Learning to cook with WP 7.5 data (a book review)

Recently I received a review copy of the “Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook” by Ramesh Thalli from Packt Publishing (ISBN 978-1-84969-122-2). This book, divided in 8 chapters, shows how simple it is to write data-driven programs WP7 applications.

What follows is an extensive review of this book.

New WP 7.5 ebook review copy arrived

I just received a review copy of a soon to be published book, titled “Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook” by Ramesh Thalli from Packt Publishers. I will put up a review of it soon. However, I can already hint, after quickly flicking through the pages, that many who liked its unofficial predecessor “Silverlight 4 Data Services Cookbook” by Gill Cleeren and Kevi Dockx will also like this one a lot. If you can’t wait for my review, check out a sample chapter (chapter 2 on using Isolated Storage for data storage) here.

XML-databinding in WPF using Blend 4

This tutorial shows how easy it is to use XML-databinding in Blend without writing a single line of code and mostly using the drag-and-drop magic of Blend. We will create a very simple rss-reader that shows the content of a single rss-feed. This post was inspired by the great talk by Isabel Gomez Miragaya and Katrien De Graeve they gave at TechDays 2011 Belgium titled “Designing and Building a Windows Phone 7 Application end-to-end” (video of the talk).

Using enum flags to write filters in Linq

Here’s the premise. Suppose we have a cookbook that contains all possible recipes with their names and needed ingredients. Using Linq it should be easy to query the cookbook and, for example, only show those recipes you can make given one or more ingredients you have at your house. My solution is a) extremely nice or b) very strange, bloated and way wrong. I leave it up to you and make sure to message me if you have a much nicer solution…because franky, I’m not a big fan of what follows (I have the itching sensation that using the correct binary logic I can solve this problem much easier…).

Using Linq to filter a databound listbox in WPF/Silverlight

In this short tutorial I show how to use Linq in order to filter the items shown in a listbox, which in turn is databound to an ObservableCollection.

Suppose we use the listbox created in the previous tutorial where we show the age and name of each user in the collection. All our databinding code-remains the same as before. What we have to add is a new collection in between our original source and the listbox. The in between collection is our Linq-query result. Each time we wish to change our filter, we change the query.

Adding buttons to databound listbox items in WPF

Introduction

In this tutorial I will demonstrate how to create a listbox in WPF which is databound to a collection, we then would like to add a button to each item in the listbox. Clicking this button will button will delete that item from the collection.

Tutorial on Silverlight 4 databinding in code-behind, custom user controls, etc.

Introduction

This small tutorial was written to show the students the following aspects of Silverlight:

• Writing a class that can be used for databinding
• Perform data-binding through code instead of XAML
• Creating a custom user control
• Writing simple data converters

Suppose we are creating a Silverlight game in which each player is represented as a pawn. However, the player class itself is somewhere deep inside the game-engine and we would like the pawn user control to be only loosely coupled to this player class. By doing this, we are able to make a rapid Silverlight prototype and if we later decide that the frontend is pretty lame, we can simply redesign it without too much fuss.