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Windows Phone Mango – New Tasks (Beta & Beta2)

Windows Phone Mango adds few more task over initial Windows Phone (RTM) release. This post will cover new task (launchers and choosers) added to Windows Phone Mango Beta and Beta 2. To introduce those features I’ve created sample application which looks very simple, yet have all those new tasks: Before we are starting, one very important note about tasks in general. Some of them works on emulator as on real device (Bing maps, Bing directions, etc.), some of them works but doesn’t produce any “visible...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Profiler” - Part 9 of 8)

This post is a “missing part” of series about new features in Windows Phone Mango New and very important feature of Windows Phone “Mango” Developer Tools is the profiler. The profiler enables the developers of Silverlight applications (currently only Silverlight scenarios are supported) to sense important heartbeats of the application and collect information about application behavior at runtime. To measure the performance or the application, navigate to Debug menu option and select Start Windows...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Push Notifications & Tiles” - Part 8 of 8)

Mango introduces some changes in Push Notifications mechanism which enables the developers to create more attractive scenarios. First feature I’ll show in this post is a secondary tiles for application. Before Mango, every application could have only one pinned tile on the main screen which could be updated using Push Notification mechanism (I blogged about it quite some time ago here and here ). Mango release enables to have additional tiles which can be pinned and removed from application code...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Silverlight/XNA Interoperability” - Part 7 of 8)

Windows Phone RTM didn’t allowed to mix Silverlight and XNA content. Mango enables the scenarios where Silverlight content can be rendered along with XNA content. In the sample presented in this post we will build 2-pager Silverlight application with pure Silverlight page (1st page) and mixed 3D XNA & Silverlight page (2nd page). Final application looks like the following: In order to ease on the developers, after installing Mango developer tools, Visual Studio provides us with two templates...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Fast Application Switch (FAS)” - Part 6 of 8)

The Windows Phone RTM operating system had only one active application and when application were sent to the background the state was serialized and kept in the application’s isolated storage. This process called tombstoning and application in such state called tombstoned. When user return to the tombstoned application, he would have to wait a while as the application deserialized its state and recovered and we as developers had to take care about saving the application’s state and resuming it. With...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Background Agents” - Part 5 of 8)

One of most requested and discussed features of Mango release is “multitasking”. In Mango the multitasking term has slightly different meaning than standard (PC) multitasking. Multitasking for Mango phones means ability to execute the code while application in not active and play audio started by the application in a background. This is achieved by Background Agents. In addition to them Mango also introduces APIs to download and upload files while application is in the background and add Reminders...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Camera” - Part 4 of 8)

All Windows Phone 7 devices equipped with camera. The minimum required camera resolution is 5 Mega pixels. For developers accession camera information enables many scenarios like image recognition, video chatting, augmented reality and others. From the beginning, Windows Phone 7 RTM devices supported camera usage scenario via launchers and choosers. Phone shell API provided the developer with CameraCaptureTask which could be used to take a picture and use it in the application. This scenario based...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“New Sensors & Tooling Enhancements” - Part 3 of 8)

Windows Phone devices are modern devices. As such, they usually have few sensors such as built-in accelerometer, A-GPS, light sensor, magnetometer, etc. Windows Phone minimum hardware spec requires that all Windows Phone will have at least 4 of them – A-GPS, Accelerometer, Compass and Light sensors. While accelerometer and A-GPS were available for developers with first version of Windows Phone, there are some new sensors which were added with Mango. The hardware market is not standing still, thus...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Local Data” - Part 2 of 8)

Mango provides API to use user’s Contacts and Appointments. To search for appointments and contacts we need to use the Appointments and Contacts classes located under Microsoft.Phone.UserData namespace. In this post I’ll show how to create the sample application which will present the list of contacts and will enable user searching for specific contact. Also we will add appointments search functionality: When page initialized we creating the new instance of the Contacts class: contacts = new Contacts...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Local Database” - Part 1 of 8)

Mango release adds a local database engine to the device. The database engine on the phone is based on SQL CE engine. Mango applications use LINQ to SQL for all database operations. LINQ to SQL provides an object-oriented approach to working with data and is comprised of an object model and a runtime. The database files stored in Isolated Storage on the phone and available to the application only (which means applications cannot share same database). Suggested scenarios for local database usage in...

Windows Phone Mango–What’s New? (“Overview” - Part 0 of 8)

The Beta version of “Windows Phone Mango” tools release and it is a time to see what is expected from developers point of view. This post is a first part of multi-part “What’s new” series which focuses on new features of “Windows Phone Mango” (or shortly Mango from this point). The Mango brings to the developer many features which we missed from initial release of Windows Phone 7 (or shortly RTM from this point). The “formal” features list includes the following features: Multi-tasking Fast Application...

Silverlight 5 Beta

Silverlight 5 Beta availability just announced by ScottGu! To try the beta follow this link and download the tools. Optionally download Blend 4 for Silverlight 5 preview from this location. Note : to install Silverlight 5 Beta you need to updated your Visual Studio 2010 with SP1 . The major improvements in Silverlight 5 are: Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 encoded videos Improves performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support (Long awaited) TrickPlay...

Silverlight 5–What’s New #4

This post is dedicated to 3D graphics in Silverlight 5. The graphics engine is pretty similar to XNA and for better understanding I suggest to read some 3D graphics theory and some XNA documentation. To display the 3D graphics Silverlight 5 adds a new FrameworkElement called “DrawingSurface”. To use it, first you application must have GPU acceleration enabled at the Silverlight plug-in level: < param name ="EnableGPUAcceleration" value ="true" /> Once your plug-in set, the...

Silverlight 5–Features list

As just announced by ScottGu during Firestarter keynotes, Silverlight 5 is in development and we should expect the Beta in H1 2011. The new Features Announced for Silverlight 5 Beta will be: Premium Media Experiences Silverlight 5 offers improved media support and rich UI capabilities: • Hardware Decode and presentation of H.264 improve performance for lower-power devices to render high-definition video using GPU support. • TrickPlay allows video to be played at different speeds and supports fast...

LightSwitch Beta available!

As published today by LightSwitch team, the first beta is available for MSDN subscribers. If you have a subscription, visit your subscriptions page . If not, the public download will be available from Monday – via the LightSwitch Developer Center .   For more information about this promising product visit the LightSwitch Team Blog .   Stay tuned, Alex
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