By default the Pivot Control on Windows Phone 7 simply displays a TextBlock as the title of the control. But what if you want to modify the title’s control template? Creating a default Windows Phone Pivot Application we see that the MainPage.xaml contains...

I’ve been using Reactive Extensions for .NET to attempt to wait until multiple async calls to load data are completed in order to perform some actions on all the data at once. Dev Tidbit of the Day Do not use ForkJoin with Event based observables. If...

Not the guidelines you must follow in order to pass the Marketplace ingestion process - these are the guidelines you should keep in mind and follow in order to make your app fit in well with the overall Windows Phone 7’s Metro UI. Jeff Wilcox’s “Metro...

No, unfortunately its not that update . It’s a small update designed to improve the software update process. Still, it is the first update for the phone and is paving the way for all the cut-n-paste & performance enhancing goodness of updates to come...

The new version of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit is available. Biggest things I want to highlight: PerformanceProgressBar built in (no more copying finding that older blog entry) TiltEffect for controls to match the phone’s Metro interface...

The Windows Phone 7 development articles are now published. They are aimed at guiding you through all the fundamentals of WP7 development, starting with “Hello World”. The topics are presented in a recommended order for newbies (like chapters of an intro...

In the last post I discussed how to create a custom page transition with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit that used your own local storyboard. That’s all well and good but there some nice changes we might like to see. Lets allow the storyboard...

Come and get it! The new developer tools include updated reference assemblies, a new version of the Windows Phone OS emulator image, and several minor bug fixes. This update also replaces the October 2010 update, including all of the fixes from that patch...

The Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit provides the mechanism for creating animated page transitions in your Windows Phone 7 applications. It also provides a few standard transitions that match the look and feel of the built in apps such as pages sliding...

The Windows Phone team recently released the Windows Phone 7 Recipe for Push Notifications which is much more in-depth than my simple server helper class . While it maintains the simplicity I was after server side with actions like this to send a tile...

Windows Phone iconography is a key part of the Metro look so the SDK provides a number of icons that match the look and feel of the built in apps on the phone. If you have the tools installed they are located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows...

I forgot to post this yesterday when we saw it go live but … Windows Phone Marketplace reporting is now available ! Reporting isn't always the most exciting thing in the world, but it sure helps make it interesting if that reporting is directly related...

My pal Girish has a whole host of tips for Windows Phone interaction.The vast majority come down to the one thing I tell everyone when they say “How do I do X?” The answer is Press and Hold Try it! Try it everywhere! Then build it into your apps as well...

The Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools has been officially released. So if you were a Visual Basic developer who wanted to develop applications for Windows Phone 7 but didn’t have the C# skills to dive right in – no more worries. This release...