I’m one of the lucky few to have access to a developer device. I’m currently using the Samsung Taylor and it is really a nice phone. I’m looking forward to seeing the production phones, which have a faster processers, more RAM etc.
Having the device is invaluable for debugging and testing. For example one of the certification requirements is that you app cannot use more the 90MB of memory. Running on the hardware I stumbled across an interesting limitation while developing a new app. On the device, going over the memory limit causes the phone to raise a NavigationFailed event when calling NavigationService.Navigate. See this thread on the phone forums for more information. I spent too much time debugging the navigation problem, when what I really needed to look at was the massive amount of memory consumed by the Panorama control. Lesson learned: pay more attention to the performance counters at every stage of your application cycle.
Built-in counters
You may already know about the counters included in the phone API. In fact, they are hard to miss in the RTM release. They are included in the default template, and setup to run when ever you attach a debugger to your phone application. Jeff Wilcox has a lengthy blog post if you want to learn more.
Memory Counters
Unfortunately these counter do not include an important metric. They are missing memory usage counters. Not to worry however. Garry McGlennon has released a counter which shows these important stats.
I’ve added it to my application and plan on using it during all future development.
Want to watch some Silverlight online training?
