In this post i share what is my experience, and what i have found to work for me as a best practice for setting up my projects and software structure when developing windows phone applications in Visual Studio 2008.

Basically I am  applying some Model-View-Presenter principles tweaked for simplicity and dividing the different parts into separate projects.

The Model-View-Presenter software design pattern is in my opinion the easiest pattern to use. It is also easy to get going with if you`re not familiar with the jungle of three or four letter acronym patterns and support frameworks available.

Patterns are important and you should use them! By applying, in this case a MVP pattern we can easily handle the rapid changes in new hardware, screen form factors, UX requirements and connectivity requirements to back-end systems. Continue Reading

Here´s a short how-to for getting started with gestures in your Windows Mobile applications. First how you set up your device project, and then i explain how it works using the managed gesture wrapper from MSDN.

First of all you need to consider if you would like to do it the “hardcore” way? by doing all the P/Invoke native calls yourself (then this documentation on MSDN is really useful) or if you just want to get gestures working and use the managed wrapper available in the MSDN code library, - You can also find the source code for the  wrapper there if you later need to find out how it really works. I haven´t  investigated the wrapper library yet, so I am not sure if it  encapsulates all the native functionality that is available.

First of all; Start Visual Studio 2008 and create a new device application solution. There is no specific Windows Mobile 6.5 application template so you just choose a Windows Mobile 6 project. Next you need to do is to add a reference to Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Gestures.dll (assuming now that you have downloaded the dll file) in your WYSIWYG in VS08.

1. Right click on the General tab in the toolbox and select “choose items…”
2. In the “Choose toolbox items” dialog select the browse button in the “.NET Framework Components” tab
3. Browse to where you extracted the Gestures dll file and select it.
4. A component called “GestureRecognizer” has it´s checkbox checked and selected.  Click the OK button.

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It was disapointingly easy and i left the test center with a score of 911.

On a side note; I purchased the MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit from MS Press for .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation about a year ago on amazon and i’ve never ever read a book with more errors. In my edition pages 700 – 730 is missing.   There’s been a couple new editions but they have the same isbn id so you won’t know which edition to avoid.

The book has no less than 4 long pages with commens and corrections. if needed here is links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4