Like many other people, I do a reasonable amount of travelling, and always wonder what I really need to take with me to cover all contingencies. I generally seem to carry too much, so I used OneNote to create a list of what I should be taking.
So - what do I consider to be a must to take with me? Here is my list.
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Apart from several jobs as a student, including turning Stop and Go signs round on a motorway construction site, I have worked in I.T. (or 'Computers' as it was known then) all my working life.
My first introduction to Computers was a trip to a computer centre in the 6th form. The only reason I went was the promise of a 'free lunch'.
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Preparing for a presentation on Visual Studio Extensions, I have done a lot of testing of my test application to make sure everything goes smoothly.
When you are testing your extension, it fires up the 'experimental' version of VS2022 as denoted by the 'EXP' in the title.
Every time you add a different extension, even with the same name, by default it gets added to the 'Tools' menu.
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When you create a new .NET MAUI project in VS2022, you automatically get an application icon and a splash screen. In this post, we will look at customising these.
The files are in the Resources folder, and the AppIcon and Splash folders within Resources.
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Having done this and forgotten how to do it several times with Xamarin projects, I decided to document how to deploy an existing SQLite database with your project in .NET MAUI.
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I have recently been doing some work on a system from my 'youth'. The system is an HPe3000, which theoretically 'died' in 2006. But these systems were from the old HP - High Performance - High Cost. There are still countless companies around the world relying on them for day to day running, and they are still going strong. For these companies, they are doing a great job.
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With the current situation of many people working from home, securing your work becomes even more important.
I have had to rebuild a system due to failures a couple of times, and the last was a real pain as I struggled with the performance of my backup. I am documenting what I currently do, as it may help other people recover there machines.
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As we all probably know by now, Windows Phone 10 has officially 'died' as of the 10th December, and you may be wondering what to do with it.
One option is to load Windows 10 Arm on it - full details from Ian Dixon can be found here.
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I usually keep quite a close eye on my disk space, but recently I was down to about 70gb free on a 512gb Surface Book instead of the usual 150gb.
I didn't remember creating any enormous files, so I checked things out with the excellent Windirstat.
This reported a used disc space of 320gb whereas properties of the drive reported almost 390gb used.
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There is an Insiders Dev Tour happening in June 2018.
This is a great opportunity to learn the latest in Microsoft Technology.
Learn about:-
- Modern Desktop Apps
- Mixed Reality
- Artificial Intelligence
- Extending Office 365
- Progressive Web Apps
- Microsoft Graph
We are lucky enough to be hosting an event in Manchester on the 20th June.
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Since the sad demise of Windows Phone, I moved to Android, using a Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge. All went swimmingly at first - the S7 edge is a great phone, and Android was far better than my original experience in the early days.
However, Samsung tend to bloat the phone with duplicated and unwanted applications that I neither wanted or used. The final straw was Samsung Pay.
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On the 20th October 2017 we at DotNetNorth held our second Xamarin Dev Days in Manchester. We were originally scheduled for September, but for a couple of reasons, we couldn't do this. We were left trying to find a venue for the event.
I had spoken at "Mobile Mondays Manchester" in the past at UK Fast in Manchester, and remembered what a great venue it was.
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As I have said many times in the past, I use VM's for development on VS2008 to keep just the latest version of Visual Studio on my 'main' machine.
I decided to update my VM to the 'Creators Edition' of Windows 10 using the insiders edition, just to check everything was OK.
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When testing our playing music from my collection on Windows 8 RT and UWP projects, for various reasons, at times I needed to do my testing on an emulator. So how do you get some sample music on an emulator to test out?
Simple - You use an 'SD card'.
This SD card is a folder on your PC. First create a folder on your PC.
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I recently updated a project from Windows Phone Silverlight to Windows RT. (The next step is to make it a UWP, but one step at a time.)
The app retrieves the users music files from the folder, and allows one to be played as an alarm in my Where's My Phone app.
As we all now know, the method of retrieving/playing files from the libraries changed in RT.
