TechEd Australia is all wrapped up, and I wanted to let everyone else know about one of the new concepts we’re introducing around application structure. As we’ve previously discussed, Windows Phone 7 applications are composed of pages that...

My Silverlight cohort and all-round good guy Shawn Oster posted on exactly the same topic that I did at almost exactly the same time... and we didn't co-ordinate it at all! http://shawnoster.com/blog/post/Improving-ListBox-Performance-in-Silverlight...

One of the cool features of lists in Silverlight is that they can "virtualize" the UI objects needed to render the list, reducing the amount of memory and CPU necessary to load large lists. For example, if you bind a ListBox to 1,000 items in Silverlight...

Well, well, well. There I was sitting in my office when I get an e-mail asking if I wanted to present Windows Phone 7 developer content at Tech.Ed Australia and Tech.Ed New Zealand ... what did they think I'd say - "No"?!? :-) Suffice it to...

Jeff has posted a version of the Windows Phone 7 “tilt” effect that is packaged as a control, built by Luke. It’s only fair that I update my tilt code too – it uses the same attached property implementation as my previous tilt...

Another quick post... Jeff Wilcox has posted an improved template for the Indeterminate ProgressBar for Windows Phone. He goes into a little of the history behind this, too. I recommend you use his updated control if you are showing an indeterminate progress...

Just a quick post... I saw someone linking me to the “ptorr” account on twitter but it’s not me. They probably won’t appreciate folks sending #wp7dev traffic to their account ;-) I’m not on twitter or facebook or anything like that.

[Update 12/31/2012: See also this post for a new Windows Phone 8 API to terminate apps] [Update August 10th below] A pretty common request both on the forums and on our internal discussion lists is "how do I exit my Silverlight application?" As...

One of the UI features of lists on Windows Phone 7 is that the "scroll bars" don't really act like traditional scroll bars; they are non-interactive and they only appear when the list is actually scrolling. To achieve this, the Silverlight team added...

One of the controls that was shipped in the Mix CTPs of Windows Phone Developer Tools was the PhoneListBoxItemLayout control. We removed this for the Beta, and naturally people are asking how to get it back . Basically the answer is to copy the template...

Quick link to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/prativen/archive/2010/07/13/windows-phone-developer-tools-beta-released.aspx if you are seeing uninstall issues (eg, uninstall prompts you to re-install… oops!)

Wow, I go on holiday for two weeks and the team ships the WP7 Tools Beta - great news! Maybe I should leave more often... ;-) As for that quick tip -- you may notice that the new emulator doesn't respond to hardware keyboard input anymore, leaving you...

I've been meaning to post this for a while, since the question comes up from time to time (internally and externally ) The typical problem is that you have some XAML like this: < Button Content ="Click Me" x : Name ="ClickMe" Click ="ClickMe_Click...

Also phrased as "Why can't I databind to the AppBar" or "Why are my named AppBar objects always null in the code-behind?" and so on. (This may also be incorrectly phrased as "Why isn't the AppBar a DependencyObject ?" but...

I'll be at TechEd next week (along with my cohort Shawn Oster and bunch of other Windows Phone folks) to give a new-and-improved version of my Mix talk. I'll be showing a few features you haven't seen yet, as well as providing some updated guidance on...

We have a new blog system setup on MSDN and for some reason I can't get the source code and XAML in my post to appear correctly (and there's no way I'm manually correcting the reams of HTML that are generated when you cut-and-paste colour-coded source...

One of the many cool features about Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight is the manipulation API , which provides super-easy access to manipulation information such as finger drags and other gestures. A basic intro post on manipulation can be found here ....

Just wanted to make a quick post to say I haven’t stopped blogging about Windows Phone, and to offer several excuses as to the lack of content lately ;-) As you can probably imagine, we’re quite busy right now making sure everything is ready to ship ...

Congratulations to the Visual Studio team for releasing the RTM version of Visual Studio 2010 ! Unfortunately the RTM release has a known incompatibility issue with the Windows Phone Developer Tools released at Mix. We are working on an update - please...

One of the (many) differences between Windows Phone 7 Series and the older Windows Mobile platform is that there is now a single hardware and software platform for developers to code against. Every device will have a fast CPU and GPU, GPS, 4-point multi...

[Update March 29th to add info on SupportedOrientations] Several people have asked me what the best strategy is for dealing with portrait and landscape layouts in the same page, and really the answer depends on what kind of content you have, how you want...

Yesterday Engadget had an opinion piece on mobile multitasking , once again borrowing my awesome slide on the topic from Mix (hey Michael, where's my royalty cheque? :-) ). A picture tells a thousand words, and I think this one actually does a pretty...

I posted the code from my Mix talk here , which includes the mock location code, but I never used the word "location" in that post so search engines don't find it. Location location location. We got that location! Got location? You know we do...

[UPDATE August 16, 2010: Please use the updated version of the tilt code at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ptorr/archive/2010/08/11/updated-tilt-effect.aspx ] One of the effects that can be seen on the Windows Phone 7 Series videos is the "tilt" effect on...

This blog post is a simple sample to get started with basic manipulation. It shows you how to move a little circle around the screen using drags and flicks. In order to keep the code simple, it doesn't do anything complicated (like bounce off the sides...