WP7Contrib: Dialling the phone number shown in a text block

I wanted to be able to dial a phone number shown in a text block on a page inside an app and I knew the WP7Contrib could help. The contrib has a control called Smart Text Block, the author Mike Wolf has already written a posted about the details here. As the name suggest it has the smarts to process the text and provide an action when the highlighted text is clicked.

What I wanted to do was show how easy it is to use. There is no difficulty here at all infact, the control hides away all the complexity, like good OOD should. Also I'm no XAML Ninja like @RichGee (my coffee of choice is not a latte) so I was surprised at how little XAML I had to manipulate.

Shown below are three screenshots from the app I'm currently developing. What you can see is an embedded Bing Map (using the WP7Contrib Bing Maps Wrapper service) with a property for rent shown along with a couple of map pins for local medical facilities. When the phone number is clicked in the bottom left hand corner of the left screenshot a phone call is started.

As I said the Smart Text Block does all of this for you. All you have to do is include the required XAML and set the content for the control. I'm using the MVVM pattern to set the 'Text' property, that is it!

Shown below is the XAML required:

Shown below is the (read only) property bound to the control:

You must also remember to include the ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER in the application manifest file, more info can be found here.

Comments

Integrating jasmine into Visual Studio 2010/2011 beta

Following on from my previous post about testing javascript with jasmine. I was interested to explore integration into visual studio 2010 so I could run them along side test written in another language like C#. I found the VS 2010 extension Chutpah (pronounced 'hutz-pah'). This got me up and running with the ability to run test manually and to my surprised it worked by only have the SpecRunner.html file open. I didn't a csproj or sln file containing the javascript, it's clever enough to resolve all dependencies: Test results are render in the output window of VS 2010: This is good and I appreciate the work someone has done to get this far but I want more... I want integration into Resharper... A quick squizz on the inter'webs and I end posting a request on jetBrains forum , it looks like support is coming in R# 7. Then I thought lets check out the current beta and see, so off I go and boot Win8 and install R#7 beta and see if it's there yet... ...

Implementing a busy indicator using a visual overlay in MVVM

This is a technique we use at work to lock the UI whilst some long running process is happening - preventing the user clicking on stuff whilst it's retrieving or rendering data. Now we could have done this by launching a child dialog window but that feels rather out of date and clumsy, we wanted a more modern pattern similar to the way <div> overlays are done on the web. Imagine we have the following simple WPF app and when 'Click' is pressed a busy waiting overlay is shown for the duration entered into the text box. What I'm interested in here is not the actual UI element of the busy indicator but how I go about getting this to show & hide from when using MVVM. The actual UI elements are the standard Busy Indicator coming from the WPF Toolkit : The XAML behind this window is very simple, the important part is the ViewHost. As you can see the ViewHost uses a ContentPresenter element which is bound to the view model, IMainViewModel, it contains 3 child v...

Showing a message box from a ViewModel in MVVM

I was doing a code review with a client last week for a WPF app using MVVM and they asked ' How can I show a message from the ViewModel? '. What follows is how I would (and have) solved the problem in the past. When I hear the words ' show a message... ' I instantly think you mean show a transient modal message box that requires the user input before continuing ' with something else ' - once the user has interacted with the message box it will disappear. The following solution only applies to this scenario. The first solution is the easiest but is very wrong from a separation perspective. It violates the ideas behind the Model-View-Controller pattern because it places View concerns inside the ViewModel - the ViewModel now knows about the type of the View and specifically it knows how to show a message box window: The second approach addresses this concern by introducing the idea of messaging\events between the ViewModel and the View. In the example ...

Awkward Coder

Search This Blog