I recently came across some very high quality charts and gauge controls available through VISIFire for WP7, WPF and Silverlight based applications. If are in need of some professional charts or gauges for your application, I would high recommend you check them out!

The chart-based controls currently available include the following:

2-D Column Charts
3-D Column Charts
Line / Step / Quick Line Charts
Stacked Charts
Funnel / Pyramid Charts
Bar Charts
CandleStick Charts
Area Charts
Pie / Doughnut Charts
Spline Charts
Radar / Polar Charts
Combination Charts
Bubble / Point Charts
Stock Charts

And for Gauges:

    Circular Gauges
    Linear Gauges

These controls include support some powerful features:

• Interactivity
• Elegant Animations
• Scrollable Charts
• Theming and Styling
• Animated Updates
• Zooming
• Data Binding
• Logarithmic Axis

Note that all these controls are compatible and editable in Microsoft Expression Blend.

To get an understanding of the stunning look and feel of these charts and gauges check out these screenshots below:

Getting start is very easy and literally takes only a few minutes to get up and running.  To start, download the trial from here once you unzip the package add a reference from your project to SLWpVisifire.Charts.dll and/or SLWpVisifire.Gauges.dll. The following code below shows an example of a Spline chart in your XAML:

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc="clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=SLVisifire.Charts"
    Width="500" Height="300" Theme="Theme1" CornerRadius="7" AnimatedUpdate="true" > 

    <vc:Chart.Titles>
        <vc:Title Text="Visifire Spline Chart"></vc:Title>
    </vc:Chart.Titles> 

    <vc:Chart.PlotArea>
        <vc:PlotArea ShadowEnabled="false"></vc:PlotArea>
    </vc:Chart.PlotArea> 

    <vc:Chart.Series>
        <vc:DataSeries RenderAs="Spline" MarkerSize="8" >
            <vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Sun" YValue="5"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Mon" YValue="6"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Tue" YValue="10"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Wed" YValue="18"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Thu" YValue="10"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Fri" YValue="30"/>
                <vc:DataPoint AxisXLabel="Sat" YValue="32"/>
            </vc:DataSeries.DataPoints>
        </vc:DataSeries>
    </vc:Chart.Series>
</vc:Chart>

When rendered, it will look like this:

Like what you see? Go to http://www.visifire.com to get started!

Thanks,

–Mike

One of the criteria for submitting an application to the Windows 7 Mobile Marketplace is to ensure your applications peak memory usage does not exceed 90 MB of RAM (except on devices with more than 256 MB of RAM). This can easily become the case especially if your application uses a lot of images.

To determine how much memory your application has you will need to access properties contained in DeviceExtendedProperties. DeviceTotalMemory will give you the physical RAM size available in bytes on the device. ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage will return the current application’s memory usage in bytes. Finally, ApplicationPeakMemoryUsage tells you the application’s peak memory usage in bytes.

using Microsoft.Phone.Info;

long totalMem = (long)DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceTotalMemory");

long currentMem = (long)DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage");

long peakMem = (long)DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("ApplicationPeakMemoryUsage");

One quick pointer: If you delete a Image from your application make certain to also set the Image object to null. This will ensure the memory is freed up faster.

Thanks,

–Mike

In the namespace Microsoft.Phone.Task there are a number of external tasks that your Win7 Mobile application can launch, perform an action, and take the results back to your application.

These tasks include:

• PhoneCallTask- Making phone calls
• PhoneNumberChooserTask – Used to obtain a phone number from a contact.
• CameraCaptureTask– Used to allow users to take and return a new photo to their app.
• PhotoChooserTask– Used to allow users to select and return a photo to the application.
• EmailAddressChooserTask – Used to obtain the email address of a contact selected.
• EmailComposeTask– Used to send an email to a specified recipient.
• MarketplaceDetailTask – Launches the marketplace showing the details of the application.
• MarketplaceHubTask – Launches the windows phone marketplace client.
• MarketplaceReviewTask– Displays the review page on the marketplace for the application
• MarketplaceSearchTask– Shows the search results on the marketplace from given terms.
• SaveEmailAddressTask– Save an email address to a new or existing contact.
• SavePhoneNumberTask– Save a phone number to a new or existing contact.
• SearchTask– Launch a web search from given terms.
• SmsComposeTask– Launches the messaging application with a new SMS message displayed.
• WebBrowserTask– Launches the web site with a given URL.
• MediaPlayerLauncher – Launches the media player

For example, to have your Win7 Mobile application make a phone call you can do this by simply creating what is called the PhoneCallTask. The following example demonstrates how easy this is to do from a button click event:

private void PhoneBtn_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    try

    {

        PhoneCallTask task = new PhoneCallTask();

        task.PhoneNumber = “555-1212”;

        task.Show();

    }

    catch (Exception ex)

    {

        MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

    }

}

Sending email is done in a similar way through the object called EmailComposeTask.

private void EmailBtn_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)

{

    EmailComposeTask ect = new EmailComposeTask();

    ect.To = "youremail@hotmail.com";

    ect.Subject = "Hello world";

    ect.Show();

}

Thanks,

–Mike

I ran into an issue the other day where my Silverlight Mobile App was calling my web service that was trying to load a COM component. Ran fine when debugging locally under Cassini. However, once deployed to IIS, loading the COM component failed with the following error:

"Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {D6567EF8-0A6C-48E7-9288-A2463123C2F3} failed due to the following error: 80070005 Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))."   

The solution was to make a change in DCOM Config adding permissions to IIS_USERS for my component.

Exact steps:

1. Start Menu->Run dcomcnfg.
2. Expand Component Services->Computers->My Computer –> DCOM Config.
3. Right-click on your component in the tree view, select properties and click on the Security Tab.
4. Under Launch and Activation Permissions, click the Edit button.
5. Click Advanced button, click Find Now Button.
6. Select IIS_IUSERS and click the OK button.
7. Check checkboxes for Local Launch and Local Activation.

Thanks,
–Mike

If you are looking to buy a Win7 Mobile phone (which you should!) I found a very useful Win7 phone versus Win7 phone comparison chart over at Elektricforest that I thought I would share with you.

Click on this image to get the original full sized version from the source:

For a further breakdown visit: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/windowsphone/glance.aspx

Thanks,
–Mike