Book Review – Windows Phone 7 Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (Apress)

• Author: Fabio Claudio Ferracchiati
• Paperback:368 pages
• Publisher:Apress; 1 edition (May 26, 2011)
• Language:English
• ISBN-10:1430233710
• ISBN-13: 978-1430233718

I was looking forward to reading this book since I learned about it. I find
sometimes I encounter a problem when I am coding a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) app but
I am unsure about how to find the answer. Sometimes the index helps or I just
browse to a section of a book I think will help. But mostly you have to hunt
around to find a complete answer to your problem.

Windows Phone 7 Recipes focuses on common problems faced by most developers and then proceeds to
show what the solution is. Each chapter delves into these problems to
demonstrate not only what the answer is but how it was derived, the code you
need to implement it on your project and how to run the compiled code on your
WP7 phone.

This book goes from introductory problems to things that can
be pretty complex. So, it is nice to see that this book devotes full chapters to
both gestures and sensors. There is also a chapter on working with the cloud to
deal with feed readers and push notifications. Finally there is also a chapter
on testing to ensure your apps can get into the Windows Marketplace on first
pass through.

The only drawback with the book is that it could have
covered some other topics that present problems for WP7 developers. Things like
XNA are only mentioned in passing. As well, binding to external sources like XML
files could have easily found a home in this book. My final quibble is that the
book does not mention whether source code for the chapter examples are available
for download on the cover or in the book. I had to browse to the book’s page on
Apress.com to confirm that they are available.

Overall though this book is an excellent resource for helping to solve those common problems we all run
into while creating WP7 apps.

Book Review – Pro Expression Blend 4 (Apress)

• Author: Andrew Troelsen
• Paperback:400 pages
• Publisher:Apress; 1 edition (March 4, 2011)
• Language:English
• ISBN-10:143023377X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430233770

I got my first exposure to Microsoft Expression Blend when I read Beginning
Silverlight 3 by Robert Lair. In the book I learned some basic animation and
how to make a Silverlight interface look better by using Expression Blend.

Fast forward to Pro Expression Blend 4 by Andrew Troelsen and my
Expression Blend skills were sent through the roof. This book is a great tool
for anyone wishing to ramp up their knowledge of Expression Blend – which is the
preferred user interface designer for both Silverlight and WPF projects. I also
found this book useful in designing apps for Windows Phone 7 which also uses
XAML-based code.

Perhaps this may be a good spot to say that Expression
Blend is part of Microsoft Expression Studio. This is not a free product and it
can be quite expensive to get all the tools you may need that are demonstrated
in this book. Although you can get 60-day trial versions of some aspects of the
studio, some things in this book may not be available to you unless you have
purchased this product.

The first section of the book takes you on a
detailed walkthrough of the IDE and helps you learn all the tools. This in-depth
session makes getting around the IDE easier which allows you to get onto the
more enjoyable task of developing.

The second section then leads you
through a series of demos where you can put your skills to the test and learn
all the intricacies of the IDE. The last chapter of this section gives you an
in-depth look at SketchFlow which was a product that I did not have a lot of
experience with beforehand but I gained some useful insight into how this could
be used in future projects.

There are labs and code examples using both
XAML and C# but this book is mostly based in theory so the code snippets do not
dominate the book. This book straddles the line between being accessible to both
developers and designers who want to use Expression Blend 4. It also ranges in
skill levels between novices and professionals. I think it does so successfully
that it can be used by anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the
tool.