Mango Application Updates

I’m pleased at announce that both the Mango updates for To Do Today and Left to Spend have passed certification and are available on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Visual State Manager and Coroutines

Well it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything having spent the last five weeks in Canada getting married and St Lucia on our honeymoon. As usual a lot happens while you’re away, with Mango getting closer to release (and the marketplace opening for Mango apps), the unveiling of Windows 8 at Build and other smaller news. With all this there’s been a lot to catch up but after five weeks away from development I’ve been itching to get back to it. I’m currently working on Mango updates for Left to Spend and To Do Today, I’m taking the opportunity to rebuild bits of To Do Today with some of the techniques I’ve learnt in the last year so I’ll hopefully be discussing some of those as I go.

Using on View Ready in Caliburn Micro

One of the recommendations from Microsoft for better performance from your WP7 application is to begin work on your page in the first LayoutUpdated event after OnNavigatedTo.

Using Caliburn Micro as a Data Template Selector

Caliburn Micro conventions for Windows Phone

One of the best things I find in the MVVM framework Caliburn Micro is the convention based binding for properties and methods. They allow a lot of binding between your view and view model to happen “auto-magically” based on the same of elements in your view.