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Matt has been paid to develop software for the past 12 years. He specializes in mobile and web development and has recently been doing a lot with Windows Phone 7. He runs DevEvening (http://devevening.co.uk/) a .net focused user group in Surrey and the Windows Phone User Group (http://wpug.net/) in London. He blogs at http://blog.mrlacey.co.uk/ and tweets at @mrlacey & @wpug. Matt is a DZone MVB and is not an employee of DZone and has posted 37 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website. View Full User Profile

Improvements in Music & Video hub integration

09.12.2011
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Back in January I wrote about some of the Gotchas when integrating with the Music and Video Hub.
With the latest/mango update to Windows Phone 7 there are a couple of changes/improvements to note.

MediaHistoryItem.Source

This is property still exists and is still not used for anything but it no longer needs to be set. (Even thought the examples on MSDN still show it being set.)


ImageStream / MaxImageSize

Previously this was a tiny 16kb and it made it impossible to show high quality images (of album artwork or packshots) at 358x358 (or 173x173) pixels.
Good news!
This has been dramatically increased to a much more practical 75kb.

Disappointingly this still isn't clearly documented in MSDN and the page on How to: Integrate with the Music and Videos Hub for Windows Phone (only lists the physical image dimensions, not the size on disk) and we have to rely on an exception to know what the limit is:


Also disappointingly, that page doesn't allow for community content. :(
I'm sure there's a good reason that not every page supports community content but it would be nice if they did because I'd add some useful information there is I could. I suspect more people would read that there than this here.
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