Tips for Debugging UI Errors in Windows Phone 7

Question

I have an app for Windows Phone 7, and I regularly see “weird” user interface crashes that require me to debug AGES. This is a series of problems, such as controls that have an extra margin, scrollbars that do not appear, animations that look really buggy, the whole page scrolls down, the offset of list items, etc. Etc.

I am glad to admit that it may be me, but how do you debug UI errors like this? I know that Silverlight Spy for PC is Silverlight Apps. Is there something similar for Windows Phone 7?

Any debugging tips v are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I found that it’s good to start with the design templates for Windows Phone 7 , accept the version control system from the very first day of the project and use Expression Blend to edit XAML. Visual Studio is great for writing code, but to take advantage of the real power of tools, Expression Blend is best for your application.

NTN, indyfromoz

Answer 2

Here are some suggestions:

• Many people have problems with the emulator due to their video card.

Very often there are such things as slow animation and ui-glitches.

Make sure your graphics card has Direct X 10.1 and that your driver

Model WDDM 1.1

Make sure you have the latest drivers.

• Windows 7 has less emulator issues than Vista p>

• Make sure you have the latest tools, get the RTM release from the website.

• In the RTM release, frame rate counters are displayed by default in the vertical panel on the left, you should follow them to check performance problems.

Answer 3

Here are a few things that I usually do ... none of them are really smart, but nonetheless share.

• Expand it after every 2-3 controls that you add and make sure things are laid out correctly.
• If by chance this does not work the way I expect, I have a parallel Silverlight 3 project in which I usually embed XAML and see if it works well.

After that, I usually test it as a Silverlight project, as even I'm not sure about any tools available for Win Phone 7.

I preferred this question, and I hope someone points us to something more interesting.

Answer 4

There you can check a lot with Blend, as Indy suggests. This is really good advice.

As for some of your specific problems, these are not necessarily glitches. I will comment on the couple that stands out.

An additional supply - this and the gasket are built into the metro design controls. Again, in a mixture, you can delve into this by re-arranging controls and changing the properties of objects inside the control.

The procedure for this is: rclick control, change the template, edit the copy. Then you can look at different states and objects and change things like costumes. In doing so, consider Application Certification Requirements and User Interface Design Guides .

As for scrollbars, they are hidden until you start scrolling. You can control their availability using the Horizontal / VerticalScrollBarVisibility function on the corresponding controls (or on the ScrollViewer built into some controls), reinserted into the mixture again).

Combobox is not the subject of a metro, so it will fight in a fitting in a department, but there are reports in which people worked on it. ListPicker is better suited for working with the Windows Phone Toolkit released using RTM tools.

Answer 5

If you don’t see any obvious reasons for the crashes in the code, the first thing I would recommend is to test your application on a real device. Somethings - especially animated objects - always look exactly the same when you launch them on the device.

I thought that in one of my applications there was a failure in the animation, but it only appears in the emulator. When I run on the device itself, I do not see it.

Of course, this will not help you if you still can’t get the phone to check it, but before you spend several hours debugging the problem, you may not have it, I would work on the rest of the application until, when you You can test the application on a real phone.

The same applies to those who create animation - do not waste time improving the animation in the emulator. The timings will almost certainly differ from the actual device, so wait until you test.