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New Release First, if you wander on over to the AgFx CodePlex site, you'll see that there is a new release up. There's some new things in this new release such as some statistics about the performance of your application, the ability to specify exact cache expiration, and some bug fixes. The majority of feedback that I have gotten has been feature requests or "how do I?", and few in the way of bug reports. So it's working well for most people, hopefully that continues. Please file bugs if you find them! All of the below references the code sample that you can find in the CodePlex source tree at AgFx\Samples\Facebook.Auth.Sample . OAuth with Facebook and AgFx on Windows Phone 7 Something applications commonly want to do...

One of the great features of Visual Studio, that’s been around for a while is snippets. Frankly, I should build more of these because I use them *so* often. I find them so useful I thought I’d share them here, either for you to use or to template into ones of your own. Firs t,when building templated controls I write this a lot: [TemplatePart(Name = ElementContent, Type = typeof (FrameworkElement))] And it’s not just that, I then have to create a constant to define “ElementContent” and then usually load that value into a member variable as part of OnApplyTemplate. So I built a snippet that builds this stuff out for me, resulting in this: [TemplatePart(Name = ElementContent, Type = typeof (FrameworkElement))] //private...

Earlier this week I wrote a post detailing the application framework that I’ve been working on, which I’m calling AgFx. I wanted that post to be a bit of an introductory overview,. Now I’m going to dig into detail a bit more, as well as show a bit about how you can use the free Windows Phone 7 Developer tools to quickly create a great application. AgFx does a lot, and one of the apps I used to generate requirements and testing, is Jeff Wilcox’s gorgeous new foursquare™ client: 4th & Mayor , which is built on AgFx. Jeff and I, along with some others, have written several apps on top of AgFx over the last few months, and have really sharpened it to be exactly what you need when building a connected phone application...

Introducing AgFx One of the things we’ve spent a fair amount of time on is working with various application writers, helping them build great Windows Phone 7 applications. Many of the top applications that you’ll find on Windows Phone 7 devices today spent some time in a debugger on my desktop, or Jeff’s , or another one of the folks around here. In doing this process, we saw a lot of common trouble spots for developers looking to write Windows Phone 7 applications and as I started to think more about the problem. I thought the same thing I always think: “hmmmm, how can I build a framework that will make these things easy for the developer so they can worry about other stuff!” And so it was born, and I’m currently...

Ya, I know that I work for Microsoft and am not supposed to admit to ever owning an iPhone, let alone liking it. What’s more, I know working for Microsoft and being complementary about a Microsoft product (in this case Windows Phone 7) will have fans of “other” products coming out of the trees to call me a “shill”. Fair enough. But I just calls ‘em as I sees ‘em. I never set out to own an iPhone. I was an AT&T customer because I live in the boondocks of New England and needed the AT&T Microcell technology . (There is NO actual Cell Service at my house.) When my Windows Mobile / HTC phone died, Windows Phone 7 was still several months from it’s release date and I needed a phone. The ONLY phone my local AT&T store had in stock that...