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I have had a Microsoft Band since they were released - Father Christmas brought me one last year, and I was lucky enough to pick up a new Band 2 whilst at the MVP summit earlier this month.
The Band 2 is a massive improvement over the original band.
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Update - June 2015
This is an update to my original post on External Disc Performance
I recently bought a new USB 3.0 drive - a SanDisk 64GB Cruzer Extreme USB 3.0 Flash Drive - 245 MB/s. I again used HD Tune to check the performance and found it was a lot faster than the generic USB 3.0 drive I already had.
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This may be a bit of tortology but Windows Phone User Group NW is now Windows PLATFORM User Group NW.
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I have posted in the past about travelling in Europe, about comms and about mobile routers. Last year I opened an account with the Spanish provider Yoigo, who were charging €10 a month for 1gb data. Due to my misunderstanding of top-ups, I finished up paying €20 per month for 2gb. I cancelled my contract last September.
So, I was looking around for options.
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Xamarin Forms is a great development tool for developers doing cross platform development. Windows Phone devs can use the C# the know and love, and xaml to design their forms - so they can feel completely at home.
But, as devs using Xamarin Forms will be well aware, there is no designer for Xamarin Forms.
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I bought a Surface Pro 3 a couple of months ago, and probably like everyone else who buys one for themselves, thought long and hard about my options. I use my laptop as my main machine, so use it for development and everything else. I wanted the Surface Pro 3 to be my main machine.
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If you have read my blogs in the past, you will know I am a big fan of virtual machines for different development environments. I have several VM's with different development environments for Windows Mobile, VB6 (honest), and several other configurations.
Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8 development threw all this into confusion.
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I have mentioned in the past that we go to Menorca a reasonable number of times - and I bought a YOIGO sim, which gives me 1gb of reasonably fast internet access for €10 per month.
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The worldwide Windows Phone //publish/ event is coming to Manchester on the 16th and 17th of May 2014.
Bring your existing app and game projects to Microsoft’s //publish/ event to code with developers from around the world.
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I blogged about my Windows Phone Design Session with Aruturo Toledo a couple of weeks ago. I took his advice on board for Find A Costa and it was released to the market a couple of days ago.
I implemented most of Arturo's suggestions, and I thought I would share what he suggested, and what I implemented.
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I recently was lucky enough to win a design consultation courtesy of Nokia DVLUP
The consultation was with Arturo Toledo, ex Senior UX designer from Microsoft, and how head of Toledo Design. I was really looking forward to the session, as I attended a webinar with Arturo earlier this year, and was very impressed.
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Normally we only write technical blogs here at APPA Mundi, but the arrival of a brand new pair of Nokia Purity Pro Headphones by Nokia persuaded me to change my mind.
These headphones arrived courtesy of the Nokia DVLUP program, and I got them with my reward points.
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I recently worked on a site that acquired some new Motorola MC67's, and also some Motorola RS507 ring scanners. The scanners are Bluetooth attached, and were replacing existing Bluetooth scanners. The existing ones were paired using the excellent 32Feet.Net library, but I encountered problems trying to pair the RS507's this way.
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If you are re-setting your Lumia, and your phone seems to get stuck at the spinning gears for a long time, try the following:-
Hold Volume Down + Power Button for 10 seconds.
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and passed it over to them for them to copy.
The file was around 1.2gb, and they said it was going to take 22 minutes to copy to their machine.
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I recently had a SSD fail on me, and it was sent back for replacement. When I installed the SSD originally I did a Windows install, and then all the installs needed, VS2012, Phone developer SDK, SQL Server, etc. etc. - not a quick job.
It therefore goes without saying, that when the SSD failed, I wasn't best pleased, especially as this was the 2nd one to fail.
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I have just finished a Windows Phone app, and was submitting it to store. It was a pretty simple app, but when I submitted it, I immediately got a mail message that it had failed. When I checked it up, I had an error 2001, which reads:-
2001 - There are duplicate files in AppManifest.xaml. Remove one of the files and then try again.
