When I tried to run a universal application in the Windows Mobile 10 Emulator today, I was greeted with an error. The phone OS in the emulator was unresponsive and Visual Studio couldn't deploy the application to it. Here's the solution that worked for me in the end.
MvvmCross is a MVVM framework for XAML platforms, similar to Caliburn Micro and MvvmLight. Unlike its competition it very much focuses on portability and code reuse across all supported XAML platforms (WPF, Windows Phone and Windows Store), and the Xamarin platforms as well (Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.Mac). Therefore it has its own approach to creating converters, allowing them to be implemented in a portable class library and reused on all supported platforms.
Since Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 there is a project template available for unit testing Windows Phone apps: Windows Phone Unit Test App. Unlike its predecessor Windows Phone Toolkit Test Framework, it doesn't require the tests to be manually started from the device or the emulator. They can be started directly from the unit test runner's window in Visual Studio. This feature should be a good enough reason for migrating any existing test projects from the old framework to the new template.
If you're used to depend on unit testing during your development or even practice test driven development, working on Windows Phone applications can be a challenge. The fact that the code must always run on the phone (or an emulator), poses some limitations on the execution of the tests.
If you're developing a Windows Phone 8 application which doesn't only connect to public web services to get its data, but also communicates with you own custom web service, you'll want to be able to connect to it from the Windows Phone Emulator with as little hassle as possible. Usually that means that you'll want it to connect to your local IIS Express server.
Some time ago I published a blog post describing how to handle incremental loading in scrolling lists with large amount of data on Windows Phone 8. After receiving an email asking me for a working solution, I decided to publish it and make it available to everyone, instead of sending it by email.
Design is an inherent part of developing Windows Phone applications. Sooner or later you'll need to add some Metro icons to them to represent different actions and items in lists.
The book does a pretty good job in delivering what it promises, but unfortunately doesn't really get into the advantages of developing an application in F# instead of C#. I see that as a missed opportunity of making the book appealing to a broader audience considering giving F# a more serious look.
At NT conference 2013 I opened the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Developer Tales from the Tranches PreCon track with a session on Building Connected Apps. I addressed all aspects of network communications, focusing on available APIs but also spending some time on the expectations for mobile applications in respect to network usage.
In mobile applications there's often a need for scrolling lists with large or even (for all practical purposes) infinite amounts of data which of course needs to be loaded incrementally. This can be achieved in pure MVVM fashion with LongListSelector control.