Developing for the Windows Phone 7 - Part 3: Your First App

Ranting and raving about anything I feel like complaining about.

Developing for the Windows Phone 7 - Part 3: Your First App

Url: http://wildermuth.com/downloads/lottophone.zip

Part 3 of this series I took this video of building a simple application using the Windows Phone 7 beta tools. The video walks through building a simple random number generator using Visual Studio and Blend to build a simple, single-page application. Let me know what you think!

Developing for the Windows Phone 7 - Part 3: Your First App from Shawn Wildermuth on Vimeo.

You can get the source code here:

http://wildermuth.com/downloads/lottophone.zip

This work by Shawn Wildermuth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at wildermuth.com.

Comments

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for the great video and the code! The part of the video where you used Blend for WP7 was great. I have a question - around 19:00 in to the video you discuss the workaround for the ApplicationBarIconButton being null. Do you know if the WP7 team is working on this issue/bug/limitation?

Looking forward to more videos and your book!

Thanks,
indyfromoz.

indyfromoz (Posted Sunday, August 01, 2010)

Nice job Shawn,

Just a quick comment, I like how you show the integration between Blend and VS, but I think you could also show that it is possible to edit XAML in Blend directly as well.

I'd love to see you grow the app out and refactor it to show how to leverage binding, and maybe even throw in some MVVM action as well.

Later bub!

--Mike

Mike Brown (Posted Sunday, August 01, 2010)

Might be easy to just use a dictionary and check .haskey for your dupe check if you're about short & simple (and maybe use a different seed to make sure you don't get the same sequences every time you start over).

The thing I don't get is the reason for using Blend at al... It would be a lot faster to just set up that layout in XAML yourself, and while you're doing that, you'd notice that instead of setting the properties for the numbers 6 times, you could just create a style to apply that font family and size. While this might not have been such a good idea when WPF was just released (IDE sucked a lot at catching errors in XAML and giving helpfull messages), this has improved a bit in 2010. It's still far from perfect, but imho not a reason to stop writing XAML yourself.

Nick Kusters (Posted Sunday, August 01, 2010)

Nick,

This is far from 'best practices' on a lot of grounds, but the purpose was to help people get started with a really simple app. As my other demo's show, there are better strategies but they require more knowledge (e.g. styling, data binding, templating, MVVM, etc.) This sample was meant to show a how-to for beginners...

Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Sunday, August 01, 2010)

Hi Shawn,

Great Video!

Cheers.

Joao Ferreira (Posted Monday, August 02, 2010)

FYI from Wikipedia: Segoe (pronounced /ˈsiːɡoʊ/ = 'see-go')

And many thanks for the video!

cirneco (Posted Monday, August 02, 2010)

Very Simple and Easy for beginners.

Well Done my dear friend!!
Great Work.

vishal (Posted Monday, August 02, 2010)

Nancy Strickland has posted a series of videos on "Windows Phone 7 in 7 Minutes". In her "Windows Phone 7 in 7: The Application Bar" video (at 03:30 in the video), she talks about creating an Application Bar in C# code, not declaratively in XAML. Is it a limitation of the Beta tooling that we have a null ApplicationBarIconButton or is it a best practice to instantiate the ApplicationBar in code? It does not make sense if the latter is the case since the Blend <-> VS2010 relationship will be fruitless from a UX designer / code developer perspective.

Cheers,
indyfromoz

indyfromoz (Posted Wednesday, August 11, 2010)

Shawn,

i have around 7 yrs of experience in asp.net webbase application with c#,sqlserver...now i'm eager to move to mobile application development...would u plz guide me wht are the technology i shud learn for that and the career prospect):

paul (Posted Monday, August 16, 2010)

Paul,

If you know .NET/C#, WP7 is a great place to be, but honestly until the market shakes out and confirms that WP7 is a real player, I am not sure how much I'd hype it. I am betting big on it (training classes, books, etc.) but it would depend on what your ability to deal with risk is.

Shawn Wildermuth (Posted Monday, August 16, 2010)