Helpful Windows Phone 7 Tips

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I recently got an email from Sean Iannuzzi, a veteran developer who’s now doing work on Windows Phone 7. He’s enjoying his experience, and passed along a few tips for writing Windows Phone software. I thought they were worth sharing. Here’s what Sean said:

I have written many mobile application over the years and have watched these tools and products grow over time.  With that said I have to say that writing software for Windows Phone 7 has been a real pleasure.  The integration, UI, SDK, and utilities all work seamlessly.  I already have a few application published on the marketplace and found the process from vision, to development,  to testing, to finally a publish to the marketplace very simple and straight forward.  Even working in the App Hub is very straight forward to gather the necessary information in order to publish an application to the marketplace.

As for the development side of the effort. I did not really have much trouble with any of the API's, Silverlight or even using the XNA framework.  I believe that it surely is possible for inexperienced developers to make the same mistakes that would made writing traditional applications.  For example it is very easy to use the Isolated Storage as a file stream and writing the binary bits directly in the file.  You could take this approach and forget to use a "using block" or "dispose" the file stream or you could handle this properly and create reusable methods that leverage IsolatedStorageSettings (Dictionary Object), and query these values by Value Key Pair.  Another example would be if you are leveraging the camera and start to write your own Jpeg decoder as many of the blogs out there recommend.  However, the proper implementation would be to use the PictureDecoder.DecodeJpeg method to return the WritableBitmap object.  These are just a few traps that can easily cause some major frustrations when coding very simple applications for Windows Phone 7.

Thanks for that, Sean! Feel free to pass along other tips and tricks to me.

Keith Ward 

Editor in Chief

MSDN Magazine