If you have used the windows phone panorama control in your applications, you will notice that you can't set the current active item (displayed panorama page). You can get it and you can set the default item that only affect the application start page. In some applications scenarios, it could be usefull to change the current active panorama item. For example in a music app, when a user choose a song to play, you may want to change the current active panorama item to a now playing page.

I have found a workaround for this issue, which is to do the following:

1. Remove all panorama items except the one you want to be active.
2. Wait for 1 second by starting an empty StoryBoard with 1 sec duration.
3. When the storyboard is completed, return the removed panorama items.

Note that the wait StoryBoard is nessecary for making the panorama control realize that there is only one item left so set it as active.

In this post, I argue about why to use Entity Framework, instead of the old ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL. I'm not talking about NHibernate, which to some developers may seem a better alternative especially for more complex scenarios or enterprise solutions. What I'm explaining here is for the general need to access database in an easy and fast method.

Easy and fast to code

Using the Entity Framework, it's definitely apparent that it’s really easy to start the project, you create a diagram, point it to your database and choose the tables you want, and you have a ready to use typed objects that access the database.

Runtime Performance

Entity Framework is known to be generally faster than LINQ to SQL except that it has some overhead in initialization.

As some may argue that it is surely slower than accessing database using old DataReader and calling stored procedures which have a precompiled execution plan. This sentence is correct assuming that both will execute the same query. My argument is that by practice, I found that generally Entity Framework out performed our written SQL procedures for the following reasons:

1. In large queries where the user has the option to use multiple filters, the EF excels because the query generated may contain only the filters chosen by user, instead of having a single procedure with all possible where conditions.
2. In a lot of cases, doing paging in SQL takes much less effort to do in EF, so it encourages everyone to use it. While doing it the old way usually took more effort which caused us to only use it when we face a performance problem after testing on production data.
3. Generally the SQL query generated by EF is better than our handwritten query (more optimized) except in rare cases where we spent long hours enhancing and testing our query performance. In these time critical cases of course you can always revert to calling a stored procedure the old way.

Other benefits

Using EF you get a lot of other benefits that includes: lazy loading, clean business logic code, automatic linking between entities loaded from different queries.

In the next post I'll talk about why you should use EF Code First.

Finally finished building this website using Orchard. It took me 1 week from scratch (on spare time only). This includes migrating my blog content from blogger (using the same URLs), customizing the UI and creating an amazing section for my Windows Phone Games.

Flip your phone following an increasingly challenging orders like shake, tap, up, down, stop....
An action packed game, full of fun and addiction. Challenge your friends or cooperate with them.
No phones were harmed in the making of this game.

Price: 0.99$
Trial includes first 4 levels of the game, the full version includes the rest of 9 levels, challenge and party modes.


http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=5fabac8b-8d4a-4c95-81d7-48c6774abd3b

Just posted source code for new Simple Samples on Farseer Physics.

I've been working on porting it from XNA to Silverlight for a week. I believe the new version of Farseer Physics 3.0 fixes a lot of performance and stacking issues. Now I'm off to start my next physics game.

An early preview of the trials I'm making for a Windows Phone 7 App: Magic Garden. The demo only shows the cool graphics effects that can be done with Silverlight on WP7 and the potential for this App as a casual multipurpose game.

Any feedback and suggestions are welcome.

I started playing with WP7 a while ago and have stumbled upon many resources and blogs, so thought I’d gather all the useful resources that I found in one place in order for new comers to get the most of it.

1. Download and install the development tools

These are the visual studio tools to be able to create and build the new Silverlight and XNA phone projects.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=c8496c2a-54d9-4b11-9491-a1bfaf32f2e3&displaylang=en

2. Check the application platform overview

This will give you a quick look at the full phone development ecosystem starting from the tools, the phone runtime, the developer portal, and the phone market place.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402531(v=VS.92).aspx

3. Check the UI design guidelines

If you are interested in UI and Design, you should read this full document. If you like to code more then you must get a quick look at this document and skip reading whenever you’re bored. But generally it’s a must read for everyone.
http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9713252

4. Read this post about WP7 Application Execution Model

This is a very useful 3 parts blog post about the application execution model and the ways to save the application states when user navigate between multiple WP7 applications and use the back button.
Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3

5. Check this full list of links

This page has a very long list of WP7 related posts/components that you may want to use in your applications.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/windowsphone7series/thread/756c8d2e-4a3f-43cf-a6ed-28fa44a27ff7

6. Keep reading WP7 blogs

There are a very valuable updates published here, so keep in touch with this page every few days.
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/

I hope this page is useful for new WP7 developers.

Finally created the website:
http://www.holybiblereader.com

A usable website for reading and studying bible from PC or mobile.

Hosted at home, developed with ASP.NET MVC 2.0 with UI features using blueprint css framework and jQuery.