In November last year, it was once again time for the 2011 Øredev developer conference. For the 2010 conference, we at Jayway created a schedule app with a social twist – a puzzle game that you played by talking to other participants. When updating the app this year, we decided to make use of the [...]

While the first iteration of Windows Phone was based on Silverlight 3 the upcoming release, mango, is based on Silverlight 4. That means a lot of new functionality like implicit styling and and rich text controls. Especially the last was interesting as it gives you a lot more control over the displayed text. What I [...]

The dust from what was presented at Mix11 has long settled and the mango released had been packaged. The tools are with us and we are just waiting for the update to officially reach the phones. So I will do a quick view on background execution in the light of a post I did a [...]

The last couple of days the battery life on my Windows Phone Mango has been catastrophic. I wasn’t able to last more than 3-4 hours, tops. Then the battery saver icon appeared (battery with a little heart over it) and gave me a couple extra hours, it really is a saver. The only thing that [...]

The first version of WP7 design style guide, specified that the panorama should not include an application bar. In Mango, Microsoft have reconsidered, and you can find it in the hubs there. Additionally, if you look at the application bar in the games hub there is a new way to display it: empty and minimized [...]

I am working on a prof of concept in Silverlight 5 and I was reading in a bunch of pictures and placed them in a list box. That part was easy enough (although there was the usual problem with pictures and access rights that differs when it comes to out-of-browser (OOB) in contrast to plug [...]

If you have done a few templates with some of the content aligned right and other content aligned left in a grid. You have probably bumped into this. It took quite some time to solve. The problem does not exist in WPF or later versions of Silverlight, but since Windows Phone 7 is based on version 3 it’s [...]

We (Andreas Hammar and I) are just returning from Tech-Days 2011, we delivered a session on developing applications for Windows Phone 7 in Blend and code. While we were preparing for this session something stuck in our minds – when it comes to mobile applications the top priority is in design and performance. Design and [...]

Touch is great thing, suddenly you can touch, tap, double tap, flick, pinch and stretch to manipulate virtual object. It really revamped the whole mobile business mainly with the release of the iPhone and the capacitive touch screens, used in most smartphones today. But also in the stuff using infrared matrix screens like the Neonode [...]

As you might have seen in the Windows Phone 7 Office application there are small round buttons in the panorama. As you should never use the application bar in the panorama it’s a good way to get some navigation points into the panorama. There are a few versions of this button out, ranging from styling [...]

One of the major complaints on the Windows Phone 7 platform is that you can’t run third party applications in the background. I had the same complaint on iPhone for a long time but over the time I have started to think about the problem and I’m not sure background operation for third party application [...]

I like the thought you have to put in to a Windows Phone 7 application, to make it work in both dark and light themes together with the accent colors. But at the same time it creates quite a few challenges. One of those is to have a panorama background and title graphics that reacts [...]

Update: Use with caution, added TestProject. A couple of weeks ago I was working on a problem with handing audio over multiple pages in an application. It worked out well until the updated toolkit that came out in the beginning of November. I tried to add page transitions and after a day of frustration I [...]

Building an audio application this weekend I ran into a problem; where do you place the media element when you have more than one page, and you want the audio to continue playing when you navigate between pages. I will get to the solution later on in the post but first some background. During the [...]

And hints on how to work around this problem… There are a couple of problems when it comes to Windows Phone 7 development right now. Apart from the obvious, that there are virtually no devices out there, the other problem is that it’s hard to examine all the interaction details. Currently the emulator gives us [...]