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Jeremy Likness has built a control that allows a calculator-like experience for entering numbers.

Source: C#er : IMage

I'm exploring the phone more and more and came across the case of allowing the user to enter digits. One thing to keep in mind on the phone is that the form factor requires approaches to input that are different from the traditional desktop. A desktop application might handle numeric entry by simply filtering the text box, but that assumes a keyboard-centric model. On the phone, touch is key.

Here is Part 11 of Jeremy Likness' series on his MVVM framework and this time he explains how to debug MEF.

Source: C#er : IMage

The one drawback to using MEF is troubleshooting. Sometimes the composition step — when MEF scans all of the requirements and contracts in a project and maps in the implementations that satisfy them — can fail and it's not immediately clear why. MEF uses stable composition, so if any part of a hierarchy fails to import the correct references, the entire composition step will fail. This is intentional so you don't get unexpected behavior when you are asking for a dependency and it can't be provided.

Jeremy Likness continues his ultra light Windows Phone 7 MVVM Framework article with this post on tombstoning with MVVM and Sterling.

Source: C#er : IMage

Sterling makes tombstoning very easy because it handles serialization of just about any type of object. To show an example, we'll start with the concept of a view model that holds a set of categories (that a pivot is bound to) and a set of items that are filtered by category. When tombstoned, the application must remember the category as well as any item that is selected.

In this post Jeremy Likness explores a very simple, lightweight, and easy way to get started with the MVVM pattern on the phone.

Source: Jeremy Likness' blog

I've been doing more work on Windows Phone 7 applications. Because of the smaller footprint of the phone and the way the application is hosted, I don't believe the phone requires the same types of tools and frameworks as the browser. Sharing code and services is something that is obviously important, but while I am a huge advocate of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and use it in my own Jounce MVVM Framework, I'm not convinced it is needed for smaller phone applications.

So how do I use MVVM on the phone? I'm still exploring options and admit I have not used some of the existing (and probably fantastic) frameworks that are out there. What I did notice immediately was that I would need about six key things to be successful on the phone:

Jeremy Likness announced the availability on CodePlex of version 1.0 of Sterling Database.

Source: Jeremy Likness Blog

It's been a challenging 8 months of late nights fixing bugs, responding to feature requests, and writing a comprehensive guide to make sure the product is well documented, but I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy every moment. I'm excited to see what the future versions will bring but for now am absolutely ecstatic to announce that I've released Sterling from beta to version 1.0. Enough people have shared the testimonial of their projects and helped me expand the battery of unit tests on both the phone and browser versions to finally make this milestone possible.

In this post Jeremy Likness discusses parsing the visual tree of your XAML using LINQ.

Source: C#er : IMage

I noticed a project on CodePlex that provides a "JQuery-like syntax" for parsing XAML. It looked interesting, but then I wondered why it would be needed when we have such powerful features available to us in the existing runtime. Silverlight provides a powerful VisualTreeHelper for iterating elements in the visual tree. It also provides a TransformToVisual function to find the offset of elements relative to other elements.

In this post, Jeremy Likness shares some interesting thoughts on the DataGrid control.

Source: C#er : IMage

When the need arose in a recent project to build this type of control I decided to do a spike and see how I could implement it as quickly and easily as possible. While eventually I think it would make sense to build a full custom, templated control for this, the solution using just existing XAML turned out to be relatively straightforward and so I ran with it.

Jeremy Likness has published the resources from his Silverlight's Visual State Manager talk.

Source: C#er : IMage

I enjoyed the talk and had a terrific crowd with some very good questions. The deck explains much of what I went into with the talk, including exactly how the VSM works from when and how it starts and stops storyboards to the timing and flow of a state change event (including a flow chart that maps out the exact steps).