7 WP7 Dev Tools You Might End Up Using Frequently
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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.
-
wp7contrib
: consider this a colorful compilation of
the best components and helper tools around. some of the tools
discussed in this article are also in the wp7contrib project. basically
this project has compiled the best tools around in one single project
(making articles of this kind rapidly redundant) with links to the
original blogs that this the tool(s). enumerating what’s in it is
overkill, simple check out all the goodies (ui controls, patterns,
transitions, etc) on their codeplex page:
http://wp7contrib.codeplex.com/
-
gridhelper:
this one was pointed out to me
yesterday. this tool, available through nuget, helps you with placing
all your elements on the grid according to the metro-guidelines (i.e.
margin of 12pt from the screenborder, etc.) . read jeff wilcox’s
original post to see what this is all about:
http://www.jeff.wilcox.name/2011/10/metrogridhelper/
-
lowprofileimageloader
: david anson wrote several
excellent classes, one of these being an extended image control which
can be used when the imagesource is an image in ‘tha cloud’. the control
will download the image without blocking the ui thread which tends to
happen with these things. this control is ideal in other words if you
have a large list of images to show on a page. i’ve used this control in
my
belgian cinema
app making the startup of the application way more fluent. make sure
you also check out the deferredloadlistbox control from the same author
which improves the scrolling of long lists in your app. all information
can be found on the
‘delay’s blog’
.
-
placeholder images:
david anson recently also
released a wpf/sl/wp7 control that easily incorporates placeholder
images to be used for those images that might not be available or are
slow to download. like all of mr anson’s control, this one again can be
easily integrated in your existing application by simply changing the
your image-controls to placeimage controls with an additional
placeholdersource-attribute that points to the local image to be used as
placeholder. a combination of the lowprofileimageloader and this
control would be awesome but with some plumbing (all the source code is
available) this can be done yourself. more information on this control
can be found
here
.
-
your last about dialog:
an about box is not a real
requirement to get approved on the marketplace, but it does help to have
one. implementing an about box is usually done in the last instance
right before you are submitting your app for approval. anxious to get
your app on the marketplace, the about box is usually an ugly, empty
page with some textboxes thrown on rapidly…at least in my case that is.
peter kuhn heard our prayers and create a very simple to use, nuget,
about dialog template to be used in all your wp7 apps from hereon. once
you use the “your last about dialog” you will never ever write your own
about dialog; believe you me (still think there’s something
grammatically wrong with that expression). more information to be
discovered on
peter’s blog
.
-
kawagoe toolkit:
besides having the most funny
toolkit name around, this sweet little thing has some interesting things
in it. the toolkit consists of 3 handy little classes being: a message
popup with customizable buttons, an imagecache class (+ an inherited
persistentimagechache and systemimagecache) ideal if your working with
lots of image and lastly the toolkit includes a “oneshotdispatchertimer”
with is a dispatchertimes that promised only to fire once, ever (check
out the end of
this article
by dan clarke why such a timer can be handy to have around). more information on this toolkit can be found
here
)
-
notifypropertyweaver:
don’t you just love
databinding?! i certainly do, though i sometimes get tired of the amount
of boilerplate i each time need to write when implementing an
inotifypropertychanged class. if you’ve only got two or three classes ,
that’s no big burden. on the other hand, if you have lots of classes,
install the notifypropertyweaver (nuget available) which will simply
write all the boring code for you…it’s like having a little monkey doing
your work, hooray! get your monkey
here
.
there we go. a little list of must-have tools. i know there’s lots of
other stuff around, but these are the ones i personally use a lot
(yeah, i use the silverlight toolkit as well, but it felt a bit
redundant to mention this one again here). enjoy!
source:
http://timdams.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/7-wp7-dev-tools-you-might-not-know-but-will-want-to-have/
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