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I have recently been doing some work with Windows Azure Mobile Services, and have been very impressed by how easy it is to develop against. I have a blog in progress about populating databases, but after embarking on a third application using WAMS, I realised that a lot of the code was repetitive and could be automated.
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Mike Taulty recently spoke to our Windows Phone User Group (North West), and got me interested in WAMS. We had been dabbling with a mobile sales demo, but other things got in the way, and we didn't make much progress.
The catalyst for doing more was some nice person stealing my Surface RT at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
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As soon as I had submitted APPA Photo Navigator to the market place for certification, I thought of something that I should have added to it. One of the things that users love about Windows Phone apps are live tiles, and I realised I could use the photographs as cyclic live tiles, and pick 9 at random every time the application exited.
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I have just written a new application for Windows Phone 8, called APPA Photo Navigator. The app allows you to browse your photo albums, select a photograph and get EXIF info about the photograph, and position one, many or all of your photographs on the map. There are a couple of similar apps out there (surprise, surprise), but none appeared to be tailored for Windows Phone 8.
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One of the first Windows Phone apps I wrote was Pop Quiz. The app contains the top 40 from the start of the charts in 1952 and goes up to the end of 2010.
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I recently ported our Windows Phone application FlightInfo to a Windows 8 version.
This was a good learning exercise for learning how to port Windows Phone code to Windows 8 Store code. Much of it went smoothly, but I did have problems, converting convertors.
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I have been writing a new app for Windows Phone 8, taking advantage of the new Nokia maps built into the platform. All was going swimmingly, maps work well and quickly, problem with AR which I am working on, but everything seemed OK in testing.
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I have been lucky enough get a SIM-free unlocked Nokia Lumia 920, so I set everything up as best I could, and then put the SIM card in the phone. It picked up my O2 signal, and then I got a text message saying they couldn't set up my phone automatically, and to ring O2 for assistance.
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The latest meeting of the WPUG North West happened on Wednesday 7th November at MadLab in Manchester.
The meeting was well attended, our best attendance so far, thanks in no small part by the effort put in by Nokia, and particularly Richard Pidgeon.
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The Windows Phone 8 SDK has been released, and running the emulator for Windows Phone 8, requires that your PC has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). This in turn needs Hyper-V. Now, I possibly don't have a typical setup on my laptop.
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The Windows Phone 8 SDK has been released, and running the emulator for Windows Phone 8, requires that your PC has Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). This in turn needs Hyper-V.
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I recently submitted my first app to the Windows 8 store. I had done all the right things, or so I thought, so from VS2012 I did Project>Store>Create App Packages...
This churned away, and then told me the app had failed. I looked at the report, and saw the helpful message "The contrast ratio of the background color and foreground text color is 1.
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Hi APPA Market Developers
Microsoft has expanded availability of App Hub, and renamed it Dev Center. You can check if your country is supported here.
If your country is listed you can now register your own developer account with Microsoft. If you follow the migration instructions below, Microsoft will reimburse your first year membership to Dev Center.
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Just a brief word of thanks to everyone who attended the Windows Phone Camp on Saturday the 30th June at the Radisson Blu in Edinburgh.
Thanks to John Cooper from Nokia, Dave Crawford from Microsoft for their help, and presentations. Dave's excellent presentation on Metro design really seemed to wow the audience.
Below is a reprise of the links we highlighted on Saturday.
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There has been a long standing 'feature' in the excellent Silverlight Control Toolkit when the list picker is the last item on a screen, the dropdown is not shown. If we look at the screenshot, we can see the list picker has been clicked, as an item is highlighted, but we only see one item.
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Just been updating one of my VM's to ensure I have all the lastes stuff I need. I installed Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 and then came to install the latest version of Nuget. I immediately got a failure message, the log file telling me 'VSIXInstaller.SignatureMismatchException: The signature on the update version of 'NuGet Package Manager' does not match the signature on the installed version.
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We have finally arranged the next meeting of the Windows Phone User Group North West.
It will again be at MadLab on the 29th May 2010 at 18:30 and you can register for it here.
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Just a quick note of thanks to everyone who came to the Windows Phone camp at LBi last Saturday - we had a great time and hope you did too.
