Here is a quick a dirty way to refresh a WP7 page. We use the NavigationService to navigate to the current page. There’s a catch though (in fact there are two but we’ll get to the second in a moment), we need to make a change to the Uri, else the NavigationService thinks we are trying to perform fragment navigation, which is not supported, and will raise an exception. A work-around is to tack a...

Using the device debugger is a snap in Windows Phone 7. There are many benefits, and you can see your app executing in a real world environment, with most of the launchers and choosers available for testing. Some choosers, however, rely on the Windows Phone Media Hub; such as the PhotoChooserTask. Trying to debug across a call to that bad boy, with the Zune software running, will lock up your app. Fortunately there’s an easy...

If you’ve tried using a DataContractJsonSerializer or a DataContractSerializer with Push Notification for the Windows Phone, you may have experienced an ArgumentNullException during deserialization. This can happen because the MemoryStream is buffered with null characters ‘\0’ that prevent deserialization. A solution is to create a new array and copy all bytes except for the trailing nulls, as shown in the following excerpt from the downloadable sample code in my upcoming book, Windows Phone 7 Unleashed:...

My wife, Katka, has published a great new article Learn how to use the Pivot and Panorama controls, page navigation, OData and more!

The ReaderWriterLockSlim class is used to protect a resource that is read by multiple threads and written to by one thread at a time. The class exists in the desktop FCL, but is noticeably absent from the Silverlight FCL. To readily support both platforms, some time ago, I incorporated the open-source mono implementation of the ReaderWriterLockSlim class into the Silverlight version of my core library, which is downloadable from http://calcium.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets ReaderWriterLockSlim is a light-weight alternative...