Essential WPF

Windows Phone 7 Bing Maps Must Have October 2010 Update by Tomer Shamam

If you’ve been running Windows Phone 7 Bing Map Control for Silverlight, you may noticed several bugs and especially performance issues. Microsoft published this update which includes 2 new utilities and address a performance issue in the Bing Maps Control. Here is a video demonstrating the Bing Map Control running on WP7 Emulator. A walk around the Statue of Liberty using Bing Maps for WP7

WPF Data Validation using .NET Data Annotations – Part II by Tomer Shamam

In part one, I’ve explained what is the .NET Data Annotations attributes and how to use them. In this part I’ll show how to use the Validator class to read and validate properties as part of the NotifyingObject base class. Lets say that your view-model is derived from a ViewModelBase base class, and you want to use the Data Annotations properties in your view-model. All you have to do is implementing the IDataErrorInfo interface and implement the indexer using the Validator class as follows: public...

Windows Phone 7 Custom Message Box – Update by Tomer Shamam

I’ve fixed some issues in my Custom Message Box . Feel free to download it from here .

WPF Data Validation using .NET Data Annotations – Part I by Tomer Shamam

Introduction There is a beautiful declarative mechanism in the .NET framework called Data Annotations designed for use with ASP.NET Dynamic Data controls. “The System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace provides attribute classes that are used to define metadata for ASP.NET Dynamic Data controls” [MSDN]. Thanks to the .NET Framework 4.0 Validator class we can leverage this mechanism in our own applications, no matter if using ASP.NET at all. This time I’ll show how to use attribute based data...

WPF Shape Editor works with MVVM by Tomer Shamam

Haven't heard about the famous WPF and Silverlight MVVM design pattern yet? Well, I have one think to say about it: “MVVM is like women, complicated but necessary. You can’t live with it and you can’t live without it”… This time I want to concentrate on how to create a WPF shape editor custom control which works perfectly with the lovely MVVM design pattern. Lets say that you want be able to draw shapes on top of Video, Image or whatever, but this time you have a view-model behind which contains...

Windows Phone 7 Custom Message Box by Tomer Shamam

UPDATE: Notification box has been updated: Take a look at http://wpassets.codeplex.com , the new home place for NotificationBox and others. I’ve wrote a custom message box called NotificationBox for the Windows Phone 7. It gives you an option to pick whatever button you like to have inside the message box. Also It provides a cool feature which is ‘Show this message again’ with isolated settings persistency so you won’t have to create this mechanism by yourself each time you want to give an option...

Open Project in Blend from Visual Studio 2010 - BlendIt! by Tomer Shamam

About one year ago, I wrote a little Visual Studio 2008 Addin called Blend It! for opening the active solution with Blend. Sadly, this Addin stopped working under Visual Studio 2010. Today someone sent me an email, and asked if I can migrate this addin to work with VS2010. So I did and I’m glad to share it with my dear blog readers. :) Feel free to download Blend It! for Visual Studio 2010 from here . After downloading, just install it and restart Visual Studio 2010. Now you can open WPF project...

Integrate Windows Phone apps with Microsoft Advertising SDK by Tomer Shamam

Introduction So you really exciting from the Windows Phone development environment (comparing to the rest ;)) and you start thinking of Business! Yes, you want to earn some money for your hard work creating great Windows Phone applications. Of course you should start by creating a developer account for uploading your application to the Windows Phone Marketplace (look here ). But now the question is, how do you earn money? There are several kind of models earning money for your Windows Phone Applications...

Saving and Loading Captured Image To and From WP7 Isolated Storage by Tomer Shamam

If you read my previous post about WP7, explaining how to use launchers and choosers, you may wonder how to capture an image using the phone camera, then saving it to the phone’s isolated storage. While it is easy to capture an image, it’s trickier to save it to the isolated storage. To capture an image you should do this: public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage { private byte [] _imageBytes; private void buttonCapture_Click( object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { ShowCameraCaptureTask...

NotifyingObject for WPF & Silverlight by Tomer Shamam

There are many ways notifying on property changed, and I think the most popular one is using the lambda expression solution: public class Ball : Model { private double _velocity; public double Velocity { get { return _velocity; } set { if (_velocity != value ) { _velocity = value ; NotifyPropertyChanged(() => Velocity); } } } } I’ve to say that using the lambda solution is cool and type safety. But, why should I bother creating a field member for each property, set it only if not equals to the...

Programming Windows Phone 7 LOB Applications – Part II by Tomer Shamam

Abstract In my previous post of this series, I’ve discussed about the Windows Phone Silverlight programming model, and showed how to create a simple Hello World Windows Phone 7 application, running it using the WP7 emulator. Those of you who are already familiar with SL or WPF actually learned nothing new except for the fact that the same code is now running on the WP7. In this post I would like to start talking about new features in the WP7. In this post I’ll demonstrate the WP7 Launchers and Choosers...