January 12, 2011

6 Really Useful Windows Phone 7 Articles

I’m in the midst of working on a line of related Windows Phone 7 MVVM Light applications which are all built on the upcoming release of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser, which includes Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 support.

I found the following articles to be really useful in the course of trying to smooth out some performance problems, implement local caching, and are just generally good links to have around if you’re trying to do any serious WP7 development:

  1. Performance of Windows Phone 7 Applications – if you’re wondering why your UI seems sluggish, then you need to read this article. It explains how to use built-in tools to enable basic performance monitoring and has a great list of fixes for common performance problems.
  2. Using Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7 – provides a great learn-by-example overview of how you can use IsolatedStorage in Windows Phone 7 to perform simple reads, writes, and serialization operations.
  3. How to Access Packaged XML Files in Silverlight – if you ever find yourself struggling to figure out how to access XML files that you package with your Silverlight or Windows Phone 7 application, the techniques illustrated in this article should provide some illumination. It’s not as easy or intuitive as it is in ASP.NET or WPF development, but it works nonetheless.
  4. Rapid Repository 2.0 – If you’re looking for a great local db to use in Windows Phone 7, Rapid Repository might be right for you. It’s simple and easy to use, but it’s mandatory Guid-only-key policy was a deal-breaker for me. Still, compared to some of the other engines I tried, it’s one of the more well-designed local database implementations I’ve used.
  5. Passing Parameters With Behaviors In MVVM Light for Windows Phone – Great article which explains how to use commanding in MVVM Light. I use EventToCommand everywhere in my MVVM Light applications, so this was a helpful resource for me – the code sample in particular.
  6. Add/RemoveRange Methods for ObservableCollection in Silverlight - This article solved a major UI performance problem for me; the technique of supressing property notification changes for bulk modifications to lists resulted in a pretty drastic performance improvement. I'll be doing a follow-up post on this myself.

Let me know in the comments if there are any great Windows Phone 7 links that you’ve used recently that are worth sharing!

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I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..