Smarty Pants Coding - Coding with a touch of flava

This is part 3 - the final part - of how to create a Pivot style application for Windows Phone 7. Attached is the sample project and code for this example.

The screencast starts off in Blend and shows how to create the endless pivot menu across the top. After that the screencast dives into the code hooking up our new pivot menu and changing how the content area works. The last 15 minutes or so of the screencast is a bit long winded, but talks about issues you might run into when trying to use this code in a more feature rich application.

After using this method of creating a Pivot style application for a project for my employer, I've decided that hand rolling one of these things is way too much of a pain. I hope these videos will help those of you who can't wait for the real Pivot control release, but be aware that the devil is in the details for this approach - and there are a lot of little details. It's also worth noting that if I had to do it over again I may have made use of WriteableBitmaps to prevent some of the accidental interactions that can occur when you have interactive elements inside of a pivot page.

On a side note, while working on this screencast and trying to make use of the Pivot in an application I also attempted to create a standalone Pivot control. Unfortunately I could never get it quite stable enough, and after spending so much time on these screencasts I don't have any desire to revisit it and try to get it working - perhaps that will change if the real pivot control still hasn't arrived in another month or so. In the mean time, I've got some WP7 applications and games I want to get to work on.

If you've been following Nerd Plus Art (which you should be doing) you'll notice a few recent blog posts of interest.

First off, intellisense can now be had in Expression Blend - you can find the full rundown here. I still can't believe it even took this long for intellisense to come. The response was always to the effect that the XAML editor in Blend wasn't meant to be a full scale editor, or that the intent of Blend was to use the UI and not manually edit the XAML, etc. - but none of those excuses really held much water. Could you imagine if Dreamweaver only let you use the UI to create HTML and not manually edit it with common editor abilities without using another application? In any event, I can't wait to get this up and running.

Next, Robby spent the whole weekend showing the development of a little app called 'ThoughtBox' from start to finish beta - and best of all, all the source is provided for you to break apart and learn from. The series chain begins with this entry, and the latest update with code can be found here - be sure to checkout the entries in between for some insight into his wireframe mockups, etc.

Finally, he updated Kaxaml to support the latest Silverlight 2 beta, and you can see that blog entry here.

As for me, I am still hacking along in my WPF journey, and even getting a chance to do some real WPF work in an ongoing project at work (w00t!). Updates like these make me wish I had more hours in the day..