Tagged: windows-phone

I’m just coming back from Build 2014 and it was a great pleasure to talk to customers/developers.  It is one of the best parts of my job right now in seeing how customers use the technology our team represents.  If you are a XAML developer and didn’t have a chance to go to Build or haven’t watched all the sessions, here’s a quick short list of recommendations I’d have: Common XAML UI Platform overview (Tim Heuer) XAML UI Controls (Shawn Oster) Developing across multiple form factors (Peter Torr)...

Recently our team released a service release for Silverlight on 1-Sep-2010.  We affectionately call these “GDR” releases (general distribution release). NOTE: Other teams have different names for different things.  I’m not sure why Microsoft doesn’t have a standard on these things and it’s funny to hear marketing teams argue the benefit of one name over the other.  For what it is worth, in my eyes, if it isn’t a major milestone release (or at least a ‘dot’ release [4.0->4.1 for example] then it is a service update.  Call it a GDR, Wave X, Service Pack, R2, blah blah. In the GDR1 release...

I was spelunking around playing with Silverlight in Windows Phone 7 and specifically the CameraCaptureTask.  The “tasks” are APIs that allow you to interact with phone-specific functionality like the camera, picture picker, phone dialer, etc.  A whole list of the available tasks in the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace can be found in the developer documentation. I was basically creating a simple application that would allow you to choose (PhotoChooserTask) or take a picture (CameraCaptureTask) and then display the picture (and later post it online or something).  Here was my basic XAML structure: ...

In talking with a friend about some Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight stuff recently.  He was giving me some great feedback about a few things (all of which I’ve passed along).  One of the things was what I felt was a common task that might exist in the mobile space but admittedly isn’t as clear if you are just coming to WP7 development.  The scenario is that of downloading media files and storing them for later playback. WP7 does not have a storage mechanism like SQLLite on the device, but since it is Silverlight, you do have Isolated Storage you can...

One of the biggest discussions I started getting into when Windows Phone development was announced to the world was sparked with this single question I posed to our internal Windows Phone developer teams: What is the use case for when you would want to use a Pano versus Pivot application layout? I asked this in the context of an application for Yelp that I was writing.  Information was similar but not identical.  It was only similar in the sense that the data was all about user reviews and venues.  In my eyes I saw this like the fact...

I recently got an inquiry to my Microsoft Translator sample on if this would work with the Silverlight in the Windows Phone 7 SDK.  I hadn’t tried it before, so I created a sample Windows Phone 7 application and copied the code over.  I used a basic UI to mock up the similarities: And then clicked the button.  The text translated fine, but no audio.  I didn’t get any warnings that the WaveMSS code sample I was using wouldn’t work.  Then I remembered about XNA. NOTE: I actually think this is a bug...

If you’ve been excited about Windows Phone 7 development and the platform being Silverlight for application development, you probably rushed and downloaded all the tools (which are free by the way).  You may have even got the samples from the SDK and noticed the Location services example…but wondered why it doesn’t work. If you are just getting started, I created some quickstart videos to help you through some of the basics.  You can view them here. In case you haven’t figured it out: Location services (aka, GPS) is not emulated in the developer tools CTP.  As you might expect, this makes it...

So the news is out!  Silverlight IS the platform for Windows Phone 7 Series development! Sweet.  We also made available an update to Silverlight 4 that you might be interested in too! You may be wondering how you get started.  If you are new to Silverlight, I recommend getting familiar with Silverlight first.  You can find all the tools you will need at the Silverlight community site.  In addition to the core tools you’ll want to get the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP.  This will add to your Visual Studio 2010 installation (or install Visual Studio Express) to enable Windows Phone...