Articles

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

Introduction

At Microsoft ASP.NET Connections March 26- 29 2012 I’ll be presenting a session on Prism development that includes the capabilities covered in this article – the URI-based navigation capabilities of Prism.  In this article I am going to right some wrongs in the code from the past couple articles that I put there to keep things simple and focused on other things for the first few articles. When using the MVVM pattern, one of the major goals is to maintain loose coupling and separation of concerns between views and their view models.

Introduction

Welcome to the second part of this article series on strategies for designing your application for a multitude of different clients. A lot of businesses face this problem today: your customers expect a rich desktop client, an almost equally rich web client, a mobile client, … and of course, on different form factors and for use with different types of input: typically, a mouse-keyboard combination, or touch.

That typically amounts to higher costs. And in reality, it will - after all, you are building multiple client applications.

Introduction

In this article series, we're going to try and tackle a problem (or opportunity, depending on how you want to put it) a lot of business face today: customers expect to be able to use your applications on a multitude of devices, with different form factors, supporting different technologies. And you're supposed to provide them with the best possible experience on all these devices, if you want to keep them. In today's world, consumers are used to the beautiful experiences they get from apps on their smartphones - and yes, enterprise users are consumers as well -, up to the point that they will prefer a nicely designed application which offers a good user experience to an application which has more features, but a badly thought out UI (on a side note, a very interesting post on why projects need to focus on design, and thus need a designer, can be read at Pete Browns' blog).

Welcome to part 2 in this series on Windows 8 and the future of XAML. The goal of this series is to give you an overview of the Windows 8 platform and teach you how you will be building Metro style applications when Windows 8 will be released.

In the first of this series, we looked at the developer preview of Windows 8, mostly from an end-user perspective. While showing you the new version, along the way, I explained several concepts which are new in this upcoming version of Windows, such as tiles, Metro style apps, charms and many more.

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 article is also available in print (Word, PDF) and e-reader formats (MOBI, EPUB).

Download all formats, including source code for $0.99. 

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.

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.