Smarty Pants Coding - Coding with a touch of flava

While sitting on the couch last weekend, I had the idea for putting up a Twitter panel on my site - you should see it off to the right. I figured since this is a Silverlight site, that it might be nice to actually have some Silverlight on it. I got the Twitter panel mostly done in 2-3 hours, and ended up using a few Silverlight features I haven't blogged about yet on the site - hence this blog post.

This post contains:

• Binaries for the Twitter panel so you can use it on your own site
• Passing in startup parameters from the object embed code
• A simple reusable Twitter assembly for Silverlight
• Source code for the Twitter panel
• Using Fluid UI to animate items added to the ListBox

(click 'read more' to keep reading..)

I am very excited to say that I've been awarded the 2010 Microsoft MVP Award in Silverlight! It is very humbling to now carry the same title as many of my peers from whom I've learned so much - and I still have much to learn from them. Thanks to those of you who've helped me achieve this great accomplishment.

It is also exciting that another member of the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup group was named Silverlight MVP as well - Jeremy Likness. If you're not familiar with Jeremy's blog, be sure to check it out.

For a complete list of new and renewed Silverlight MVPs from this quarter you can check out Tim Heuer's blog entry here.

It has been mentioned a few times in the last month or so that if you want a Windows Phone 7 test device, then you need to be showing why you deserve one. Most notably, Brandon Watson has laid out a post showing 2 such examples, and listing 6 suggestions of how to garner the @wp7dev team's notice. Well, I'm going to take those 6 suggestions, and respond to each - because I want a friggin' test device.

1) Get the tools and start building apps.
I am working on 3 games independently, as well as several at IQ.
2) Blog about your development progress. Screenshots and videos help a lot.
See #3
3) Tag posts with "Windows Phone 7 Development" or "wp7dev" so that we, and other developers, can find you.
Windows Phone 7 Posts on SmartyPantsCoding.com
4) Build something which extends the platform and can be used by other developers.
How to use the Facebook Developer Toolkit with Windows Phone 7
My Windows Phone 7 Pivot Control
5) Post videos of your apps running in the emulator to youtube
See new preview videos below (hopefully Vimeo is alright)
6) Register in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Done.

To put things in context, I had no intention of posting any videos of my WP7 side projects anytime soon. I hope (read: pray) that folks watching these videos understand that both of these games are very much in the pre-alpha / proof-of-concept state at this point, and honestly any sort of feedback at this point would be very premature.

Pre-Alpha Preview Video of Matchingo 2
This first video showing Matchingo 2 is a very rough port of the original Matchingo - this game will be getting a complete frontend overall and hopefully some pretty cool additions. The UI in the video below is 100% temporary.

Pre-Alpha Preview Video of Hungry Castaway
This second video is showing Hungry Castaway, which is in the proof-of-concept stage as well. This is the game I have been working on in both XNA and Silverlight versions, which I've referenced recently. I spent quite some time evaluating Silverlight vs XNA for this game, but I have now chosen XNA and am back to focusing on functionality.

There is a third game I am working on for WP7 as well, however it is way too early to show anything. I also would love to port ImageWind.net to WP7 - but I have to get a better understanding of if such an app can make it through the app approval process. Now that a few of the cats are out of the bag, I guess I better get back to work.. ;)

The last month or so has been pretty hectic both at work and in my personal life - but rather than make excuses or promise to blog more frequently, I'll instead just post a grab bag of random tidbits I've learned / come across this month.

First Screenshot of the Windows Phone 7 Launch Screen in Landscape

Original screnshot from CNET

Having played with the hacked emulator quite a bit I'd grown concerned at how few apps so far supported landscape orientation - including the main launch screen of the phone. I am pretty sure that this screenshot above is the first shot of the launch screen running landscape, which is nice to see. I am very hopeful that the WP7 team might update their Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design & Interaction Guide to discuss more about landscape orientations, and that more videos or screenshots might come out showing how native apps will handle this orientation.

Some New Understandings about the Visual State Manager in Silverlight
Two of the biggest issues I'd run into using the Visual State Manager was the inability to know when a state transition had completed, and the ability to query the current visual state. Thanks to this month's presentation at the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup by James Chittenden I now know the solution to both of these issues.

It turns out that in Silverlight 3 you actually CAN tell when a visual state transition has completed. I had asked around to several folks about this, so apparently I wasn't the only one in the dark on this ability. It is actually very simple. Supposing that the name of your visual state is 'MyState', attaching a completed event is as simple as attaching a completed event to the relative Storyboard:

MyState.Storyboard.Completed += new EventHandler(Storyboard_Completed);

New in Silverlight 4 is the ability to query the current visual state of your control. Supposing that the name of your visual state group is 'MyVisualStateGroup', you can check the current state like so:

string currentStateName;
if (MyVisualStateGroup.CurrentState != null)
    currentStateName = MyVisualStateGroup.CurrentState.Name;

Windows Phone 7 Development Continues...
Finally, I just wanted to point out that I am still working on Windows Phone 7 applications - both at work, and in my personal time. Brandon Watson and others have recently commented that developer devices will start rolling out in July, and that those who want a test device need to be showing off their work. I hope to post some information as to the initial apps/games I hope to have in the marketplace on launch soon - and if you want an early test device, I suggest you do the same.