Many thanks to John Cooper from Nokia for all his help, Riaz for his usual excellent help, and Lizzie and her team for all the great organisation.
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After the success, and over-subscription to the London Windows Phone 7 camps organised by Microsoft, Nokia have come to the aid of developers, and added more camps in conjunction with Microsoft, again taking place in London at LBi.
The first of these will be held on the 31st of March 2012, with myself and Andy Wigley in attendance from APPA Mundi.
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I was recently sent an 'ebook' of the Windows Phone 7.5 Data Cookbook by Ramsh Thalli.
It seems a good time to look at a book on data access for Windows Phone, as Mango introduced local database support using SQL Ce. The book covers:-
- Data binding, including element binding, DataContext, data templates, converters.
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We have been running, and are continue to run Windows Phone Camps in the UK.
During the presentations, we include many links to articles, resources etc.
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On Tuesday the 13th of September, we finally held the first meeting (hopefully of many) of the WPUG in Manchester. Matt Lacey has been running the WPUG in London for over a year, and a northern meeting has been mooted for a while.
This finally came about due to the efforts of Rick Garner, Chris Hardy and a bit of input from myself.
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After the resounding success of the Windows Phone 7 workshops earlier this year, Microsoft has asked us to reprise our act, and is running several more camps. The first two dates have been announced, 17th September in London at LBi and the 24th September in Manchester at The Studio.
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A great, and much needed facility for Windows Phone 7 developers arrived with the 7.1 SDK – the ‘Isolated Storage Explorer Tool’. As its name suggests, it allows you to explore isolated storage on the phone itself, copy files from isolated storage to your PC, and copy files to isolated storage from your PC.
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The App Hub has just undergone a (much needed) facelift. Reporting is much better (there IS some reporting), metadata is retained and loads of other enhancements - check it out.
However, I came to update one of our apps recently, and had a problem.
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We use automated error reporting in our applications, and we were getting a few reports where the error was "The parameter is incorrect". We finally tracked it down to the back key being pressed very quickly when the page was being changed.
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I have increasingly been seeing the message 'Property editing not available' when on the xaml design page of a VS2010 Windows Phone 7 application.
Some judicious searching threw up various suggestions, including several opinions that the problem was fixed. Possibly, but not for me, using VS2010 with the latest service packs, and the current phone development beta.
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Having in past blog entries, extolled the virtues of mobile broadband and a mobile 3g router I thought I would share my experiences of last week. Mobile broadband is all very well, when everything is working as it should, but what happens when you have problems? We had a week in Menorca last week, and as usual, I went to top up my Vodafone dongle for a weeks unlimited access.
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Although I have been developing Windows Phone 7 apps for over 12 months now, I saw 101 Windows Phone 7 Apps by Adam Nathan and it looked interesting.
I put in a 'request' for the book for Father's Day. It was delivered earlier this week, and I was allowed to read it before the 'big day'.
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Last Saturday, we held the first of our free Windows Phone 7 Workshops - hope everyone enjoyed it as much as we did. Special thanks to Mike Ormond for coming along and pitching in, plus talking about Marketplace submission.
The venue was the excellent 'The Studio' in Birmingham - heartily recommended to anyone looking to run an event in Birmingham.
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We were getting reports of this occurring in one of our apps, but it was proving difficult to track down, despite our app emailing a stack trace and other details when we got an error.
Peter did some judicious searching, and found that other people had seen this if the page you were navigating away from was using DispatcherTimer.
This did indeed appear to be the case.
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APPA Mundi are running 4 developer workshop days
26th March 2011 - The Studio - Birmingham REGISTER
2nd
April 2011 - Hallam Conference Centre, London REGISTER
9th
April 2011 - Manchester Conference Centre, Manchester REGISTER
16th April
2011 - LBi Centre, London REGISTER
If you are creating apps for Windows Phone 7, as a professional, independent or student developer please join us at one – or all – of these free events, which
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Validating text box fields in any application has always been a pain, and I have always tried to use short-cuts to validate input. Windows Phone 7 is no exception, so hopefully this will help you ease through field validation.
