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Let’s say that you want to allow the user to customize the startup page of your application. You can easily change the startup page by editing the ‘NavigationPage’ attribute in the manifest file. But the manifest cannot be modified once the application has been published. How to define it at runtime? For this, we’ll use a class very useful in ‘classical’ Silverlight, but widely forgotten on Windows Phone: UriMapper. In this example, we create an application with three pages (Page1, Page2, and Page3), and we want the startup page to be picked randomly among those three pages. First, change the manifest to use an inexistentRead More →

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Let’s say that your application is dynamically loading resources, and you have to constantly add/remove new resources during the development. In this scenario, it could be a huge-time saver to just tell Visual Studio to take the contents of a folder and inject it into your application. I don’t think there’s an out-of-the-box way to do that, but you can inject the files yourself using a post-build event. How? The output of every WP7 project is a .xap file, which is just a zip file with a different extension. So you can edit it using whichever zip extractor you like. In our case, let’s useRead More →

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Unexpected NONE in parse rule ElementBody ::= ATTRIBUTE* ( PropertyElement | Content )* . ENDTAG.. Best. Error message. Ever. Thanks Silverlight. So, what’s going on? For the sake of all the devs who’ll come to this page using Google, let’s describe one of the causes of the error message. Is that it? Yes, pretty much. I don’t know if it’s the only possible cause, but it seems that this error message is triggered when an empty element is used in the XAML for a collection. In this case it’s the MenuItems of an ApplicationBar, but you can also have the problem with an empty rowRead More →

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Another issue I found on StackOverflow, which is way more tricky that it seems. Let’s say we have a Silverlight WP7 application, and we want to add a drag&drop scenario. The user first taps an element, drags his finger to another, and raises his finger on another element. Easy enough! Just handle the MouseLeftButtonDown on each element, store which element triggered the event in a property, handle the MouseLeftButtonUp on each element, and then we have the originator and the destination! … right? Well, so I would have thought. Unfortunately, the MouseLeftButtonUp event will only be triggered if the ‘mouse’ left button (or your finger,Read More →