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 [...]

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 [...]

Background Storage for Windows Phone 7 is an important issue and needed for both supporting tombstoning by persisting state and for storing application data. The out of the box storage mechanism available on the phone is IsolatedStorage, accessible either via an class library with classes such as IsolatedStorageFile and IsolatedStorageFileStream, or through a key-value store [...]

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 [...]

Typing text in the Windows Phone 7 emulator when developing apps can be frustrating, especially when you’ve got that nice, big keyboard in front of you. But, there is an easy way to activate the host keyboard as text input. Activate host keyboard – Page Up or Pause Deactivate host keyboard – Page Down or [...]

In this blog post I will introduce you to some basic functions of the Caliburn.Micro framework, along sharing the result of a small lab using it with a common Pivot scenario. Filtering. Introduction First, what is Caliburn Micro ? It´s a lightweight MVVM framework, with support for WP7 specific features as TombStoning, Launcher, Choosers,  a [...]

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 [...]

Today the Smooth Streaming Client was updated to also work for the Windows Phone 7 and looking in to video streaming for an upcoming project this was indeed very good news. (Lets just hope the Silverlight Media Framework will be upgraded as well!) The first test I did was to check how easy it would [...]

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 [...]

Update 2: Now using the RTM SDK! Update: Now using the new beta of the windows phone SDK! I was trying out a few things on the windows phone 7 platform and wanted to come up with a simple application idea. There are numerous of simple list application examples out there like twitter and RSS [...]

I was trying to make a mockup in Balsamiq for a windows phone 7 series application and thought i needed a few items to get things right. So I started creating the parts needed. The basic phone, with a see-through screen so it’s easy to create panoramas to lay behind. The keyboard variants (there are [...]