My ideal method has always been to loop through the controls, and validate any text boxes I come across.
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One of the great things about APPA Mundi is the wealth of knowledge held by my colleagues. We have recently released a Pop Quiz for Windows Phone 7, and the answers are selected using radio buttons. My problem was that some of the questions were too long for the text allowed by radio buttons, and I couldn't find out how to wrap the text.
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I have been developing a new WP7 application recently, using XML to store the data. We have used XML extensively in the past to store data and settings, but this is the first 'heavy' use of adding/updating/deleting records using XML files in isolated storage.
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I have blogged about Resco tools in the past - got an email today to say they have released their Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone 7
There are 15 controls included supporting multiple mobile platforms including Windows Mobile. Some controls are optional replacements for existing controls, but there are several new controls.
Worth checking out to see if they will add pizazz to your Windows Phone 7 applications.
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Microsoft have released a great utility for Windows Phone 7 - CapabilityDetection.exe. This was released with the Windows Phone Tools Update as reported in Peters' blog, and will scan your Windows Phone 7 project and determine what capabilities it actually uses.
It is a command line utility, and is documented here, and it will scan your project and report on the capabilities your WP7 program needs.
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For one of our apps for Marketplace, I decided I needed to play a sound notification under certain circumstances.
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For those put off by the fact Windows Phone 7 development was C# only, Microsoft have today released VB for Windows Phone 7 CTP - get it while it hot!
Originally published 23/Sep/2010
6 months after the CTP of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, the final version is released today. Read about it here and download them here.
The development team have done a great job, and Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone is a great, easy to use product.
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As anyone who has read my blog may know, I am a great fan of using Virtual Machines for development, but keeping my source code on my 'main' drive for security and backup purposes. Up until recently, I couldn't do this, as I had problems running VS2010 and the Windows Phone 7 emulator.
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I do a reasonable amount of travelling, and spend quite a bit of time in Menorca. I have a Vodafone ES dongle for this, which gives me unlimited 3G access for €20 for 7 days, and have been using this for over a year without a problem.
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Microsoft has update the UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7 for the newly release beta. At the same time, also available are Design Templates for Windows Phone 7
These are a collection of 28 layered Photoshop template files and the Segoe WP font family that can be used to create pixel-perfect application layouts, to help guide UI development, or to pitch an idea.
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If you didn't get to see the excellent Jumpstart Training sessions last week, the recordings are now available here.
For anyone who didn't get to attend this event 'live', and wants to know more about writing apps for Windows Phone 7, these recordings are a must.
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If you are having problems uninstalling the Windows Phone 7 CTP, take a look at the excellent link from Nick Beradi
Originally published 13/Jul/2010
Microsoft have updated their Windows Phone 7 Training kit for Developers - get it here
Originally published 13/Jul/2010
Our esteemed colleague Andy Wigley, along with Rob Miles will be doing FREE on-line training for Windows Phone 7 next week. You can register for the event here - it is sure to be popular, so book early!
Originally published 13/Jul/2013
We have recently been doing a .Net CF project, where the device doesn't connect to the development PC using Activesync, but is connected via WiFi or even Infra Red.
Peter had a problem trying to deploy the project, and kept getting the message 'An operation was attempted on something that is not a socket.' This was despite the fact that nothing in the infrastructure had changed.
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I am a big fan of Resco tools for developers, and have blogged about them in the past. Resco have become the first of the Windows Mobile tools developers to announce they will be releasing their tools for Windows Phone 7. Read more about it here.
This is great news for developers of new Windows Phone 7 applications.
Originally published 19/May/2010
The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh that works with the final release of VS2010 is now available.
More details here - get it while it's hot!
Originally published 29/Apr/2010
If like me, you are the proud owner of the HTC HD2 on O2, you will be pleased to know that O2 have finally pulled their finger out and released a new ROM upgrade. I used the excellent SPB Backup to backup my device, and then used their 'ROM Upgrade' mode to restore everything after the upgrade.
