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In this third WP7 programming tip, Jeff Prosise demonstrates how to disable an application bar button in code.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

Application bars play an important role in the UI of many phone applications. An application bar can contain up to four buttons (and five menu items) giving the user quick and easy access to the app’s most commonly used features.

Each button is an instance of ApplicationBarIconButton, and the ApplicationBarIconButton class exposes a property named IsEnabled that allows buttons to be enabled and disabled.

See more Windows Phone programming tips by Jeff:

• Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #1
• Silverlight for Windows Phone Programming Tip #2

Here is the second Silverlight for WP7 programming tip of Jeff Prosise.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

Phone developers sometimes bemoan the fact that Silverlight for Windows Phone lacks syndication classes such as SyndicationFeed and SyndicationItem. In the desktop versions of Silverlight, these classes simplify the task of consuming RSS feeds, as well as other types of feeds such as ATOM.

Mads Laumann has published the solution to an EndpointNotFound exception on WP7.

Source: Laumania.net

In my aggressive attempt to figure out why this exception were thrown, I never tried it without the debugger and never had the time to press F5 after I saw the exception in the debugger. If I had done that, I would have discovered that the game continued to run and that I went into my “_Completed” event handler method where I could have checked for e.Error != null and have done what I wanted – without the game crashing.
Stupid me!

Jay Kimble has prepared this short Silverlight/WP7 tip for you.

Source: Jay Kimble's Blog

I have struggled with dealing with this for sometime, and ultimately gave up. Today, I happened across something interesting. I’m doing some intense Isolated Storage stuff with WP7, and I’m using ViewModel. I analyzed one of the errors I was getting in the VS XAML designer, and discovered what in my ViewModel VS didn’t like. So here’s what I discovered.

Jeff Prosise is starting a new series of little WP7 tips that can save you time, reduce aggravation, and help you build better apps.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

The Silverlight for Windows Phone documentation contains a helpful article demonstrating how to encode a WriteableBitmap as a JPEG and use the XNA framework’s MediaLibrary class to save it in the phone’s pictures library. The code works, but it’s way more work than you have to do.

Rather than create a temporary file in isolated storage, write the JPEG into the temporary file, transfer the JPEG from isolated storage into the pictures library, and then delete the file per the example in the documentation, you can accomplish the same thing with four lines of code.

Beth Massi has collected for you some tips and tricks on controlling screen layouts in LightSwitch.

Source: Beth Massi's Blog

Visual Studio LightSwitch has a bunch of screen templates that you can use to quickly generate screens. They give you good starting points that you can customize further. When you add a new screen to your project you see a set of screen templates that you can choose from. These templates lay out all the related data you choose to put on a screen automatically for you. And don’t under estimate them; they do a great job of laying out controls in a smart way.

After the great success of his first list of absolutely essential utilities for programmers, Jesse Liberty is now ready with the next dozen of utilities.

Source: Jesse Liberty's Blog

In July I published a list of 12 Insanely Essential Utilities for Programmers. That list is still current and I’m still using every one of the twelve. The list, however, has become popular enough, and there are enough great utilities that didn’t make that list, that I herewith present 12 more Insanely Great and Absolutely Essential Utilities.

Kunal Chowdhury fulfills the wish of one of his readers to write an article on Group Row Header customization of Silverlight DataGrid.

Source: Kunal's Blog

Earlier, I was looking for some solution to create a multilevel Group Row Header in a Silverlight DataGrid and found some good points over various forums including Tim's Blog. I explored them more and found that, yes, we can customize the template to create a multi level group header (but it is limited to only two levels, means if you add more levels of header the rest of the group header will look as same as the second header). I thought to write an article explaining all these so that, you can understand it properly. But due to lack of time, I was unable to complete it.

In this post, Matthias Shapiro will quickly walk you through the process of forcing a theme in your WP7 project.

Source: Designer Silverlight

If you want to create a design that uses some custom colors, it can be difficult to make sure those colors fit both themes, which can throw a cramp into your creative juices. Additionally, if you decide to toss theme-compatibility to the wind in favor of your own design, you’ll need to make sure all your control templates conform and don’t go all wonky when the user changes their theme.