A little over a year ago, I got tired of searching for a Google Reader client on Windows Phone that worked exactly how I wanted. So I started writing one myself. My plan was to create a simple, efficient app that began by doing as little as possible - and gradually add more advanced features as time...

The HTTP protocol supports data compression of network traffic via the Content-Encoding header . Compressing network traffic is beneficial because it reduces the amount of data that needs to be transmitted over the network - and sending fewer bytes obviously takes less time! The tradeoff is that it takes...

One of the challenges with referencing online content is that you never know just how long it will take to download... On a good day, images show up immediately and your application has exactly the experience you want. On a bad day, images take a looong time to load - or never load at all! - and your...

Tip Use a Transparent brush to make "empty" parts of a XAML element respond to mouse and touch input Explanation I got a question yesterday and thought the answer would make a good addition to my Development Tips series. As you probably know, WPF, Silverlight, and Windows Phone support a rich...

Recently, I wrote a post about the IListExtensions collection of extension methods I created to make it easy to maintain a sorted list based on any IList(T) implementation without needing to create a special subclass. In that post, I explained why I implemented IListExtensions the way I did and outlined...

If you want to display a dynamically changing collection of items in WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Phone, there are a lot of collection classes to pick from - but there's really just one good choice: ObservableCollection(T) . Although nearly all the IList(T) / ICollection(T) / IEnumerable(T) implementations...

One of the neat things about sharing code with the community is hearing how people have learned from it or are using it in their own work. Of course, the more people use something, the more likely they are to identify problems with it - which is great because it provides an opportunity to improve things...

The WebBrowser control is available in Silverlight 4, Windows Phone 7, and all versions of WPF. It's mostly the same everywhere, though there are some specific differences to keep in mind when using it on Silverlight-based platforms. WebBrowser offers two ways to provide its content: by passing a URI...

Just over a year ago, a couple of readers asked me about a WPF/Silverlight Panel that arranged things to make "best use" of available space without requiring the developer to set a bunch of stuff up in advance or know how many child elements there would be. Interestingly, this is not a scenario the default...

A few months ago I began a similar post about LowProfileImageLoader/DeferredLoadListBox updates by saying : Windows Phone 7 applications run on hardware that's considerably less powerful than what drives typical desktop and laptop machines. Therefore, tuning phone applications for optimum performance...

Two posts ago, I explained the benefits of pseudo-localization and showed an easy way to implement it for WPF - then said I'd outline how to do the same for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7. In my previous post, I went off on the seeming diversion of implementing a PNG encoder for Silverlight . With this...

At the end of my previous post about easily pseudo-localizing WPF applications , I said this post would show how to apply those concepts to a Silverlight application. Unfortunately, I seem to have made an off-by-one error : while this post is related to that topic, it is not the post I advertised. But...

I've previously written about the benefits of localization and shown how to localize Windows Phone 7 applications . The techniques I describe in that post constitute a good workflow that's just as suitable for WPF and Silverlight desktop applications! But even with good processes in place, the way localization...

As part of my previous post announcing the Delay.Web.Helpers assembly for ASP.NET and introducing the AmazonS3Storage class to enable easy Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) blob access from MVC/Razor/WebMatrix web pages , I made some changes to the BlobStoreApi.cs file it built on top of. BlobStoreApi...

While it might be convenient if everybody spoke the same language (or communicated via telepathy), that's not the world we live in. :) Therefore, building applications that can be easily translated to other languages is an important consideration. Fortunately, it's easy - and it's covered in the MSDN...

It feels like a long time since I last wrote about hash functions (though certain curmudgeonly coworkers would say not long enough!), and there were a few loose ends I've been meaning to deal with... Aside : If my hashing efforts are new to you, more information can be found in my introduction to...

I've previously blogged about my implementation of AnimateOrientationChangesFrame, FadeOrientationChangesFrame, and HybridOrientationChangesFrame . As part of my DynamicOrientationChanges sample, these classes smoothly animate an application's layout transition as the phone orientation changes from portrait...

A few weeks ago, Microsoft held its annual Professional Developer's Conference (PDC10) and I had the privilege of being a (small!) part of it. This year's content spanned a variety of topics, including Windows Azure , HTML 5 , Windows Phone 7 , and more ! The Channel 9 folks were there in force with...

If you've done much work with Binding s in Silverlight, you're probably aware that Silverlight doesn't support applying Binding s using a Style 's Setter the same way its big brother WPF does. This limitation isn't a big deal at first because people don't tend to need that until they're more familiar...

In yesterday's post, I announced the second release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit and gave an overview of the four new controls it includes. (For a discussion of the controls in the original Windows Phone Toolkit, please see my announcement for that release .) In today's post, I want to...

I'm happy to report that we've just published the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit November 2010 release ! This is the second iteration of the Windows Phone Toolkit and effectively doubles the number of controls we've created to help developers and designers build more compelling, more platform...

If you've used the Windows Phone 7 emulator to access the network, you might have noticed that in some environments it takes an absurdly long time for network activity to complete. For example, a single HTTP request with Internet Explorer or an HttpWebRequest from a custom Silverlight application can...

It was about five months ago that I blogged about BlobStore, a simple Silverlight 4 REST-based cloud-oriented file management app for Azure and S3 . I pitched it like this: It's a small, lightweight Silverlight 4 application that acts as a basic front-end for the Windows Azure Simple Data Storage...

Windows Phone 7 applications run on hardware that's considerably less powerful than what drives typical desktop and laptop machines. Therefore, tuning phone applications for optimum performance is an important task - and a challenging one! To help other developers, I previously coded and blogged about...

This isn't my first time discussing animating device orientation changes , so I won't spend a lot of time explaining the motivation. Here's where things left off last time: For "in your face" transitions, there's AnimateOrientationChangesFrame which animates the rotation interactively (but might get...