When you create an app like the SilverlightShow app, that accesses remote data frequently, thinking about a suitable strategy for local storage and caching is vital to provide a great user experience. In the previous parts of this series, we have already seen how several optimizations are used to improve the networking performance of the app. Overall, the costs to pull data from the portal could be reduced to far less than 1/10th of the original traffic by applying some relatively simple changes. However, this is only half the story. What we also wanted to achieve is that content that has been retrieved once should not be fetched again – we needed a solution for storing those items locally.

You can read the full article at SilverlightShow here:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Creating-the-SilverlightShow-Windows-Phone-App-part-4.aspx

I once again would like to thank everybody who attended my session about Behavior-Driven Development with Windows Phone at this year's Entwicklertag Karlsruhe (#etka12), and for the great feedback and discussions afterwards. I offer both the slides and the shown demo code for download here:

As requested by someone, here also is the link to my free Windows Phone training videos again:

http://www.goodcat-trainings.net

This can be used to get started with Windows Phone programming from scratch, and to learn about the special features and inherent problems of the platform discussed during the session.

I hope you enjoyed etka12 as much as I did; happy coding!

It's been a while since the last part of my series on background agent pitfalls, where I talked about data exchange between your app and the agent, and what potential errors and edge cases you may run into with that. There are a few more topics I wanted to create awareness for, so today I'll continue with…

Part 4: Exceptions, exceptions, exceptions

A lot of things can go wrong when you work with agents, and one of the places that are particularly interesting is at the very beginning – when you try to schedule your task. There are a hand full of conditions that may prevent you from doing this, and knowing about them to e.g. add proper error handling is vital. In this part I'll show and explain to you the individual error cases, and talk about how to work around them, if that's possible at all. More...

I've released version 2.0 of my open source component "Your Last About Dialog". This major new release adds full styling support to the about page, which gives you complete control over the visual appearance of the component. This not only includes simple details like foreground and background colors, font sizes and styles, but also much more sophisticated things like the possibility to add page transitions from the Silverlight Toolkit, or control the visibility of the system tray and other details.

Version 2 also improves the install experience from NuGet by integrating some quick start help, to get you up and running in only a minute, without the need to study the documentation separately. As always, installing from NuGet is the recommended way, but you can of course also download the binaries and source code from CodePlex if you want. To learn about the new features in more detail, consult the "Styling" section of the documentation. The default styles that are created for you when you install the NuGet package also contains some pointers and comments on what you can do.

Have fun :)