Francis K. Cheung

Prism for Windows Runtime: Validating User Input

2013-05-07T18:23:26Z

This is the fifth post in a series that walks you through creating a simple Windows Store app using the Prism for Windows Runtime library. Please review the fourth post in the series for the steps necessary to create the basic app based on MvvmAppBase. One feature that is missing from Windows Store app sdk is control support for user input validation. In WPF and Silverlight, you would expect to implement INotifyDataErrorInfo/IDataErrorInfo and controls such as TextBox and ComboBox would show an error...(read more)

Prism for Windows Runtime: Integrating a Dependency Injection Container

2013-04-26T22:13:35Z

This is the fourth post in a series that walk you through creating a simple Windows Store app using the Prism for Windows Runtime library. Please review the third post in the series for the steps necessary to create the basic MVVM style app based on MvvmAppBase. You can get the latest source on CodePlex . The following procedure shows how to integrate a dependency injection container into a Windows Store app that leverages MvvmAppBase from the Microsoft.Practices.Prism.StoreApps library. Add a reference...(read more)

Prism for Windows Runtime: Creating and showing a Flyout using the FlyoutService class

2013-04-25T22:46:49Z

This is the third post in a series that walk you through creating a simple Windows Store app using the Prism for Windows Runtime library. Please review the second post in the series for the steps necessary to create the basic MVVM style app based on MvvmAppBase. You can get the latest source on CodePlex . The following procedure shows how to create and show a Flyout by using the Microsoft.Practices.Prism.StoreApps library. You will discover how to use the FlyoutService class within a view model to...(read more)

Prism for Windows Runtime: Creating a basic implementation of the MVVM pattern

2013-04-25T18:38:56Z

This is the second blog post in a series that walk you through creating a simple Windows Store app using the Prism for Windows Runtime library. Please review the first post in the series for the steps necessary to create the basic app based on MvvmAppBase. MvvmAppBase exposes several services including the FrameNavigationService which is necessary for both navigation and view model state persistence. You can get the latest source on CodePlex . The following procedure shows how to create a basic implementation...(read more)

Prism for Windows Runtime

2013-04-24T23:15:28Z

As Blaine Wastell posted , we are about to release the patterns & practices guidance for building Windows Store business apps. You may be thinking… “What is a business app?” and “How is a business app different than any other app?”. Well the simple answer is that a “business” app is expected to be well architected, maintainable, testable, and have high quality. Business apps may differ from simple content consumption apps in many ways. Business apps are more likely to need data validation. There...(read more)

SHIPPED!!! Windows Phone Developer Guidance updated for Mango (WP SDK 7.1)

2012-04-03T05:30:38Z

We dramatically updated our guidance around Windows Phone development . Beyond recompiling our previous guidance against the Mango SDK, the latest guidance takes advantage of many Mango features such as fast app switching, background tasks, and new sensor APIs. We also did a fair amount of work showing how to create a layer of abstraction on top of the Windows Phone APIs that facilitates unit testing. We split up our guidance into three parts: Developing a Windows Phone Application using the MVVM...(read more)

Running Windows Phone Unit Tests via MSBuild

2012-01-03T23:10:24Z

I’m a big fan of TDD and continuous integration, so when I first started development on Windows Phone 7, I quickly found Jeff Wilcox’s Silverlight Unit Test Framework . This unit testing framework provides a nice way to write MSTest style unit tests and have them run on a device/emulator. The piece that was missing for me was the ability to capture the results of the unit test run and include these results with an automated run of MSBuild. If any unit tests fail, the MSBuild run should fail. I’ve...(read more)

Tombstoning in Windows Phone 7.5

2011-12-08T00:54:22Z

There is quite a bit written on how to handle tombstoning on a Windows Phone. Most of the guidance is for code-behind developers. Here is an MSDN article ( How to: Preserve and Restore Page State for Windows Phone ) that shows how to use the Page’s OnNavigatedTo and OnNavigatedFrom methods to preserve and restore page state. This article proposes using an instance variable (_isNewPageInstance) to distinguish between navigating to the page due to dormancy or tombstoning. protected override void OnNavigatedTo...(read more)

Case Study: TailSpin Windows Phone Survey Application

2011-12-07T21:16:01Z

We are just about to release an update to the Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide that p&p shipped one year ago. The updated guidance takes the same scenario but updates the phone client application leveraging features in the Windows Phone 7.1 OS Mango release. We will ultimately publish the final bits and docs on MSDN in January but you can find it on CodePlex with in the next few weeks. Here are some topics we tackled in this new release: Support for Fast App Switching as well as Tombstoning Improved...(read more)

Composite Services Guidance: External Routing Configuration sample

2011-06-15T18:58:10Z

Let me give you a little background on this sample. If you look at the WCF Routing Service , you can quickly and easily configure a router with endpoints and message filters in the web.config. This is a great way to set up context based routing. You can configure a message filter that identifies messages that call specific methods, have certain information in the header. You can then forward messages that match this filter to a specific endpoint. The External Routing Configuration sample simply illustrates...(read more)