Or The Frustions of Development…
I know that the Windows Phone is a new environment, but life would be easier with some good examples. Of course, actually finding these examples is also an excercise in frustration. Since the original C langage (aka COBOL), the use of compound words has been prevalent. Names like BRINGFORWARDDAILYREVENUETAXAMOUNTS were common (luckily the limitation of fitting the name into 72 columns of an 80 column card put an upper limit on the size). Unfortunately, modern search engines do not respect the uniqueness of these names and try to break them up. So searching for compound words meaning to ade through the thousand of results where the individual component words appear anywhere on the searched page. It is even more fun when you are searching for noise words like ABOUT or HELP when your aim is tou find some suggestions for how to create an About or Help page for a WP7 app.
This was also one of the reasons for creating the Visio 3rd party page, http://visio.mvps.org/3rdParty/default.html. I had to wade through many hits where Visio was part of a persons resume or people were selling copies of the software. Now the search for Visio stencils is compounded with police reports of stolen Vizio TVs. Most of the time they misspell the name of the manufacturer.
Once you have found a reference, or an example, there is usually a need for more information. Most of the time there are other components required to make the solution viable. How does this component interact with other commands, what other commands are needed to support it.
Code snippets are fine, but my preference is fully working solutions. It gives you something to play with and disect to find out all the dependancies. The same is true whether you are working in VBA for Visio or C# for WP7.
Recently I had the joy of tripping over the issue that should the Build Action be Resource or Content. Luckily I had a working example to verify what setting was required. The downside was that the example was loaded with other, non standard features, that I needed to wade through. So if you are providing a working example, remember Gene Simmons and think of KISS – Key In Simple Sample.
John Marshall… Visio MVP Visio.MVPs.org
john Visio MVP 