Search

The next Windows Phone 7 application that we bring to your attention is Morse Code Flash Light – one app created mostly for fun. Its author, Laurent Duveau, agreed to share some details about the app as well as some tips on developing for WP7.

Q1. Laurent - please introduce yourself briefly 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?

Telerik are happy to announce that now you can install their Windows Phone 7 quickstart application directly on your WP7 device.

Source: Telerik Blogs

In my last announcement about the availability of the second drop of the Telerik Tools and controls for Windows Phone 7 I promised you that we will publish our quickstart application on the zune marketplace. I'm now glad to tell you that the application submission process ran without any problems and you can install the quickstart application directly on your windows phone 7 device. You can see a details about the application here. You can also download the application source code and run the application on the VS2010 Emulator.

This article of David Kelley is a preview of an article on performance optimization for WP7 that he wrote for Code magazine.

Source: Hacking Silverlight

For those of you that know me, you might wonder why I would be writing an article on Performance Optimization for Phone 7, I mean sure it’s Silverlight; and phone 7 has this coolness factor but I always talk about User Experience right? So what gives you ask?

Well when it comes down to it, without performance you don’t have much to experience. The dirty little secret is that performance optimization is a critical often ignored part of good user experience design more so when we are talking about a device barely bigger then a pocket calculator.

Ramesh Sringeri explains how to start using Sterling for your Windows Phone 7 app.

Source: Braincells2pixels.net

The codeplex home of Sterling has everything you need to start using this excellent storage solution for your Windows Phone 7 app. Source, sample code, documentation (MS Word and PDF formats). You get everything. However, I did run into a few hiccups and hopefully my findings below will help you get past any blocks. This is not a replacement for the excellent documentation for Sterling. I am filling a few gaps that will help those not familiar with Silverlight and/or Windows Phone 7 get Sterling setup quickly.

Peter Kuhn demonstrates an attribute-driven approach to mark members of types for persistence in the transient application state of WP7, similar to using the data member attribute when the data contract serializer is used.

Source: Mister Goodcat

Hopefully every Windows Phone 7 developer has heard about Tombstoning by now. To avoid writing the same code to persist and retrieve data again and again, there have been quite some efforts in the past to create generic methods of handling this process of application deactivation/termination by various people. James Ashley for example uses the ApplicationSettings and State classes for this (improved by rschiefer here). I personally like implementations that use the data contract serializer (here is an example by Joost van Schaik), because I can selectively choose what values should be serialized by applying the data member attribute only to those properties I want to be persisted.  

Sigurd Snørteland is happy to announce that his WP7 apps Tetris7, Loud Tweets and Fingerpaint have been now added to Silverlight.net.

Source: Sigurd Snørteland's Blog

Microsoft has now added my wp7 apps ‘Tetris7′ & ‘Loud Tweets’ & ‘Fingerpaint’ as ‘Community samples’-apps on their site www.silverlight.net.

                               

Matthias Shapiro explains how to fix a problem with multiple ListPickers in a ScrollViewer.

Source: Designer Silverlight

The ListPicker is available via the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7. If you don’t have it, you should get it. Get the source as well, for reasons that will be clear in one more sentence.

The only problem is that I can’t scroll if I do this because I run the risk of accidentally opening the ListPicker (which should be a tap interaction) when swiping (which is a gesture interaction).

The next WP7 application we present is called Marathon and it keeps track of your movement with the help of a GPS-receiver. It’s the perfect companion for sporting activates such as running, skiing or even skydiving. We introduce you to Johan Dahlbäck who will tell us how otherwise his app can be used.

Q1. Johan - please introduce yourself briefly 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?

The Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools has been officially released.

Sourc: Microsoft Download Center

This release enables Visual Basic developers to create Silverlight applications for Windows Phone 7 using the final version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.