WebRequest and its baby sister WebClient behave differently regarding what thread they return on. This is a short post to really clarify what returns where. Summary WebClient will always return on the UI thread if called from the UI thread WebRequest will always return on a background thread The investigation To test this I created [...]

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 [...]

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts describing how to get started with Windows Phone 7 development. It is written based on my own experience getting started with Windows Phone 7 development. The previous entry, where I demonstrated how to use databound controls in xaml based webservice is available here. The purpose of [...]

The Windows Phone Marketplace was updated with new features in July 2011, one has to do with default language. The previous process to submit an app required you to define the default language when submitting the app, the new version checks the default language in the uploaded xap. The problem An app created before July [...]

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts describing how to get started with Windows Phone 7 development. It is written based on my own experience getting started with Windows Phone 7 development. The previous entry, where I demonstrated how to retrieve and data from a REST based webservice is available here. In that [...]

Have you seen the new (since fall 2011) ways to publish a Windows Phone app to Marketplace? In addition to regular publishing, you can now publish as private beta or targeted. Neither will make the app discoverable in the Marketplace, Beta is time limited and does not include the full certification requirements. MSDN has a [...]

Coming from WPF and Silverlight for the desktop into Silverlight for Windows Phone, which is Silverlight 3, can leave you longing for some features – one that I missed was Implicit Styles. But, with the Mango (7.1) release of WP7 we now have Silverlight 4! What are implicit styles? A style that has a target [...]

If your Windows Phone 7 project isn’t starting at all – you’re not even hitting App.xaml.cs, you’ve probably renamed the app project. Fix: Set the startup object on the app project’s properties page In the .csproj file, this corresponds to the SilverlightAppEntry element: <SilverlightAppEntry>PhotoDiary.App</SilverlightAppEntry> I would call it a bug, that you cannot rename a [...]

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 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 [...]

Today my Windows Phone 7 solution started giving me one single build error: Xap packaging failed. Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Short story A file had been removed from disk but not from the solution. Always set your sample data files to Build action: None. Long story The missing file [...]

To show data to the user you have to load data and bind data – but which one is the slow part? Answer: It depends on the nature of your data and the complexity of your UI. This post will show you that data can be loaded on the UI thread or the background thread, [...]

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 [...]

LowProfileImageLoader I’ve recently bumped into the need to display images from various RSS feeds in a Windows Phone 7 app. UI binding and loading of images can easily degrade the performance of any wp7 app, which led me to the excellent LowProfileImageLoader (LPIL) by David Anson. The LPIL attaches a property, UriSource, to an Image [...]