Writing a WP7 website scraper application

In this tutorial I will explain how you write a WP7 application using the HtmlAgility Pack in order to use information scraped from a website.
Website scraping is the act of retrieving information from a website page. An act by some considered stealing, by others borrowing. Let’s leave that debate to the others. In this post I will show how easy it is to scrape content from a website so that you can (re)use it in your Windows Phone 7 application. As it is, this information will for the most part also work in other, non WP7, projects of course.
Sometimes website scraping is the only means available to consume certain information from a website. If the website doesn’t have some publicly available API or web service you can use you’re pretty much left with scraping, whether you like it or not.

7 WP7 dev tools you might not know but will want to have

There’s an incredible amount of guides, tools and utilities to be found on the Internet (or should I say ‘tha cloud’?) for Windows Phone 7 developers. Compiled in this article are some of the tools I’ve come across on my searches which I now use frequently but didn’t know the existence of beforehand. Read on to change you WP7 development life.

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.

Creating a WP7 app: Listbox items of the same width

I love databound listboxes in WP7. I do. I really do. However, every time I come to the part of making a nice template for each item (i.e. shiny ugly orange border, etc.) I fail in having items of equal size. This is usally what I produce:

Resulting in:

In WPF, the trick is to set the HorizontalAlignment=”Stretch” property of the Listbox. However, apparently there still some internal bug in the ListBox control, which results in the ListBox simply ingoring that setting.

The solution however is, luckily, provided by Microsoft’s Peter Torr in a reply in here.

By simply adding the ItemContainerStyle as described in the post , to the ListBox we get the result we are looking for:

Resulting in ..hooray:

Update: As Alex Sorokoletov was so kindly to cmment (thanks for that), there’s even a simplier solution:

<ListBox.ItemContainerStyle>
<Style TargetType=”ListBoxItem”>

<Setter Property=”HorizontalAlignment” Value=”Stretch” />
<Setter Property=”HorizontalContentAlignment” Value=”Stretch”/>

</Style>
</ListBox.ItemContainerStyle>

Creating a WP7 app: Supporting dark and light themes

In this post I will show how to create an application that supports both the dark and the light themes, without the hassle of creating two sets of images, icons or styles.

This post is part of a series of posts I’ve planned on my findings while writing a windows phone 7 application (see the previous post, on the problem of caching urls, here).