Android screen sizes

For my own reference, but possibly interesting to others.  Android screen sizes of note: ldpi: small screens in low numbers mdpi: range of sizes and quite popular hdpi: most popular xhdpi: very few devices summary: must support normal screens at hdpi and mdpi densities. See more at http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/screens.html See also, the android guide to supporting multiple...

Think mobile at DDD South West

If you're not aware of the DDD (or Developer Developer Developer) series of community events then you've missed out. They provide a great opportunity to learn what's new in the .Net community. Or, officially: DDD South West is a free one day technical event for developers. It is a day of learning,...

So you want some help?

Warning: Rant! So you want help with something. Ok. Now make it easy to help you. I get a bit annoyed by people posting questions (on SO mainly) with a vague problem or descriptions of what's been tried but no actual code     Deliberately including no examples to protect the guilty Before you ask for help, please read the following: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/how-to-ask http://tinyurl.com/so-hints  http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/rubber-duck-problem-solving.html It'll...

Ideas of March | #IdeasOfMarch

As prompted by http://shiflett.org/blog/2012/mar/ideas-of-march I like blogs. I read the titles of hundreds of blog articles each day and usually end up reading dozens of posts. There are 2 main reasons (that I can think of right now) that I like blogs though: 1. I like how anyone can write a blog. Yes, even little old me. Blogs have allowed me to read the thoughts, ideas, experiments, plans and...

Slides from last months Scottish user group talks

Last month I went to Scotland to talk at some user groups about Windows Phone development and general mobile development principles that can be applied to all platforms. I've had some requests for the slides from those talks. (The latest evolution of the slides since the last time I gave these talks.) So here they are: Thinking mobile and beyond (Edinburgh & Dundee) View more from Matt Lacey...

NanoIOC - How I do Depenedency Injection on #WP7

When it comes to Dependency Injection / IOC  there isn't a good story for Windows Phone*. There's nothing built in and lots of people have created their own solutions. Including, but not limited to,: Funq, MicroIoc, TinyIoc, this or this. But none of them work the way I want to. I want: Automatic constructor parameter injection Explicit indication of where a dependency exists Explicit configuration...

Metro designs require imagination but provide endless possibilites.

I've heard it claimed that due to the restrictions that are imposed on Metro style apps "they're all going to end up looking the same" and "there's no opportunity to differentiate". I'm calling BS on this. Not only are people making such claims forgetting about the myriad applications which were all battleship grey and/or seemed to want to copy Outlook regardless of whether it made sense or not. Such...

Debugging deserialization errors in JSON.NET

Ever have a problem handling deserialization issues with JSON.NET? Did you know it has built in functionality to help debug deserialization errors? Well, it does. To help debug such scenarios you can do something like this:    if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(json))    {        var settings = new JsonSerializerSettings           ...

Want help with Tombstoning?

I originally built TombstoneHelper to try and make it a bit easier to handle tombstoning in Windows Phone 7 apps. It covers some of the basics but doesn't go as far as most people need and their is still lots of confusion, amongst many, about how to handle tombstoning in an app. I think I've finally got a good enough idea about the best practices for how to handle tombstoning for almost all situations...