In my last blog post on XNA for Windows Phone 7 I said that I was working on a game in both Silverlight and XNA, and that if I got a chance to test out performance I would report back. As you can see in the image below, I got a chance to test out my Silverlight game on a real device last week at ReMIX Atlanta - so this post is to cover some insights gained.

me testing my game prototype on a Windows Phone 7 device

First off, if you are trying to get a basic understanding of when to choose between XNA and Silverlight for WP7, you should take a look at this post by Michael Klucher. Michael lays down the basic differences between the two platforms - Silverlight has great controls with great tool support for styling them, and XNA has a crazy fast sprite rendering pipeline which supports full 3D.

But, let's say that you don't need controls for your game, and you don't need 3D - is Silverlight good enough for writing a basic 2D game? After playing with a device briefly last weekend I can tell you the performance of Silverlight on the device looked great - but you will need to analyze the game you're creating a bit before making the ultimate decision.

(click 'read more' to keep reading..)

I am very stoked to say that I've been selected to speak at CodeStock 2010 in Knoxville, TN on June 25th and 26th. I'll be doing a revamped version of my Thinking Outside the Battleship Gray Box talk I did at the Atlanta Silverlight Meetup group a few months ago, and I'll be adding some new examples including some demos on Windows Phone 7.

Thanks to everyone who voted for my session - there were 300+ submitted, and I am very psyched to have been selected. Several other folks from the local Atlanta Silverlight Meetup group will be presenting as well including Corey Schuman, Jeremy Likness, James Ashley, and Jason Rainwater. Hope to see you there!

A couple of people have noticed that the Facebook Developer Toolkit doesn't work on the current release of Windows Phone 7. The primary reason is that it has a dependency on System.Windows.Browser - a library which isn't in the WP7 runtime (Silverlight isn't hosted in a browser on the phone).

I took the source from the Facebook Developer Toolkit and hacked at it until I got it to work on the phone. Here is a quick demo showing it working in the WP7 emulator:

(click 'read more' for more on how this was done..)

This is part 3 - the final part - of how to create a Pivot style application for Windows Phone 7. Attached is the sample project and code for this example.

The screencast starts off in Blend and shows how to create the endless pivot menu across the top. After that the screencast dives into the code hooking up our new pivot menu and changing how the content area works. The last 15 minutes or so of the screencast is a bit long winded, but talks about issues you might run into when trying to use this code in a more feature rich application.

After using this method of creating a Pivot style application for a project for my employer, I've decided that hand rolling one of these things is way too much of a pain. I hope these videos will help those of you who can't wait for the real Pivot control release, but be aware that the devil is in the details for this approach - and there are a lot of little details. It's also worth noting that if I had to do it over again I may have made use of WriteableBitmaps to prevent some of the accidental interactions that can occur when you have interactive elements inside of a pivot page.

On a side note, while working on this screencast and trying to make use of the Pivot in an application I also attempted to create a standalone Pivot control. Unfortunately I could never get it quite stable enough, and after spending so much time on these screencasts I don't have any desire to revisit it and try to get it working - perhaps that will change if the real pivot control still hasn't arrived in another month or so. In the mean time, I've got some WP7 applications and games I want to get to work on.

I got some feedback after part 1 and part 2 of how to create a Pivot style for your Windows Phone 7 application - what I had created had a few issues. First, the pivot menu items across the top of the screen is supposed to be an endless scrolling menu. Second, there wasn't supposed to be an overlay of each pivot page on the edge like there is in the Panorama style.

I took a closer look at exactly how the Pivot control should look and interact. In the process I noticed that the Zune HD's pivot menu is actually different - it doesn't have an endless menu across the top. I also noticed that the menu on my AT&T U-Verse box uses the pivot style as well (not surprising, it runs on a Microsoft Media Room) - and it doesn't endlessly repeat either. The only way I could try and figure out exactly how it should look was by looking at the hacked ROM that showed up on the web right after MIX.

Above is a video of my current Pivot app (on right) working very closely to what can be found in the Photos application in the hacked WP7 ROM (on left). This was built by modifying the code from Creating a Windows Phone 7 Metro Style Pivot Application [Part 2]. I was hoping to get the code posted before heading out of town, but there is still some tweaking left to do - I will be posting a part 3 sometime next week.

Note: It has been noted that this demo and code more closely follow how to create a Panorama style application than a Pivot style application. I hope to fix that in the next part to this series - sorry for the confusion.

This is part two of how to create a basic Windows Phone 7 application that follows the Pivot style of navigation (you can find part one here). Part two of this screencast is focused on using manipulation events to provide gesture support for the Pivot style of navigation.

In the screencast I reference a few other posts on this same topic, you can check those out here:
[WP7] Create a panoramic view using Silverlight
Panoramic Navigation on Windows Phone 7 with No Code!

The code from this step of the app can be found here. Please leave any suggestions about the code and/or update it yourself - I may or may not be updating it going forward depending on other solutions that come about. I hope to continue similar screencasts over the coming weeks/months, and would definitely appreciate any feedback on how to improve these going forward.