Alex Yakhnin's Blog

The feed reader app that I described in my previous post is ready to for beta testing. So if you own a developer unlocked Window Phone 7, have Google Reader account and willing to beta test the app (I named it MY FEEDER) send me email at alex.yakhnin...

I don't know how about you, but I love the Outlook app on the Windows Phone 7. I like its simplicity, readability, ability to quickly triage the email, etc... I also read feeds every day using the Google Reader on the web. I've been looking through a...

The Windows Phone 7 doesn't sync the contacts from the Outlook without a connection to the Exchachge server. I've seen a few customers asking about the ways to be able to do it. This KB article outlines the way you could do it: http://support.microsoft...

As you already know, the SL Toolkit team has recently released the update to the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. This update includes a few controls that I developed in order to fill up the gap - ListPicker and PickerBox controls. So I would recommend...

The Silverlight Toolkit team has just published the new release of the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit . The update includes the following goodings: AutoCompleteBox (fully themed for Metro) ListPicker (Works as a ListPicker for <5 items...

The OData client library as well as its source are available for download from the codeplex . The download also includes the sample app utlilizing the Northwind database.

The full version of the book: Programming Windows Phone 7, by Charles Petzold is available for download .

The Sync Framework 4.0 (they jumped over the v3) October CTP is available for download. This framework is built on a top a standard protocol - OData and implements an "assymetric" syncing - meaning that most of the synchronization logic will be running...

Kevin , from Clarity has started a blog post series on the tips when developing WP7 applications. Hist first post dives into the nitty gritty details on how to improve performance of your applications. Must read!.

I've made some refactoring to the Progress Dialog code: First of all I changed the name. Now it's ProgressIndicator. Second, this class is now a custom control derived from ContentControl . And last, I twicked the styles and the code so it matches...

When creating Windows Phone 7 applications we'll inevitably encounter the situation when a certain procedure takes some time to complete. In this cases it's a good practice to show a progress indicator to the user. The UI Design and Interaction Guide...

The Windows Phone Training Kit has been updated with the RTM bits. It's gotten even bigger with 5 new labs: Using Silverlight Map Control and Bing Services Building Silverlight Applications Using Panorama and Pivot Controls Catapult Wars...

Today I am going to show you how you can customize the Picker Box dialog to display a color picking dialog similar to the one that you see in the Settings\theme applet in the emulator instead of just a list of strings: In order to be able to...

The WPDT has gone gold and available for download: Windows Phone Developer Tools The tools include the Panorama, Pivot and Bing Map control. Also the team has released the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit which includes the controls and...

Last time I showed you how you could create the Picker Box functionality in your Windows Phone 7 applications. There're a few updates that I had to make in order to match Picker Box's behavior to it snative counterpart. First of all you will probably...

Last time I talked about the missing Combobox control in the Windows Phone 7 platform and the ways it could be replaced if you require similar functionality. Among the replacements I mentioned the Picker Box functionality. Today I am going to show you...

I've seen recently quite a few requiests from the developers externally and internally asking about the ComboBox control for Windows Phone 7 applications. The answer has been that the ComboBox control is not a part of the platform, however if you want...

There could be many scenarios when you'd need to be able to dipslay a text in your WP7 application which doesn't fit on the screen. The easiest way to approach to solve this would be to utilize the ScrollViewer control as a host for a TextBlock. Something...

I've made a few updates to the original code for the List picker control that I described here . When creating this control I made a mistake of relying on LayoutUpdated event to make calls to ScrollIntoView when animation is chaning the control's size...

For the application that I am working on right now I needed a control that would allow a user to select a single item from a small list. Similar to how the list picker is defined in the design templates : This document also specifies that when the...

If you have seen the demo of the sample application "USGA Shot Tracker" that was created by the UX and design team at Microsoft to demonstrate the principles of the UX on WP7 platform, you have probably noticed how the app is displaying a splash screen...

In my previous post I described a programmatic way to change an icon for the Round Image button (or any other control for that matter) in your WP7 application by creating the ThemedImageConverter class. However, if you are able to create a XAML vector...

Last time I showed you how I created a Round image Button for my Windows Phone 7 application. Today I am going to show you one of the ways to address a common issue with displaying images in your application that would need to be changed depending on...

When creating a Windows Phone 7 application I've encountered a need for a round button with an icon, similar to what the native applications on the phone have: So, I set on the path of creating one by myself. Since we've been armed with the power...

In my previous post I described how to create a simple LINQ data provider for WP7 . Today I am going to show you how we can make use of this library as well as Push Notifications functionality that is available for WP7 to create a custom data sync sample...