For the last couple of months I’ve had my head down writing a WP7 book. Entitled Windows Phone 7 Unleashed, it will be published though Sams Publishing. I’m pouring lots of tips and techniques into this book, along with the requisite WP7 development info. The book will lead you through end to end production of WP7 apps, from developing Silverlight and XNA apps, through to certification and publishing on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Figure 1....

Reduce threading code, and increase UI responsiveness with a new approach extending MVVM. The article describes an approach that leverages the facilities that make MVVM so effective. The MTVT pattern is an architectural approach used for explicit demarcation of the view and view model via disparate threads of execution. Read on…

String.IsNullOrEmpty is a commonly used method for determining whether a string is null or has a zero length. But, no such method exists in the FCL for collections. A moment ago I whipped up an extension method for IEnumerable types. It’s not rocket science, but I thought I would post it anyway. public static class Extensions { /// <summary> /// Determines whether the collection is null or contains no elements. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="T">The...

I arrived back in Geneva on Thursday night, after spending a couple of days in Belgium attending Techdays 10. I had a blast, and some of the highlights for me were: The presentation by my good friend Laurent Bugnion entitled A day in the life of a WPF/SL. Very cool. I had the opportunity to ask Anders Hejlsberg about the new .NET 4.0 default parameter feature. I attended a presentation on Moles. Looking forward to...

Get a head start with the new Windows Phone 7 developer tools. Learn how to create a Sokoban game in Silverlight for the WP7 platform. Read on…