Archives

Archives / 2011 / May
  • The Basics of MVVM in WPF

    This is a follow-up to my previous blog post on the Basics of MVVM in which I used Silverlight to illustrate how to use a basic MVVM design. I had so many emails asking for a WPF version, I decided to post this sample using WPF.

  • The Basics of MVVM

    While training and consulting with clients around the country, I find that many developers still have trouble grasping the concept of Model-View-View Model (MVVM) as used in Silverlight or WPF. In this blog post I thought I would show two examples side-by-side to help you learn how to move from the more traditional model of development to MVVM.

  • Windows Phone Choosers

    Windows Phone does not yet support multi-tasking, however you can interact with some of the built-in applications on the phone from within your application. Depending on the application you call, you will either launch the application and pass in some data to the application, or you will launch the application and have some data returned. The former is called a launcher, while the later is called a chooser. In this blog post you will learn to call a chooser from your application and have that chooser return some data from the built-in application. The specific chooser for this blog post will be the PhoneNumberChooserTask as shown in Figure 1.

  • Windows Phone Launchers

    The Windows Phone does not support multi-tasking (yet), however you can call many of the built-in applications on the phone from your application. Depending on the application you call, you will either launch the application and pass in some data to the application, or you will launch the application and have some data returned. The former is called a launcher, while the later is called a chooser. In this blog post you will learn to call a launcher from your application. The specific launcher will be the SavePhoneNumberTask as shown in Figure 1.

  • Using the Windows Phone Pivot Control

    The Windows Phone Pivot control is similar to a Tab control on Windows Forms, WPF or Silverlight. Each “tab” or PivotItem you create is like a separate little page where you can have whatever other XAML you need. In this short blog post I will show you how to create a set of PivotItem controls where each control (tab) will display a list box of photos. You will be able to take a set of your photos, drop them into this project and try out this sample right away. In Figure 1 you can see the sample application that you will create. I named it “My Life in Categories” and it has a list of “tabs” across the top. Each tab is a different year and in each year is a list box with a list of pictures from your life.

  • Using the Windows Phone Panorama Control

    The Windows Phone Panorama control makes creating a wrap-around list of items very quick and easy to accomplish. In this short blog post I will show you how to create a nice panorama of a collection of photos. You will be able to take a set of your photos, drop them into this project and try out this sample right away. In Figure 1 you can see the sample application that you will create. I named it “My Life in Panorama” and it simply shows a list of pictures from your life. In this picture I show me at the top of Kilimanjaro in 2004.

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