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The next WP7 developer who we introduce to you is Tim Greenfield who will reveal some secrets behind the creation of his PuzzleTouch application. Tim also gives some advices to those of you who consider to start developing for Windows Phone 7.

Q1. Tim - please introduce yourself briefly (experience, interests, key projects, etc) and tell us more about the application you created - what are the key functionalities, major differences from other similar applications on the market, why do you think people would want to install this app on their WP7?

Source: Programmer Payback

As an amateur photographer, I have always kept my eyes open for new tools to help me search, sort, filter, and view my own photos. Microsoft Pivot (a cool new technology that lets you easily view, search, and filter data using deep zoom) seemed like a natural and obvious fit for the task.

Therefore, using Microsoft Pivot and the Pauthor open source libraries, I created a tool that helps users create a pivot collection from the photos on their hard drive and supports filtering by all the nifty meta data embedded in those files such as shutter speed, aperture, film speed, and focal length.

Silverlight 4 introduces XPath support including XPathNavigator and LINQ to XML extension methods for evaluating XPath expressions on your XElement objects! For those that aren’t familiar with XPath, it is essentially a big string that contains specially formatted text that is interpreted at runtime to describe a pattern for finding nodes in an XML document. You can use it to find nodes with specific conditions much like how regular expressions finds smaller strings in a bigger string. 

For those of you who don’t know or can’t remember, SAX (Simple API for XML) is a technology for reading Xml in an event based way. Instead of loading your Xml into a great big DOM and looping thru it or plucking out nodes via XPath or LINQ to XML, SAX allows the Xml parser to notify your application as new nodes were encountered. SAX (like XmlReader, is a forward-only Xml reader) and efficient for parsing large and streaming chunks of Xml.