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As reported by fellow MVP Erik Ejlskov Jensen SQL Server Compact 3.5 SP2 has been released.
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For everyone taking the leap from .Net CF development, Channel 9 are offering a new Silverlight course to aid you in developing your new Windows Phone 7 applications. Head over to Channel 9 to take a look
Originally posted 7/Apr/2010
The Windows Mobile 6.5.3 Developer Tool Kit has been released, and is available at the Microsoft Download Center
The Windows Mobile 6.5.3 DTK provides documentation, sample code, header and library files, emulator images, and tools to Visual Studio that let you build applications for Windows Mobile 6.5 and 6.5.3.
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Just in case you missed it, and don't read my colleagues' blogs Microsoft anounced the new Windows Phone 7 Series at MWC in Barcelona.
You can see lots of videos with full details and demos here
No announcement about development environments, but as Peter Foot points out in his blog entry, the full story should unfold at MIX10
Exciting times!
Originally posted 16/Feb/2010
Error handling and tracing has always been a challenge, and many attempts have been made to automate error handling. I have tried various methods in the past, including writing my own error handler, that bolted in after the application had been written.
Being an MVP, we tend to get offers to try products. A couple of months ago, I got just such and invitation from EurekaLog.
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I am a great fan of Redgate tools for both SQL Server and .Net development.
They write superb tools for developers - I find SQL Toolbelt invaluable for working with SQL Server.
The have just produced a new FREE tool call SQL Search which does exactly what it does on the tin.
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I installed Windows 7 64bit on my laptop and it runs really well, with one exception. I do a nightly incremental backup to an external drive, which includes an option to power off my system when it has finished. Sometimes, when re-starting the system, it gets so far and then hangs.
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Maarten Struys of Dot Net for Devices has produced a series of downloadable videos showing A Windows Mobile Application developed from scratch.
Maarten is a stalwart of the Windows Mobile Development community, and a major contributor to the How Do I for Devices videos.
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Modern communications have totally transformed our lives. To illustrate this, we at APPAMundi had a company meeting last Friday. Nothing unusual in that you may say, but in this case, Andy was in Manchester, Andrej at home in Croatia, I was away in Menorca, and Peter was in Christchurch, New Zealand. 3 time zones and thousands of miles.
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I have been writing some user controls recently, to save importing code around projects. I wanted to use a custom icon in the toolbox, so as usual, I searched and found loads of solutions - generally for the desktop as opposed to the Compact Framework.
After refining my search, I came across this easy solution from fellow MVP Mark Arteaga - thanks Mark.
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There are several fairly new UI controls for Windows Mobile that are now available, to enhance the looks of your application.
Resco have been around for a while, and have some great visually appealing tools. Their 'Tab' control looks superb, and is finger friendly. Their tools allow you to give a more modern look to your apps after the challenge thrown down by some of the iPhone apps.
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My latest article on 'Optimizing Query and DML Performance with SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 and SqlCeResultSet' has just been published at the Windows Mobile Developer Center
The article contains some good tips on optimising SQL Server Compact Edition and illustrates the performance benefits that can be gained by using the SqlCeResultSet
Originally posted 6/Jun/2009
I recently had an application whereby a user had to enter their name on a mobile device, and sign for a delivery.
I wanted to use Transcriber for the entry of the name in a TextBox. This was no problem, as I could select it as the input method, and do an inputpanel.enabled when the text box gets the focus.
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There is a great new free keyboard called FingerKeyboard2 over at xda-developers. It is skinnable, and supports multiple languages. It also supports multiple screen sizes, VGA amd QVGA and both portrait and landscape. It is also highly 'customisable' having one 'text' layout, that can be edited.
Definitely worth checking out
Originally posted 22/Apr/2009
My laptop's hard drive developed some bad sectors a couple of months ago, and stopped booting every time, and was very unreliable. I had backups, but the lastest was a few days old, so I bit the bullet, and put a new 320gb drive in my laptop.
After talking to my colleagues, I decided to install Vista, and then use virtual machines within Vista.
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