News

5/17/2012

source: devhammer.net

.WRONG!

Design is everyone's responsibility, at least to some degree. No, you don't have to start wearing black turtlenecks or engaging in other clichés, but what you should do is start cultivating a basic knowledge of design, and training your eye for what is and isn't good design, both in the world of pixels as well as in the real world. Have you ever found yourself marveling at how difficult it is to figure out how to use some basic device? Listen to that voice in your head...it's telling you that you're dealing with a bad design. .

Microsoft Design

These are two words that, when placed together, may draw snickers in certain corners. And you could argue there was a time when that snickering had a basis in fact. Not anymore. Microsoft has spent years building its design muscles, and creating a consistent and compelling design language, called Metro.

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5/17/2012

source: blog.mrlacey.co.uk

There are lots of ways you can improve the performance (and the perceived performance) of your app.
This is not a complete list, just what came to mind right now.
The important (though unfortunate) thing to take from this is that great performance doesn't come easily and there are lots of things you can (or have to) do to give your users an awesome experience.
Note that some MVVM purist may dispute some of these but they're based on real world experience.

1. Get off the UI thread - Don't use it when you don't have to. Keep the UI responsive.
2. Don't use value converters - They have a much greater performance impact than direct properties.
3. Don't use dependency properties when you don't need to - If regular properties will work for your needs then keep it simple as they're much faster to read

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5/17/2012

source: weblogs.asp.net

What is Farseer

The Farseer Physics Engine is a collision detection system with realistic physics responses to help you easily create simple hobby games or complex simulation systems. Farseer was built as a .NET version of Box2D (based on the Box2D.XNA port of Box2D). While the constructs and syntax has changed over the years, the principles remain the same.

This tutorial will walk you through exactly what Emanuele create for Flash but we'll be doing it using C#, XNA and the Windows Phone platform.

The first step is to download the library from its home on CodePlex. If you have NuGet installed, you can install the library itself using the NuGet package that but we'll also be using some code from the Samples source that can only be obtained by downloading the library.

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5/17/2012

source:  mark.mymonster.nl

Yes 1 minute. So let's start immediately.

1 - Open the NuGet Package Manager Console and type:

Install-Package MSAF.GoogleAnalytics

2 - Next, register a new application / web property inside Google Analytics.

Then copy the Property ID that starts with UA-.

3 - Past that Property ID inside the App.xaml at this place.

<analytics:GoogleAnalyticsService WebPropertyId="UA-12345-6"

That's it. Yes, totally. And? Did you do it under the minute?

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5/17/2012

source: dotnetapp.com

With the release of the Mango update, having a minimized application bar with an application using the panorama control is now part of the Metro experience. The best example is the games hub. The minimized application bar uses the Opacity property as you can see in the following picture.

To mimic the application bar of the game hub, follow these 2 steps:

1- Add the following XAML code where the panorama control resides to add the application bar.

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5/17/2012

source: ehrizo.wordpress.com

On several occasions we come across situations where more than one thing should happen on the software simultaneously, is running different processes and/or component update screen while some process is still running. For resolution of situations like this, one of the relevant solutions would be to create routines that can be run in the background, "freeing" so other software routines that can also be performed. Performing routines in the background is controlled by a class named BackgroundWorker. See below for an example of how to use it:

1) Just below the class declaration of the page where the multithreading is required, instantiate a BackgroundWorker class object:

...
public partial class Toggle_Progress : PhoneApplicationPage
{
   private BackgroundWorker bw = new BackgroundWorker();
   ...
   ...
}

...Read more

5/16/2012

by WindowsPhoneGeek

Daily WP7 Development News 16 May 2012:

• Designing Windows Phone Applications With Photoshop
• Get the Assembly Version Number in Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Tip: How to Access the App Manifest
• Windows Phone Tip: URIs Rules
• Microsoft Face SDK For Windows Phone: face detection, tracking and more
• PhoneGap Build welcomes Windows Phone 7

You may also find interesting our Daily Windows 8 Development News 16 May 2012

Subscribe to our News feed or follow us on Twitter @winphonegeek . (We list the latest Windows Phone 7 development activities.

5/16/2012

source: blogs.microsoft.co.il

AKA: How to design your own Windows Phone Application UI, using Photoshop, Expression Blend and a little touch of Magic.

When it comes to being an indie-app-developer, you usually find yourself being the Jack of All Trades. You are the developer, designer, tester and marketer.
This really isn't easy, besides being good in each of these fields, and usually you are not, you need to familiarize yourself with various tools, each for it's own role in creating the application.

The most confusing of all to the common developer is usually designing the application UI.
"If it works well, why the heck does it also need to look good!?" Is a common thing to be heard from frustrated software developers, when given a UI design assignment.
But here is the thing, when it comes to Applications built for a mobile platform, Great UI is key for the success of an application.
It doesn't matter how amazingly fast your app algorithms run, if they don't come in a pretty package, No one will download it!

The good news are that together with Visual Studio and Expression Blend, Microsoft provides you with a fairly good suite for easily creating your very own beautiful Windows Phone Applications. And best of all, these tools play beautifully well with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

...Read more

5/16/2012

source: blog.anthonybaker.me

When creating a Windows Phone application that will be submitted and hopefully published in the Marketplace,  is always a good idea to have an "About" page where users can find information about the application, the author and even support contact information. When doing this, you should always include the application version number, so you know which version of your application the user has. This will save you a lot of time when trying to solve issues or when trying to replicate certain behaviours. Here is how you retrieve the application's assembly version number:

public string GetVersionNumber()
{
    try
    {
        string version = typeof(MainPage).Assembly.ToString();
        if (version != null && version.IndexOf("Version=") >= 0)
        {
            version = version.Substring(version.IndexOf("Version=") 

+ "Version=".Length);
            version = version.Substring(0, version.IndexOf(","));
            return "version " + version;
        }
        else
        {
            return "version unknown";
        }
    }
    catch
    {
        return "version unknown";
    }
}

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5/16/2012

source: blog.anthonybaker.me

There will be times where you want to access the Windows Phone Application Manifest in runtime and be able to get specific elements or attributes. This is quite straight forward to achieve and here's how it is done.
First, make sure to add a reference to System.Xml.Linq in your project. Second, add the using statement in your code file: using System.Xml.Linq;

And finally, implement the method that loads and parses the WMAppManifest.xml file and gets the information you need. The following method will get the application title.

public static string GetAppTitle()
{
    XElement xml = XElement.Load("WMAppManifest.xml");

    var manifestElement = (from manifest in xml.Descendants("App")

 select manifest).SingleOrDefault();

    if (manifestElement != null)
    {
        return manifestElement.Attribute("Title").Value;
    }
    return string.Empty;  
}

...Read more