Windows Phone 7 Action Pack: Video Tutorials available, package coming soon

News · 26 Jun 2010 · MTW Editorial Team

Matt Van Horn is currently putting the finishing touches to his Windows Phone 7 Action Pack which is a set of tools aimed at making WP7 development easier by including some useful Extension Methods, Behaviors, Actions, Triggers and several controls. He is expected to make it available on codeplex next Monday but you can already check out some video tutorials after the break.

Currently Implemented (at some level)
OrientationChangedGoToStateBehavior – Forces visual state changes based on changes to the phone orientation
PhoneFileDataSource – Control that will read/write/list files in the applications Isolated Storage
MakeCallAction – Action that can be attached to any FrameworkElement that will make the phone call a number based on bound properties
CallMethodAction – This is just a simple port from Silverlight of the same basic action that calls a method on a target element
ChoosePhoneNumberAction – Simple Action that will bring up the phones contact list and allow the user to pick a phone number

Goals
PhonePositionControl – expose as dependency properties all useful information about the position of the phone
TakePictureBehavior – simple behavior that takes a picture based on an event on the attached object
AccelerometerControl – expose as dependency properties all useful information about the accelerometer on the phone so that visual elements can be bound to them.

The PhoneFileDataSourceControl that you will see in action below is designed to be a designer friendly control that will allow you to implement file access. It has a few key features including:

-Creating & deleting both files and directories with the aid of an Action.
-Returning a observable collection of all the files and directories in a given path
-Selectively control whether or not to show files and or directories in the given path
-Filter files returned in its collection by using a search pattern
-Each file/directory in the collection is wrapped with additional information such as the full path to the item, the name of the item, and if it is file or a directory. (More i-fo will be provided down the line. Perhaps simple mime type info or file size)