Creating app promotional videos

I’ve received a few emails over the last week on how I created the in app videos for my apps To Do Today and Left to Spend so I thought I’d go over the process I used.

Announcing Left to Spend

Building a Navigation ListBox

A common usage pattern for a ListBox is to use it as a navigation list, when you select the item the application navigates to a new page. This usually involves either wiring into the ListBox SelectionChanged event, or using some sort of GestureTrigger.

Extending the ListBox control

I’m currently going through a process of bringing together code and controls I’ve been using in the last few applications and compiling my own “toolkit”. The idea will be a very opinionated way of building WP7 applications rather than a generic control library. Some parts will be controls like the “empty list box” discussed in this post and other parts will be extensions to the Caliburn.Micro MVVM framework for how I like to work.

WP7 Context Menus with Caliburn Micro

Context Menus in all the xaml based frameworks (WPF, Silverlight and WP7) are tricky little beasts waiting to trip people up. In WP7 they’re provided by the awesome Silverlight Toolkit. The major problem is that they don’t exist in the visual tree in the way standard elements do. This inhibits things in Caliburn Micro (CM) like action bubbling (the process where an Action bubbles through the visual tree to find a Target that can handle it).