Welcome to Jeff Fansler's Blog

I recently attended a session at CodeMash 2011 called Mobile Smackdown. During this session Jeff Blankenburg (WP7), Chris Judd (Android), and Dan Steinberg(iPhone) set out to create a twitter application in 15 minutes or less. I thought it was a great session. I found it very interesting to see how the same application was implemented in each platform. In the session Dan was the only one to finish the application within the time limit. Once I got home, I was curious to see how hard it would be to create this application in 15 minutes. I also thought others may find this interesting,...

Along with the release bits for Windows Phone 7 came a new control called Pivot.  Pivot allows you to define Pivot Items that the user can scroll through with a swipe of their finger to the left or right. The pivot control looks like this: In this case, the pivot has two pivot items, requests (index 0) and tags (index 1). There are several posts in the intrawebs that explain how to use the pivot control.  It’s pretty easy.  One gotcha to think about when using the pivot is what happens if your application is interrupted (phone call, windows button,...

As promised, here’s my post on launchers and choosers.  There is a lot of information out there on this topic. I’m adding to it for my own benefit. The two sources that I pulled most of my information from were the 3 part post from Yochay located here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and the WP7 Training Kit Launchers and Choosers Lab. What are Launchers and Choosers A pretty common scenario for a phone application is to utilize the functionality that exists on the phone.  I’m talking about features like accessing contact data, sending emails and texts, dialing a phone number, and...

How’s that for a title.  At least it’s descriptive. As it says, this post was going to be on Launchers and Choosers in Windows Phone 7.  After struggling a bit I realized that before I could understand exactly how the Choosers were working, I needed to understand the application execution model.  So here we are, the WP7 application execution model. Every post I’ve read about the WP7 execution model starts out talking about the lack of multi-tasking and this post will be no different.  WP7 does not support multi-tasking.   This point has caused some controversy. Old versions of the Windows phone...

This is going to be a short post.  If you search the interwebs for information on navigation in WP7 you will find plenty of information.  I’m adding to that information mainly for my own good.  Hopefully you will get some use out of it as well. The first point to make here is that navigating in WP7 uses the System.Windows.Navigation API.  This is not a new API.  I believe it was introduced with Silverlight 3. If you are already comfortable using this API then you are all set. If you are like me and haven’t worked with a lot of Silverlight...

The application bar is a menu system used in WP7. MS has built this into the API’s so that applications can maintain a consistent look and feel. This image shows what the application bar looks like when expanded.   There are a few components in play here.  The icons in the circles are called Icon Buttons. In this example there are three; last, next, and favorite. WP7 limits you to only having a maximum of 4 icon buttons.  If you try to add more an exception will be thrown when your application starts.  Normally the text for these icons will not...

When I started digging into the WP7 push notification system I thought it would be pretty quick to learn.  On the surface it’s not terribly complicated.  My phone app tells a service that it wants to receive notifications and the service sends them.  In the end, it pretty much is that simple. Getting there, however, was more difficult then it needed to be.  This is mainly due to the beta nature of WP7.  Working on beta platforms shows how poorly the web handles finding the most relevant information. There are lots of articles out there that explain the messaging system. ...

Before I begin this post I want to be clear, although I have made some tweaks, using the Wiimote as accelerometer input was done by Bill Reiss. Thank you Bill for giving me something fun to play with. Let's start at the beginning. What is an accelerometer? You can read about it in more detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerometer, but effectively it's a little doohickey that allows a device (in our case the Windows Phone) to detect the magnitude and direction of acceleration. Windows Phone 7 (WP7) will have an accelerometer in it. The framework namespace that covers the accelerometer is Microsoft.Devices.Sensors. The class...

Earlier today Jeff Blankeburg made a blog post about hostility towards windows phone 7.  Instead of commenting on his blog I decided to share my thoughts with everyone. Kin No Question MS dropped the ball here.  I think most were surprised when it was announced and then surprised when it was yanked.  The lifetime of Kin was so short that I doubt it will make a large impact over time.  People talk about it now because it's somewhat recent news.  Give it a few months and most will forget it.   Market Size I've seen some comments suggesting that the game is over because Apple...