Articles

4/8/2012

Introduction

Electric effect, like other effects such as flame, smoke, explosion, is one of the most common visual effects used in game development. However, not too many examples are found, even fewer were proved ready for mobile application. So let's talk about how to "invent" one.

The image below shows the final electric effect implemented on Windows Phone 7 using XNA:

You can also follow the project on Codeplex.

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3/20/2012

by JustAnotherAppDeveloper

Dedicated to Elizabeth

Welcome to the LongListSelector walkthrough! This covers the very basics of LongListSelector, and by the end you'll have a small enough codebase that you should be able to go back through each line of the code and figure out what it does. The basic half of the walkthrough takes around half an hour; the full walkthrough, less than two hours.
Oh, and by the way, your code should compile after each step. (And you should compile after every step to make sure you're still on track.)

Contents

Basic

A.Installing the Silverlight toolkit

B.Creating a project

C.Adding a reference to the Silverlight toolkit

D.Adding a LongListSelector

E.Making a model

F.Connecting the model and the LongListSelector

G.Adding jumplist functionality

Intermediate

H.Prettifying

I.Updating the LongListSelector at runtime

J.Doing something when the user taps an item

K.Touch feedback

L.Separating model and view

M.Leveraging the designer

N.Extra topic: Binding unrelated properties

Advanced

O.Advanced topic: Recovering from a tombstone

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2/20/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this article I am going to talk about how to update your database schema when updating your app. The problem is that if you change the database schema(for.ex: add new columns or tables) in a future version of your app, then when users that use the old version of your app update to the new one an exception occurs. So in practice if there is no additional code to change the database so that it is compatible with the latest version of the app the following exception occurs:

So in this series of posts I will explain how to prevent this exception from happening.

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2/7/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this post I am going to talk about how to programmatically change the visual states of a HubTile control inside a ListBox(or any ItemsControl).

NOTE: For more information about the HubTile control take a look at:

• "Windows Phone Toolkit In Depth 2nd edition" FREE e-book
• Windows Phone HubTile in depth| Part1: key concepts and API

We will use as a base a previous article that looks at the simpler case of changing the visual state of a single HubTile control: http://www.windowsphonegeek.com/articles/How-to-Programmatically-switch-the-HubTile-Visual-States

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2/2/2012

by Rudi Ferrarin

In this article, based and inspired by Jeff Wilcox metrogridhelper, I would like to show you how I modified the base Grid control class so it can show me the "metro squares" at design time inside Visual Studio editor.

Step1: lets create a custom control, named metroGrid, which derives from System.Windows.Controls.Grid

using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Imaging;
using System.Windows.Shapes;


namespace wp7Library
{
    public class metroGrid : Grid
    {
    }
}

Step3: add a protected member of type Brush which we'll use to store the actual design background of the grid so we can restore it when we hide the metro squares

 protected Brush oldBrush;

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1/31/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this article I am going to talk about using the Twitter Rest API and JSON.NET in Windows Phone apps to show the latest 10 tweets from a particular Twitter account.

Before we begin, make sure that you have took a look at the Twitter Rest API Documentation:

https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1/get/statuses/user_timeline

Is short we will use the following uri to get winphonegeek's latest tweets:

https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.json?trim_user=true&screen_name=winphonegeek&count=10

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1/19/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this article I am going to talk about how to get a reference to the item that has been tapped in a MultiselectList. At first look this task may look pretty simple but in fact it is not. The problem here is that the SelectedItems collection is empty when the MultiselectList is not in a selection mode.

To begin with, lets first create a new Windows Phone application project and add the necessary reference to the Windows Phone Toolkit. For more information about the MultiselectList control, take a look at the previous in depth posts:

• Windows Phone Toolkit MultiselectList in depth | Part1: key concepts and API
• Windows Phone Toolkit MultiselectList in depth| Part2: Data Binding

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1/11/2012

by Janos Gergely

In this article I will show you the icons what you need for publishing Silverlight for Windows Phone applications to the marketplace.

This information is not a big secret (you can find it: Msdn Application Artwork) but every time I submit a new application to the marketplace I have to find out  the meaning of the icons. The icons filename are not mandatory but for easy understanding I use the default names.

Application Tiles

Application tiles are the main icons. This show your application on the list of installed applications on the phone.

You must set the icons size to the predefined size. Transparent background is changed to match the theme color of the phone.

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1/11/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this article I am going to talk about the Coding4fun Toolkit button controls in details. I will explain everything about the main features, available public API, and will  give lots of examples in different scenarios.

NOTE: About an year ago we posted the "WP7 RoundToggleButton and RoundButton in depth" article, however this post is not relevant any more since things have changed significantly during the last few releases of the toolkit!

Basically Coding4Fun toolkit offers RoundButton and RoundToggleButton controls. RoundToggleButton  is an UI component that derives from CheckBox and exposes several additional dependency properties. As its name says it is some kind of extended toggle button with round shape and automatic inverted image support. RoundButton is a kind of extended button which derives from Button, has a round shape and offers automatic inverted image support.

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1/3/2012

by Sheriev Akhmed

I have released an AdvancedApplicationBar library recently, enhancing the standard ApplicationBar in WP7.
It's a wrapper over the standard ApplicationBar which adds DataBinding support, Visibility property and Panorama / Pivot elements support.

Supporting DataBinding, ICommand, Visibility

<Sh:AdvancedApplicationBar>
    <Sh:AdvancedApplicationBarIconButton 
        IsEnabled="{Binding AppBarIconButtonEnabled}"
        Text="{Binding AppBarIconButtonText}"
        IconUri="{Binding IconUri}"
        Click="AdvancedApplicationBarIconButton_Click"
        />

    <Sh:AdvancedApplicationBarIconButton 
        Text="{Binding AppBarIconButtonText}"
        IconUri="{Binding AppBarIconButtonText}"
        Visibility="{Binding Visibility}"
        Command="{Binding DeleteCommand}"
        CommandParameter="42"
        />
    <Sh:AdvancedApplicationBarIconButton 
        Text="static text"
        IconUri="/Images/appbar.feature.settings.rest.png"
        />
    <Sh:AdvancedApplicationBarMenuItem Text="MenuItemTxt" />
</Sh:AdvancedApplicationBar>

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