I presented the Windows Phone 7 Tips & Tricks session with Allen Newton yesterday at Portland Code Camp.  Good times.  In our talk we showed a sample application "PDX Chow" that demonstrates a number of phone development concepts:

• MVVM architecture with Laurent Bugnion's MVVM Light
• Panorama control
• Inversion of Control / Dependency Injection
• Navigation using commanding and context
• Page orientation events
• Accessing phone features with tasks
• ApplicationBar wrapper class that is fully Blendable and supports attached behaviors
• Application life-cycle events
• Accessing WCF services

The slide deck and code for the sample app are available on the downloads page.  Enjoy!

The navigation framework of Silverlight 3 is great.  The URI mapping and browser history support add a lot of value.

When upgrading a Silverlight 2 site to use Silverlight 3 with navigation, I was surprised to see that all of my HyperlinkButtons that referenced external URLs were failing!

For example, a button with this XAML:

<HyperlinkButton Content="Microsoft" NavigateUri="http://www.microsoft.com"/>

when clicked yields this:

It turns out that once your HyperlinkButton is inside of a navigation frame (which it will be once you add navigation support to your application), you need to set the TargetName property of the button.  To preserve the Silverlight 2 behavior where the referenced URI loads in the same browser window, use “_self” as the TargetName:

<HyperlinkButton Content="Microsoft" NavigateUri="http://www.microsoft.com" TargetName="_self"/>

You can also use “_blank” to open up the page in a new browser window.

When using a HyperlinkButton to navigate to a Silverlight page internal to your application, TargetName should reference the name of the navigation frame:

<navigation:Frame x:Name="ContentFrame" Source="/home">

  <navigation:Frame.UriMapper>

    <uriMapper:UriMapper>

      <uriMapper:UriMapping Uri="" MappedUri="/Views/Home.xaml"/>

      <uriMapper:UriMapping Uri="/{pageName}" MappedUri="/Views/{pageName}.xaml"/>

    </uriMapper:UriMapper>

  </navigation:Frame.UriMapper>

</navigation:Frame>

<HyperlinkButton NavigateUri="/about" TargetName="ContentFrame" Content="About Us"/>

HyperlinkButtons fixed!

If you put a TextBox inside a ScrollViewer, the TextBox will take as much width as it needs, even if you set TextWrapping to Wrap.  That means that a long line of text will just stretch out to the right, beyond the right edge of the ScrollViewer, instead of wrapping.

Fortunately, you can bind the Width of the TextBox to the ScrollViewer ViewportWidth.  This makes the text wrap at the right edge of the ScrollViewer.  If you hide the horizontal scrollbar, you get just what you'd expect - vertical scrolling and horizontal wrapping.  This also allows the ScrollViewer to participate in a flow style layout and still have the text wrap correctly.