News

Read original post at Kunal's Blog

Sometime in our application, we want to launch the Media Library of the Windows Phone 7 device and also want to provide user the option to view any existing image from that library. So if you want to do this, how will you implement the code?

Windows Phone 7 SDK provides provides API to do this. Using the PhotoChooserTask you can actually launch the photo chooser application and handle the selected image. Continue reading to read more about this process from this small tips.

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Wednesday, March 21st, 2012.

• Part 1 of the 'Creating SilverlightShow Windows Phone App' Series Published
• OData Apps In LightSwitch, Part 1
• Windows 8 Metro Application AppBar trick
• Windows Phone arrives in China. First phone on sale today.
• The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): Part 2, More about Search
• Metro: Introduction to CSS 3 Grid Layout
• Keeping apps fast and fluid with asynchrony in the Windows Runtime
• Windows Phone 7: Tweetsharp and AgFx
• Creating HTML-based Metro Style Apps Using Blend Beta
• Hacking Silverlight 5 PivotViewer: Zoom
• Metro Nuggets: Async is your friend
• Microsoft Allegedly to Release Windows 8 This Fall
• Does anyone actually care about WinRT?

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Do you have the official SilverlightShow Windows Phone app installed on your device? If not - you can get it for free from here (or just search for 'SilverlightShow' in the Marketplace).

Peter Kuhn is the man who stands behind the development of this app and he is now starting a series of articles in which the whole application design and infrastructure, plus the problems (and their solutions of course), will be discussed and described in detail. The first part is now available here:

Creating the SilverlightShow Windows Phone App: part 1

In this introductory article, Peter deals with the development process of the app, so prepare for some more text and less code (read: no code) than usual.

And here is some info about the application itself, for those of you who still haven't tried it:

SilverlightShow Windows Phone app gives you access to some of the content of this website, including news, articles and events, and is completely free for use (also ad-free!). Some of the convenience features include the possibility to create reminders for upcoming events and webinars directly on your phone, to get notifications about new content in the form of live tiles, and to maintain a local list of favorites that allows you to permanently store items for later reading. If you haven’t checked out the app yet, you can find more details and a quick intro video here, or visit its Marketplace page here.

Feel free to leave your feedback on this app or suggest new features to be included in its next versions! You are also welcome to address any specific questions you would like to be covered in the article series. You can do this in the comments below this news or by writing us directly at editorial [at] silverlightshow [dot] net.

Read original post by Matt Sampson at Heavily Caffeinated

One of the cooler features that comes with LightSwitch in Visual Studio 11 Beta is it’s support for attaching to OData Services and exposing it’s own data as an OData Service.

OData stands for Open Data Protocol. It’s an open protocol that defines how to expose your data for querying and updating. This enables consumers (like LightSwitch) to connect to an OData service like it would with other data sources, for example SQL.

Read original post by Jose Luis Latorre Millas at SilverlightGuy

I've playing around with METRO XAML Applications and have come with an original way of creating a global AppBar - usually we have to add it explicitly to every one of the application pages.

A very simple method that uses a DataTemplate to define the AppBar ContentTemplate so we can reference it from every Page and code only once!

Read original post by Michael Stroh at Windows Phone Blog

China here we come. HTC announced Wednesday that they’ve started selling the first Windows Phone in the country. The HTC Eternity is an unlocked (aka “open market”) handset with a 4.7-inch screen, front- and rear-facing cameras, and comes stocked with a slew of popular Chinese apps. It’s also the first of many great Windows Phone handsets headed for China from Nokia and other phone makers this year. So stay tuned.

Read original post by Laurent Bugnion at GalaSoft

In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract.

There are a few cool features around the Search, and especially the applications associated to it.

Read original post at Stephen Walther's Blog

The purpose of this blog post is to provide you with a quick introduction to the new W3C CSS 3 Grid Layout standard. You can use CSS Grid Layout in Metro style applications written with JavaScript to lay out the content of an HTML page. CSS Grid Layout provides you with all of the benefits of using HTML tables for layout without requiring you to actually use any HTML table elements.

Read original post by Jason Olson at Windows 8 App Developer Blog

Human beings are asynchronous by nature, which directly affects how we expect apps to respond to us. The Windows Runtime (WinRT) has embraced this asynchrony as a first-class citizen in the building of fast and fluid Metro style apps. If you are building a Metro style app, you will need to write some asynchronous code at some point. In this blog post, we talk about why asynchronous programming is so prevalent in WinRT, and we’ll give you the basics on how to use it in your apps and some background on how it works.