Windows Phone 7 – emulator’s shortcut

I discovered about these shortcut only today, so maybe this short post it can be useful to other devs.

When you enter a textbox in the emulator, the virtual keyboard comes up; and you can use it with your mouse. But if you need to enter text in a faster way, you can hit PageUp, and use the “real” pc keyboard.

Then you can switch back to the virtual keyboard with PageDown.

Other useful shortcut:

• F1 – corresponds to the Back button on the emulator
• F2 – the "Start" button on the emulator
• F3 – the Search button on the emulator

Windows Phone 7 – my first app :-)

I’m working on a little application for the new Windows Phone 7 operating system.

The app, TimeToRead, is a client for Read It Later (http://readitlaterlist.com). Its goal is to let you access your “reading list” when you have time… to read something you pinned earlier.

It will provide you the lists of read / unread / all articles; tapping an article you can read it directly from the web version or choose to read only the “text version” (this is a service provided by readitlaterlist.com site), mark as read an article and finally tweet about the article on your Twitter account.

The app uses some libraries like json.net and Hammock for REST in order to access the external sites. It’s not very complicated, still I think that it can be useful – let’s see.

A few screenshots:

and here’s a little video I posted on Msdn Italy’s Facebook page – it’s not of the latest release, but it gives an idea.

Ciao!