Alex Yakhnin's Blog

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...

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...

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...

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...

In order to show you the Mobile MVC framework I came up with, let me walk you through the same excersise we did when I showed you the MVC pattern . Let's create a simple application with the same login form. Let's create a Smart Devices project and rename...

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 current version of the WP7 tools doesn't allow you to use the WCF Data Services by just adding service a from the VS environment. This workthrough will show you how you can still use OData services from the WP7. (Disclaimer: Even though I work...

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...

As you all should be aware by now, the first release SL for the WP7 is not going to contain any structured data storage (SQL CE) functionality or LINQ data providers. However this fact should not preclude us from rolling out our own version. After all...

One of the questions that has recently come up on the .Net CF MSDN forums was on how to create a custom (owner drawn) header in the DataGrid. This person wanted to implement the look similar to the grid that is used in the Mobile CRM application that...

I would like to start a series of posts devoted to best practices when designing mobile applications. So in this first post I will describe the MVC pattern that I have been using when creating CF applications for the customers. I realize that a lot has...

The Deep Zoom (Seadragon) functionality has been available on Silverlight since version 2. It's a techonology that provides the ability to interactively view high-resolution images. The images need to be prepared using available tools like Deep Zoom Composer...

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...

This is the part 4 of the series of the posts related to the Mobile MVC framework that I have described for you in my previous posts . I've updated the framework to handle the scenario of passing data between different controllers: the Controller class...

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...

Last time I showed you how to create a simple Login Form and pass the data between the View and Controller using ViewData dictionary. In this post I am going to show you how to pass a strongly typed data. We will continue working with code sample we...

When developing applications it is always a good idea not to hardcode database connections, urls, server locations, etc... In .NET there's the Configuration stack that allows us to use the app.config xml file. Unfortunately this functionality doesn't...

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...

I've recently made a substantial update to the MobileMVC framework . I've added the ability to utilize a (D)epenendcy (I)njection container by adding IControllerProvider interface into the framework which looks like this: public interface IControllerProvider...

Just for people who are not comfortable with passing strings when notifiying the view or the controller, I've added the functionality to use events instead. You would not need to hook into the events explicitly because the controller will take care of...

Would you like to have ListView control in your .NET CF application on Windows Mobile 6.5 to have this fancy gradient item selections (they are defined by the current theme on the device)? The secret is in the extended style LVS_EX_THEME that needs...

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...

Let's continue on the way how-to implement the model-viewer-controller pattern in .NET Compact Framework applications that I started in my previous post . We stopped at the point where we needed to figure out on how to connect the LoginController with...

I've been doing a lot of coding lately that utilize the features of the C# 2.0 and 3.0 language enhancements such as generics, Func delegates, anonymous types etc... And then it hit me that we are still using the old and clumsy coding style when developing...