This year, the Windows Phone team is trying out something new for our blogging activity: instead of having individual team members post content on their personal blogs, we’re centralizing the content in the Windows Phone Developer Blog to make it easier...

Well, I already did that once today , but in doing so I realized I should address another old post (or two ). Yes, in Windows Phone 8 we have added the Application.Terminate method so that you can quickly exit your application in the case of insurmountable...

Recently I've had several folks ask me for the images for my Threat Modelling Post , which have disappeared due to various back-end changes over the years. The first few times I just e-mailed the Visio diagram, but more people are asking so I updated...

A lot of people are asking for access to the SQLite wrapper I demoed at //build. Rest assured we are working on getting it out to you but it is taking some time. Also I should set expectations in that it is by no means a complete wrapper for all SQLite...

Hello from //BUILD ! As you probably know by now, we've released our SDK and have a bunch of content to deliver at the Microsoft campus this week. Time permitting, that means I can get back to blogging about some of the cool new features, but in the mean...

Hopefully this will get added to the documentation eventually, but recently I was playing around with some reflection code in Windows 8 Consumer Preview and a few web searches for the "obvious" keywords didn't yield any results, so I thought...

Windows Phone Mango introduces a lot of great new features for developers: alarms & reminders , pinned secondary tiles , deep-linked toasts , and AppConnect to name just a few. One thing that Mango hasn’t changed, however, is the overall navigation...

[Update 9/21] Just got back from //BUILD in Anaheim, and it was a great conference to be at. I presented "Multitasking in Windows Phone" for what seemed like the 100th time, and the slides + video are up on channel 9 but unfortunately the video did...

In addition to the multitasking video I did the other week , several other Windows Phone folks have been doing videos, too. A current list (I am sure it will grow): Sean McKenna discusses database support in Mango Thomas Fennel discusses push...

If you already follow my blog, you probably know everything you need to know about Mango's multitasking support... but just in case you don't, you can check out a video I did with Robert Hess over at Channel 9. http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/The+Knowledge...

In Part 1 we looked at a simple app to get tweets from Twitter, and in Part 2 we looked at the AsyncWorkloadHelper library. In this final part, we'll look at a couple of the other helper libraries in the project that you might find useful. As before,...

In Part 1 we looked at a simple Windows Phone application that used a background agent to periodically show a toast and / or update a tile when a new tweet was found for a particular search term. The code we are discussing in this post can be found at...

This post has (errr, "These posts have") been a long time coming. They are based off the Mix 11 and TechEd 2011 sessions I gave a loooooong time ago, but despite my best efforts I've not been able to post anything to my blog for some time. Partly it was...

Here's the first of several posts about the new multitasking features in Windows Phone Mango. Alarms and Notifications is a good place to start because it is the simplest of the new multitasking features (outside of Fast App Switching, but that's not...

Now that the consumer features of Mango have been announced and the beta developer tools have been released , it's time to make good on my promise to make the Mix / TechEd sample code available to all. I'll also try and post the push notifications code...

Just a quick note - the recorded sessions from Mix are available on Channel 9 . I will be posting more on some of the new Mango features soon... still trying to dig out from under the pile of e-mail I received while in Vegas! Also I will get the demo...

Thanks to everyone who posted on the previous post about tombstoning in Windows Phone 7. It was actually quite surprising to see the positive comments about tombstoning (both on the blog and privately through e-mail) where developers are saying they appreciate...

One piece of feedback we hear from Windows Phone developers is that "tombstoning is hard," but there are many ways of interpreting that statement and we'd like to understand it more. We have some theories about what might be hard, but I don...

[Update 12/31/2012: See also this post for a new Windows Phone 8 API to terminate apps] [Update 7/27: fixed a typo and made it a bit clearer; thanks Nicole! Also added a link to code with the new Mango APIs ] I have previously blogged about exiting...

Much has been written about tombstoning and how important it is that your application be able to save and restore state once it goes into the background. This is all good. One of the finer points of the Windows Phone application model that has received...

Today Jeff Wilcox , David Anson , and I did a Channel 9 live session with Dan Fernandez at the PDC on Microsoft campus. You can catch it almost exactly 55 minutes into the stream here (note to self: try to remember what team you work on - it's the Application...

Introduction One of the things I've been working on for a while is a "smart" ListBox implementation that uses the new scrolling states and data virtualization features in Windows Phone 7 to help improve performance. Here's a relatively common pattern...

Firstly, fellow WP7 PM Developer Dragos Manolescu is resurrecting his blog and posting about Windows Phone 7 . His first WP7 post is a great introductory piece on using Location Services and Reactive LINQ on the phone (and if lambdas make your brain hurt...

[Update September 9: Link to the recorded sessions] [Update September 2: Updated the ZIP file to comment-out dependency on not-yet-shipped Map control :-)] Attached to this post is a ZIP file with three projects in it: Part1Demo , which...

One more post on the subject of keeping screens out of the backstack. A common scenario we see is a variation of the login screen scenario I mentioned the other week. In this case, the first page the user is supposed to see depends on some state saved...