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.

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).

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).

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.