In my last post I wrote about how I had created a ViewModelLocator that was a bit different from what everyone else was using. I had come up with the awesome idea to use the same VMs at design-time as I used at run-time. This idea sounds very good, as it means that I only needed to build a single set of VMs and instead could switch the service implementations using DI. At the time, it sounded like the most “correct” solution. Little duplicated code, no chance of messing up the bindings and so on…but it has a huge problem…
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After my last session, which was about designing applications so that it fits in to Microsoft’s Metro layout, somebody asked why the tiles on the home page of the phone was off center with a gutter at the top and right. The answer was awesome and shows how much thought the design team has put into the layout. Or the guy on stage knows how to bullshit convincingly without any preparation. The answer was simply that the gutters where there for the touch gestures. By having a gutter the user won’t unintentionally start an application when it was supposed to be a drag to move around the screen. The right gutter simplifies scrolling vertically while the top one simplifies horizontal scrolling… As I said, either VERY well thought through or really good BS…
I have just attended the 2nd WP7 session. This was another 100 level, which means that it just just another run through of the vision and platform and stuff. No dev stuff yet. It did produce some new information though. First, the Silverlight environment on the phone will be a superset of Silverlight 3. That is SL 3 with some SL 4 features and some “custom” stuff. This first surprised me, but it is pretty obvious to be honest. A lot of the new features in v4 extended the offline feature of SL, which won’t be available on the phone anyway.
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