Search

Rudi Grobler demonstrates a simple way with which you can have full barcode support in your WP7 application.

Source: Rudi Grobler in the Cloud

Barcode scanning doesn’t have loads of practical use on a desktop (besides point-of-sale terminals) but on a mobile device it’s a whole new ball game! Imagine a word where you can pick up an item, scan it with your phone and it gets delivered to your door… there are loads of scenarios where barcode scanning on you device makes sense! How difficult is it to do barcode scanning on a Windows Phone 7 device?

In this blog post, Mihail Mateev discusses the simulation of the Multi-Touch activity for the WP7 applications.

Source: Mihail Mateev's Blog

Currently, most computers do not have Multi-Touch Screens.
One very easy option is support for multiple mice. For this purpose you can find different solutions as Multimouse for Windows 7 or Multi-Touch Vista in codeplex. This article uses Multi-Touch Vista which is free and quite popular.

Rudi Grobler takes a quick look at the Sterling database available on WP7.

Source: Rudi Grobler in the Cloud

Sterling is a lightweight object-oriented database implementation for Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 that works with your existing class structures. Sterling supports full LINQ to Object queries over keys and indexes for fast retrieval of information from large data sets.

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.

Q1. Andrej - 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?

A. My name is Andrej Tozon and I’m working as a contractor with my own company in Slovenia. I’ve been developing for Windows for nearly 20 years now, working through a lot of technologies and languages in my past. Currently, my primary work interests are Silverlight, WPF and, lately, Windows Phone 7. I’m also a Client Application Development MVP.
My first WP7 application, Hey weigh!, is a simple weight tracking tool, which you can use to track your weight. It’s a very basic, free app that lets you enter your weight for a day and keeps history for last 30 days. History is, besides in a scrolling list, also represented by a line chart. I wanted to keep it simple and clean so I only included those features I myself thought I needed to track my weight, so I could also say that it was a very personal project :) If that basic feature set and the looks appeal to other people, that’s great. There are other similar apps on the marketplace, offering additional features and users may find them more useful than mine. And that’s what’s so great and important about taking part in the large, global marketplace – you offer your vision of an application and watch the users all over the world responding to it.

At the end of the previous part of this series we created a very simple application, starting from the Visual Studio 2010 template, at the sole scope of showing how simple is to create a Silverlight project and having it deployed to the phone for development purposes. We easily ran the Hallo Windows Phone application directly from the IDE and debugged it as we are habit with all the other common project types.

If we go deep inside the project structure we encounter some little differences from a normal Silverlight project made for the desktop.

In this article, you will learn about the TimeSpanPicker control that comes with the official release of the Coding4fun Toolkit.

Source: WindowsPhoneGeek

TimeSpanPicker is an UI elements that will automatically provide you with a TextBox input and when the user selects it, the picker will display form where you can choose another date/time using infinite scrolling. Basically this control is extended DatePicker/TimePicker that allows timespan restriction.

In this post, Jeff Prosise discusses one really cool feature of WP7 - the location service.

Source: Jeff Prosise's Blog

The location service is a set of APIs that rely on Assisted-GPS (A-GPS), Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS), and cell-site triangulation to expose location data to an application. Simply put, this means that a Windows phone app can determine where it’s at at almost any time, excepting situations where GPS satellites aren’t reachable, cell towers aren’t in range, and no Wi-Fi signals are available.  Combined with Microsoft’s Bing Maps Silverlight control for Windows Phone, the location service opens the door to an entire genre of apps that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Jesse Liberty has published two posts on Launchers and Choosers in his Windows Phone From Scratch series:

• Tasks: Launchers and Choosers–Windows Phone From Scratch #22
• Launchers & Choosers–Part 2 - Windows Phone From Scratch #23

  To provide your Windows Phone application access to the operating system (and with it, to the native applications such as SMS, the Contact List, the Camera, and, oh yes, making a call) Windows Phone 7 has a set of predefined Tasks.
  
  Tasks can be divided into two types: Launchers, which launch an application but do not return a value (e.g., sending a SMS message) and Choosers, which launch an application and do return a value (e.g., fetching a phone number).