On Saturday June 16, John Waters will be teaching the Window Phone Unleashed event in Mountain View, CA. This is an all day, bring your own laptop, instructor led hand on programming day, culminating in a contest with chances of winning a $500 gift card. The event will be at the Hacker Dojo.

 

Update!

Slides can be found here: Power_Point_Slides


Congratulations Anushree, proud winner of the event with her UV index app. The app does a reverse lookup of your current location to get the ZIP code, then retrieves the UV index from another web service. That service was ...

I’ve been looking at several alternate reality application ideas and how to best show the real world on the phone. It’s easy to get the camera preview to show up in a WP7 application, but sometimes you want to maximize the camera preview in the screen. One problem is that the camera preview is a different size and aspect ratio than the WP7 screen. The size differences are illustrated below.

 

The WP7 screen is 480x800 and the camera preview is 480x640. If you want to show controls, then you can use the extra space at the top and bottom. ...

If you missed my blog about showing the WP7 magnetometer in 3D with an XNA/Silverlight application, you can read about it by clicking here. We are in the process of putting this application in the Marketplace so you’ll be able to check it out on your phone shortly. One of the steps in the Marketplace process is coming up with screenshots of the application. You can always use the screen capture option in the Windows Phone Emulator; however, in this case it was going to take some code to emulate the magnetometer sensor. Figuring out how to take screen ...

The Windows Phone platform has been making headlines lately.  A Customer Think survey recently revealed that among smartphone users, Windows Phone users experience the highest customer satisfaction. Nokia's new Lumia 900 Windows Phone debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show and took home CNET's best cell phone award. Market research firms iSuppli, Gartner and IDC all expect Windows Phone to claim the number two spot in smartphone market share by 2015.

So what's the big deal?

We are giving you a chance to see for yourself. On Feb 10th at 12PM EST, join us in our free Windows Phone webinar, "The ...

EventBoard is making waves again. Telerik just released a customer case study featuring our mobile conference companion: http://www.telerik.com/company/customers/case-studies/telerik-s-integrated-technologies-help-make-falafel-s-eventboard-solution-a-hit-with-audiences.aspx

When Telerik asked if we wanted to be part of a customer case study, the answer was an enthusiastic yes! At every turn, EventBoard utilizes a Telerik solution. The WP7 mobile application uses RadControls for Windows Phone, the administration application uses RadControls for Silverlight, and even the product webpage features blogs powered by Sitefinity.

Thanks to the Telerik controls, EventBoard for Windows Phone continues to shine as a model of style and usability. Expanding the use of  Telerik’s  Window’s Phone Controls in ...

Microsoft’s next release of the Windows Phone operating system is here and brings over 500 new features to handsets everywhere. You can learn to build apps that leverage these new features and capitalize on the growing Windows Phone market with our new book, “Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ Nuts and Bolts”. The best part? It is 50% off through Friday! Get it now with promo code “MangoWeek”: https://www.falafel.com/store/courseware/wp7nutsandbolts.aspx

“Windows Phone 7.5 ‘Mango’ Nuts and Bolts” is over 600 pages of step-by-step instructions, detailed explanations, and downloadable source code that will have you cranking out robust, user-friendly apps in ...

We had another awesome time out at Silicon Valley Code Camp this year. As promised in the Windows Phone 7 Kick Start session, here are the key downloads for getting started with Windows Phone 7 development. Minimally, to develop just on your computer using the Windows Phone 7 Emulator, you will need Visual Studio and the Windows Phone 7 SDK.

App Hub is the developer site for Windows Phone 7 with free tools and developer resources. From App Hub you can register for a membership that will allow you to submit applications to the Marketplace and "unlock" your phone so ...

Going to Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend? Chances are, you will run into a Falafel. Our entire team travels from all over the country to Foothills College this weekend, to attend the biggest (and best) code camp in the country.

We love being a part of this fantastic event. This year, Falafel is a platinum sponsor, picked up the tab for Saturday’s pizza lunch, built the mobile track, supplied 7 speakers with 11 informative sessions and donated our mobile application, EventBoard, to be used as the official conference app.

Our 7 speakers have been having a friendly competition to see who can get the greatest number ...

The previous blog on Categorized Lists with LongListSelector demonstrated IGrouping implementation. If we play it right, we shouldn't have to touch the "Grouping" class to group using complex objects.

I'll use a playing card deck as a familiar data model that has categories to group on, i.e. the "Suit" that contains "Clubs", "Spades",  "Hearts" and "Diamonds" and where each card has a value from two through nine and including "Jack", "Queen", "King" and "Ace". The cards can appear in the LongListSelector with the Suit in the heading for each group and the value for each card making up the details ...

You can use LongListSelector as a glorified ListBox, but that cripples its true purpose. The real power  of LongListSelector is to display long categorized lists, enable a "People Hub" style "jump list" to navigate between groups in the list and to allow performant scrolling.

Grouping

The trick to get LongListSelector working is to properly group the data assigned to the LongListSelector ItemsSource. You can start with a simple flat list of objects, where each object has a property suitable for grouping. In the snippet below, "MyObject" has a "Category" property that the list will be grouped on....

Many Windows Phone 7 developers (including those at Falafel) are pretty excited about the new features available in the upcoming ‘Windows Phone Mango’ update.  One of the features we are hearing a lot about is the new ‘deep linking’ through push notifications and also in live tiles.  It’s easy to find article after article listing this as one of the exciting upgrades to the WP7.

What’s not so easy to find is a simple example of these deep links!  Even the examples from MSDN which were supposed to be previewing the new release seemed to leave out this important part.  ...