I’ve updated Chapter 7: Messaging in Windows Phone Book to the new task-based approach. This is one of the first chapters I wrote for the book, back in late 2012, and this version is significantly cleaned up and shortened.
Some notes about the changes.
First, obviously, was the move to a task-based approach. Sometimes this was as simple as changing headings from things like “Managing threads and messages” to something like “Manage threads and messages.” Other times, there was a lot of rewording or just removals of superfluous blocks of text.
The early, non-task-based chapters each had a section called “Outside the apps,” which detailed (monotonously, in retrospect) each of the ways in which the functionality of the chapter topic also popped up throughout Windows Phone. In the case of this chapter, I simply moved some of that stuff out into the main text of the chapter. In others, I just removed it because the topic was covered elsewhere. (People hub integration is a good example. That stuff was subsequently covered in the People + Me chapter.)
Once I had edited the text down, I arrived at a chapter that was 31 pages in Word, down from 37 pages in the earlier version. So the next step was to crop and shrink some images. This was actually a lot of work. At some point I switched from a width of 3.5 inches on all full screen shots to a width of 3 inches, and as one of the older chapters, the images in this one were the older, bigger width. So basically ever shot had to be resized too. Once this was all done, the page count had shrunk to just 25 pages. Nice!
I’m not hugely interested in doing this kind of work, so it was nice to get this one out of the way.
Download Messaging 0.8 (25 page PDF, 1.74 MB)
Download Windows Phone Book 0.045 (440 page PDF, 26.9 MB)
