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How to stop toolkit transitions affecting performance

by Matt Lacey’s blog

I was recently debugging a performance issue in an app and couldn’t work out why the fill rate was so high based on what was on the page.

It was so high (>3.2) that it was definitely having a negative effect on performance. Depending on who you talk to, you’ll be told that the fill rate should be below either 2.5 or 3.0 to avoid affecting performance. In my experience, I’ve noticed performance impacted above a fill rate of 2.0 so I always aim to keep it below this.

The only exception I’ll accept is a panorama with a large background image.

 

Read Text File contents in Windows Phone 7 Application

By Usmanahmed blog

There are many threads on the web that speak of reading a text file in a Windows Phone 7 application however most of them target Isolated Storage which is required when you need to manipulate data during execution/runtime. Opposite to that there are scenarios when your application requires various forms of data avaialble as part of the application package itself and deployed on the client device rather than being manipulated during execution of your application.

 

Adding Tactile Feedback to your app the easy way

by mark.mymonster.nl

About a week ago there was a very good article with tips to make your wp7 app a killer app. Tip 24 was about tactile feedback. Tactile feedback can be something like 30 milliseconds running the VibrateController. That’s very easy, just like this:

VibrateController vibrateController = VibrateController.Default;
vibrateController.Start(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 30));

Because I just want to call one method instead of two lines of code, I created a small static method.

public static void GiveTactileFeedback()
{
    VibrateController vibrateController = VibrateController.Default;
    vibrateController.Start(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 30));
}

Alright, but now I had to add this method call to every Button Click, ListBox SelectionChanged, and ApplicationBar menu or button use. Probably there are some more places where I want to give a little bit of feedback. So I’m thinking about a solution, a generic solution. I remember how easy it was to apply the TiltEffect. So my mind was going the direction of a similar solution. So I started with some Attached Dependency Properties, the same mechanism that’s used to implement the TiltEffect. So enable it for example in the root of your Phone Page and only suppress the effect if you don’t want to apply it a special occasion.

 

windows phone application bar icons

by pedrolamas.com

The Windows Phone 7 development team added a set of 32 icons to the SDK to be used on the Application Bar by developers of external applications.

This  number seemed quite low to get things done, even more after seeing the other icons spread across the native Windows Phone 7 applications (like the “send” icon on the messages, the “attach” icon on the mail app, etc.)

Thus, I now present you a collection of 132 extra icons in comparison to the 32 that comes on the SDK (please click on the image below to get a full size visualization of the collection)

Windows Phone HubTile in depth| Part3: Freezing and Unfreezing tiles

by WindowsPhoneGeek

This is the third article about the new HubTile control from the latest release of Windows Phone Toolkit – August 2011 (7.1 SDK). This time I am going to talk about freezing and unfreezing tiles. It is a good practice, from performance point of view, to freeze the animation of your tiles whenever they are not visible.

NOTE:  For more information about data binding, the key properties, methods, events and the main features of the Windows Phone HubTile control you can take a look at my previous posts: