Articles

 

Introduction

The Microsoft’s Live SDK (or commonly referred to as Live Connect), provides a set of controls and APIs that enables applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) functionality using Windows Live ID. You can also use it to access data in SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger. The library supports multiple platforms, including Windows Phone 7 Mango and Windows 8 Metro Style applications using either C#, Visual Basic or JavaScript.  In this article, we will build our first metro style application using the Live SDK and XAML/C#.

This is part 3 in the series Working with Prism 4.

Introduction

In the last article, I showed how to structure your Prism application to use the MVVM pattern and use DelegateCommands to communicate between the view and view model. Additionally, I showed how to pull some data in using WCF RIA Services and display it in the view, as well as using Prism Regions and the ability to add and activate different views in a region to accomplish simple navigation for the user (view switching).

In this article, I’ll extend that sample application a little farther and show you how to leverage two other loosely coupled communication features of Prism 4: CompositeCommands and Prism CompositePresentationEvents (aka pub/sub events).

Also if the technical specifications of Windows Phone 7.0 stated that it is compatible with Silverlight 3.0, this only means that every feature you can use in the phone is available on the desktop but not viceversa. Sockets are a clear demonstration of this sentence. While they are perfectly available on Silverlight 3.0, they are locked down in the phone for the, so called, "security purposes". Curiously if you watch at the codebase of Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.0 you see that, the Socket class exists but it is declared "internal".

There is not any doubt, the first thing you meet when you use Windows Phone are the tiles. These are the large squares on the home screen that identifies some applications and they are also a distinguishable character that make your Windows Phone unique. As you know for sure, the tiles can be attached or detached from the home screen and some particular software can take advantage of double size tiles. While this is not a feature available to developers, in OS7.5, the tiles gained new features and a new set of APIs that you can use to enrich your applications.

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Introduction to the series

Welcome to this first part of a whole series on Windows 8 articles, which I’ll be writing over the coming weeks and months. It’s my goal in this series to introduce you to what we know at this point about Windows 8 and how we as (XAML) developers will need to adapt to the new platform. Since you’re probably a XAML developer like I am, we are going to see things from a XAML point-of-view. In some of the upcoming articles, I’m going to describe you how you can leverage what you already know in XAML when Windows 8 will be ready.

This review is for the book 'Windows Phone 7 Silverlight Cookbook', and has been submitted by a member of the Windows Phone 7 User Group - a user group supported by SilverlightShow.

We support user groups with books, swag, events promotion, free event passes and others. Contact us to get support for your user group. 

Interested in this book? Get it for free by tweeting our next webinar Leveraging Windows Azure for the Windows Phone Developer using tag #webinarsilverlightshow. Three of you will get a free ebook copy provided by Packt Publishing. Tweet this webinar now!

 

This book is another in the ever growing number offering an introduction to Windows Phone development. This one takes a slightly different approach to others I’ve read by opting for a “cookbook” style where it aims to provide a collection of “recipes” which the reader can apply to their apps.

The book starts out well by encouraging developers to work with Expression Blend (which is something most developers would benefit from) and begins with helping the reader understand the available controls before showing how to create simple animations and behaviours.

Guess how many people use Live Services? 500 million plus! And when our applications connect to the same services, they start feeling right at home with what our users are already used to. Microsoft recently opened the Live Connect APIs, along with some SDKs for 3rd party applications on desktop/web/mobile platforms to leverage the cloud offerings from Live Services. In this short article, we take a look at how we could get started using the Live Connect API from our Windows Phone applications and interact with SkyDrive storage through the new Live SDK.

To contact me directly please visit my blog at http://michaelcrump.net/ or through twitter at http://twitter.com/mbcrump.

This article is Part 10 of the series “10 Laps around Silverlight 5.” If you have missed any other section then please see the Roadmap below.

To refresh your memory on what Silverlight is:

Microsoft Silverlight is an application framework for writing Rich Internet Applications.

The run-time environment is available as a plug-in for most web browsers and works on a variety of operating systems including Windows, Mac and Linux.

 

So, you have heard the buzz about the brave new world of Windows 8 from MSFT’s BUILD Conference! May be you even attended the wonderful SilverlightShow webinar about “Getting Started with XAML Development in Windows 8” by Gill Cleeren. Ready to get your hands muddy? In this short 2-part article series, we talk about how to get started towards writing data-driven (specifically OData) Windows 8 Metro apps with XAML & C#. Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Part 1 – Handling of OData from our XAML Metro App [Consumption & Updates to OData source].