WP7Contrib: Dialling the phone number shown in a text block

I wanted to be able to dial a phone number shown in a text block on a page inside an app and I knew the WP7Contrib could help. The contrib has a control called Smart Text Block, the author Mike Wolf has already written a posted about the details here. As the name suggest it has the smarts to process the text and provide an action when the highlighted text is clicked.What I wanted to do was show how easy it is to use. There is no difficulty...

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WP7Contrib: Criterion Factory - Location by search by latitude & longitude

To kick off the series about the Criterion Factory in the Bing Maps service I thought I'd start with the easiest functionality - searching for a location using latitude & longitude.Firstly here is the code - I have to emphasize how easy this is to use. It has taken only 5 lines of code to get the location information and the only required is a set of WP7Contrib assembly references.private void locationByPointClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs...

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WP7Contrib: Bing Maps REST Services Wrapper - Criterion Factory

Today I'm starting a series of post about Criterion Factory in the Bing Maps service in the WP7Contrib. I'm not sure how many posts there will be but I expect there to be a few, every time I add one I'll update the list below.Rich & I have written several posts already about using the Bing Maps service, these have focused around the  Location, Routes & Search functionality provided by the Bing Maps REST API and how easily you can get data back without having to deal with a single HttpWebRequest!. If you've read any of these posts...

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Using Bouncy Castle on Windows Phone 7

I'm currently working on a port of an application from iPhone onto WP7 and the local content has to be decrypted on the device. The content was original encrypted for a different platform and the cipher & padding used are not supported in the Silverlight version for WP7. The content was encrypted using the AES symmetric algorithm with an ECB cipher and PCKS5 padding. As stated this combination is not supported by the AESManaged  class...

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SharpSerializer for Windows Phone 7

There's a new binary serializer available for WP7 - SharpSerializer. It 's OSS and is currently hosted on CodePlex. Available via NuGet as well.I received an anonymous comment the other day on a blog post about serialisation performance on WP7. So I thought I would re-run the test app and see how it compared, the original post can be found here. My first attempt failed because the NuGet packages were invalid, so after the...

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Be careful of the culture when using Bing Maps REST API

When developing the Bing Maps Wrapper service for the WP7Contrib we weren't aware of the importance of the instance of the CultureInfo class used to format the geo-coordinate data when building the URL parameters.This was for the simple reason, being based in the UK we were relying on the default culture, which happens to be 'en-US'  and this culture formats decimal numbers in the required format for calls to the Bing Maps REST API. The documentation...

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WP7Contrib: Getting debug information from the NuGet packages

When using the WP7Contrib packages from nuget.org you will be using the release build versions of the assemblies. Unfortunately what you won't get is the debug information generated by the services and other classes in the contrib. What is detailed below is steps you can use to get this debug information when using the packages.I am aware NuGet now supports the publication of PDBs & symbols to symbolsource.org (more...

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Manipulating web browser scroll position on Windows Phone 7

Manipulating the browser control position on WP7 is relatively straight forward, all you need to is a couple of calls out to javascript using the InvokeScript method on the browser control. In fact this is the same pattern provided in the desktop version of WPF & Silverlight.The only requirement is the ability to include a couple of javascript functions in a web page. Now this is only possible if you either have control over...

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Manually build WP7 solution with MSBuild on win64

When manually building a WP7 solution file on a win64 machine make sure you use the correct version of msbuild.exe - if you don't you'll get the loads of 'failed to load assembly' messages.The message that gives it away is 'Could not load file or assembly PresentationCore':C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight for Phone\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.Common.targets(188,9): error MSB4018: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file...

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WP7Contrib: 'IsCachable' is here to help!

We've added the method 'IsCachable()' to the ICacheProvider to help diagnose and test suitability of entities for caching.It can be used in a live application but we expect it to be more likely used during testing. We don't see any problems with exposing this method on the interface as it has no side affects for the entity being tested or for the cache provider being evaluated against. Any exceptions which occur whilst calling this method...

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