JAPF

You’ll need not more than a couple of minutes to download and install all the tools needed to create your first Windows Phone application using Blend.

Here is a tour in images:

Welcome in Blend 4

Discovering new projects templates in the Welcome dialog:

It must be quite familiar to you if you’re working with WPF or Silverlight

Choosing a target

Launching the app in the emulator

App.xaml file has all the resources for the Windows Phone theme

Let’s go now and play with the tools

The first keynote of Mix10 is just over and the biggest announcement I was waiting for occured: Windows Phone 7 series development tools are NOW available for FREE.

Grab the tools right now ! You’ll need:

• Expression Blend 4 Beta
• Windows Phone Developer Tools
• Expression Blend Add-in for Windows Phone
• Expression Blend SDK for Windows Phone

If you want more details about Blend4, you can check out Christian Schormann’s overview. A new website is now live for all Windows Phone 7 series related development information at http://developer.windowsphone.com/

Another announcements is the availability of Silverlight 4 RC and support for VS2010 RC:

• Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (this installs Silverlight developer runtime, SDK, tools, and WCF RIA Services).
• Silverlight Toolkit March 2010 Release
• WCF RIA Services Toolkit
• Expression Blend 4 beta
• BREAKING CHANGES DOCUMENTATION
• Windows Phone Developer tools

For more information about Silverlight 4 RC, you can check out the blog post of Tim Heuer.

I can’t wait to play with all this new stuff. It’s very impressive to see the work done around Windows Phone 7 series. WPF and Silverlight developers just became Windows Phone developer today, and I think this is great !

I’ll give more feedback as soon as the tools will be installed

Mix10 is starting today and we can expect many cool announcements during the keynote. You can watch the keynote online at live.visitmix.com. I’ll try to give feedback as soon as possible. Because I’m not lucky enough to be in Vegas, I’ll watch the keynote tonight (French time !) at home with some coworkers.

Last information before the keynote, it looks like we’ll have some announcements about Silverlight running on Symbian devices…

Next monday, Mix10 will start in Las Vegas. Even though it’s a little bit far from my place here in France I’ll try to give feedback after the keynotes and as soon as first videos will be available. I’m sure you’re aware that major announcements this years at Mix will be about the Windows Phone 7 series.

To make the long story short :

• Windows Mobile 7 was presented during last WMC (Word Mobile Congress) under the name “Windows Phone 7 series”
• Microsoft demonstrated the new UI experience coming with this new version
• Microsoft confirmed that Silverlight and XNA will be the technologies available to develop on the Windows Phone
• Microsoft shows off single game running on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox

I’m sure you realize that we are going to a very capable and powerful mobile platform here:

• all existing .Net and Silverlight developers are going to be able to write apps for the Windows Phone (this is HUGE)
• we are going to finally have the 3 screens version of Microsoft: develop once and then run on your mobile, your PC and your TV (XBox)

Mix10 website now contains the name and the description of the sessions which are dedicated to the Windows Phone 7 series:

• Designing and Developing for the Rich Mobile Web
• Building a High Performance 3D Game for Windows Phone
• Building Windows Phone Games
• Changing our Game – an Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series
• An Introduction to Developing Applications for Microsoft Silverlight
• Windows Phone UI and Design Language
• Overview of the Windows Phone 7 Series Application Platform
• Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 1
• Building Windows Phone Applications with Silverlight, Part 2
• Unit Testing Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Applications
• Silverlight Performance on Windows Phone
• Distributing and Monetizing Windows Phone Applications and Games
• Development and Debugging Tools for Building XNA Games for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Application Platform Architecture

If you’re using Twitter, make sure to watch the #wp7 hashtag. It make not any doubt the next week is going to be very informative about Windows Phone 7 series.So stay tuned !

Thanks to the readers who gave me feedback on my Silverlight MVVM frameworks explorer I updated the application this morning in order to fix some problems.

Here is the change set:

• fix incorrect URLs
• fix incorrect “Silverlight Support” options. As Laurent Bugnion said in the comments, his MVVM Light framework was the only one supporting Silverlight which was strange…
• links now open in a new window

Click on the following image to launch the Silverlight application.

About adding new frameworks, I’m not sure to add those which targets a much larger domain than MVVM itself. CompositeApplication guidance for example is a lot more than MVVM…

A couple of weeks ago, I started a series of articles about WPF internals organization. In the first article I did a tour of the core WPF classes. In this second part, I’m reviewing the organization of the various controls that exist in the framework.

Because the image of the diagram is pretty big, I decided to use Silverlight DeepZoom and the result is just below this text You can download the full image resolution here. Please use the full screen button in the upper right corner of the viewer for the best browsing experience.

Here are general remarks that might help you get information from those diagrams.

The top level Control class:

• Defines general UI properties such as Background, Foreground, BorderBrush and BorderThickness
• Defines a set of properties to control font rendering: FontFamily, FontSize, FontStyle…
• Has a DoubleClick event (other mouse events such as MouseUp/MouseDown comes from the UIElement class)

Below the Control class, we have (this list is not complete):

• The ContentControl class: those controls have… a single Content
• The ItemsControls class which handles a collection of child controls
• The TextBoxBase class which is the parent of TextBox and RichTextBox
• The RangerBase class which handles a range (minimum, maximum) and which is the parent of the ScrollBar, Slider and ProgressBar classes
• The Thumb class which has the ability to be dragged over a surface

Below the ContentControl class we can find many existing WPF controls:

• ButtonBase and its child: Button, ToggleButton and RepeatButton
• Label (see this post for an explanation of the differences between a Label and a TextBlock)
• ListBoxItem and its children: ListViewItem, ComboBoxItem
• ScrollViewer
• HeaderedContentControl, a ContentControl that has both a Content and a Header. This is the case of the Expander, GroupBox and TabItem controls
• Tooltip
• Window
• UserControl

General other remarks:

• It’s funny to see that both Window and UserControl inherits from ContentControl. Before doing the diagram I though that Window came from somewhere else
• Having those diagrams in mind (or on a screen !) is very useful when you need to create your own custom control
• We can see the differences between creating a custom control (inherit from Control or derived class) and a UserControl (inherit from UserControl)
• .Net4 will introduce new controls (not in this diagram) in the WPF framework such: DataGrid, Calendar, TimePicker

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post where I compared the existing MVVM frameworks. This post became a bit famous in the WPF/Silverlight blog world and I received a lot of feedback to update the list, fix information, etc. I also got a request from Erik suggesting me to put all the datas in a matrix.

Today I’m proud to announce the MVVM frameworks Silverlight application (click the image to open the Silverlight3 page).

A couple of observation:

• please contact me via this blog or twitter if you find incorrect information
• I’m not judging anybody’s work by giving rating, it’s just my personal feeling to have an easiest way to sort the data

Hope you’ll like it