Series Introduction and Outline This series is going to walk through building a polished, functioning Windows Phone app from start to finish. The app is called Realworld Stocks and the full source code will be available on CodePlex as the series progresses. I’ll be using Mercurial to encourage forking and maybe even pull requests from developers who want to contribute their own real-world solutions. View the Series Introduction and Outline The windows phone panorama Many apps lend themselves nicely to a Windows Phone Panorama. CTA Watch looks similar but it’s actually a Pivot with a background image. After going back and forth for a bit with Real-world Stocks I decided that the panorama looked pretty nice and went with it. Thanks again @Templarian for the background! Be sure to hit...

Series Introduction and Outline This series is going to walk through building a polished, functioning Windows Phone app from start to finish. The app is called Realworld Stocks and the full source code will be available on CodePlex as the series progresses. I’ll be using Mercurial to encourage forking and maybe even pull requests from developers who want to contribute their own real-world solutions. View the Series Introduction and Outline Caliburn.Micro Many Windows Phone Applications use a lightweight MVVM framework for basic infrastructure services. Realworld Stocks is going to use Caliburn.Micro. I have had great success with Caliburn.Micro in my previous Windows Phone and Silverlight apps. CM was created by Rob Eisenberg and is under active development and has a great community and following. This article is going to walk through a lot of Caliburn.Micro setup, but...

Series Introduction and Outline This series is going to walk through building a polished, functioning Windows Phone app from start to finish. The app is called Realworld Stocks and the full source code will be available on CodePlex as the series progresses. I’ll be using Mercurial to encourage forking and maybe even pull requests from developers who want to contribute their own real-world solutions. View the Series Introduction and Outline Before you begin, install NuGet! NuGet is a Visual Studio extension that makes it easy to install and update open source libraries and tools in Visual Studio. It can be installed directly from within Visual Studio and only takes a minute. In Visual Studio: Tools –> Extension Manager and find NuGet   Defining our Solution Structure For our solution we are going...

Series Introduction and Outline This series is going to walk through building a polished, functioning Windows Phone app from start to finish. The app is called Realworld Stocks and the full source code will be available on CodePlex as the series progresses. I’ll be using Mercurial to encourage forking and maybe even pull requests from developers who want to contribute their own real-world solutions. Realworld Stocks The app we are creating is called Realworld Stocks, and this is what it looks like as of today. It’s not much yet, but hey, we’re only a few days in! Hopefully as the series progresses we’ll end up with a pretty nice looking stocks app ready for marketplace submission.   Series Outline The following is a rough outline for how I expect this series to progress. Some parts will probably be...

Why? Because I should be able to Get Latest and F5! I think simplicity is a crucial measure of success in all software. I think being able to pull down the source code onto any developer machine and F5 is an important goal to strive for. Removing manual processes and streamlining the development workflow can yield huge productivity gains – especially when onboarding new developers. I believe databases should be provisioned and seeded automatically, all 3rd party libraries should be readily available in the repo, and any manual steps that must be memorized or documented should be avoided at all costs. But this hasn’t been easy on a Windows Phone device The aforementioned goals have been easily achievable in all of my projects except Windows Phone apps. A key component to this workflow is the magical variable known as localhost. When I F5 one...

This morning I received a Microsoft MVP award for Windows Phone Development. I’m really honored to be part of a community that really values knowledge sharing and continuous professional growth such as this. Over the past few years I’ve come to greatly respect and appreciate the vast amount of personal time that many people in the development community (both MVPs and non-MVPs) contribute to help drive our profession forward. I’d also like to offer a very special thanks to the entire Windows Phone Dev community for helping to expand this great platform into the consumer reach that it deserves. There is still a ways to go, but after the impressive world-wide launch of Mango across dozens of countries, carriers, and OEMs on a single day I think we can all agree that Microsoft is taking this seriously. I’m personally really excited to be in on the ground floor this...