DarksideCookie

A wee while back, I installed the new WP7 beta tools on my machine. I then started to rewrite the code for my push notification stuff to use the new beta APIs. And everything went fine until I pressed F5 to try and run it. At that point, it spewed out an exception saying

"Connection failed because of invalid command line arguments"

Apparently, I wasn’t alone to have this problem. A quick Google came up with several forum threads and interesting potential solutions.

The problem only arises if you had the previous phone tools installed and the reason is that he emulator creates a directory to store information in. Unfortunately, this directory isn’t removed when the old tools are removed. The good thing is that removing it fixes the issue. So if you run into the error message above, go to %LocalAppData%/Microsoft/ and delete the Phone Tools directory. Then restart the emulator, and it should be running nicely…

Tonight, I presented a talk about MVVM “in the real world” at the Silverlight and Mobile Developer user group on Wellington.

For those of you who were there, I am sorry that it wasn’t better organized. I just ended up with way too much work the last 2 weeks, so I didn’t have enough time to structure it all enough. I decided that it was more important to get the code built than to have a  lot of PowerPoint slides.

As I did promise, I you can download the code below and I have also added the IDispatchService that I talked about as well. It will give you the ability to marshal execution back to the UI thread from a ViewModel. Just call IDispatchService.BeginInvoke() and pass in a lambda expression or a method to execute on the UI thread.

For those of you who weren’t at the user group, or were there and thought that what I said was completely impossible to understand, I just want to explain what is in the download.

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A couple of weeks ago…ehh…well…let’s at least call it a couple of weeks ago (it might have been longer to be honest) I posted a blog post about using push notification on the Windows Phone 7 platform. It included more or less everything you needed to start sending push notifications on the pre-beta version of the platform.

However, about a week ago (once again…+- a couple of days) Microsoft released the new beta version of the developer tools as well as the emulator. And I assume they also pushed I to the lucky bastards that already have phones.

In this new beta, they have changed the API for the notifications, and hence destroyed my previous code. So I have updated my sample to use the new tools and the new APIs. So here I go again…

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Windows Phone 7 is still not released, and the APIs, SDK, emulator and so on is till far from complete. Having said that, people are still getting revved up about the platform and have already started to develop on it. I think this is cool, and makes me believe that there will be some really good apps on the market place already on the launch day. Unfortunately, I have been too busy to get too down a dirty with it. I definitely hope to change this, and have decided to build a game. Hopefully it will be complete by launch and I can sell 2 or 3 copies.

But, to be honest, I still feel that the SDK and APIs are changing a bit too much for me to get REALLY excited about it. I really hope that there is a new refresh on the way soon. Cause at the present, I find that there are just too many unknown things that make the development hard. You never know if the issue you are experiencing is due to you doing something wrong or due to a bug in the OS. And if it is a bug in the OS, you don’t really know when or how it will be fixed. And I really don’t want to spend my time working around things now, just to end up with weird an unnecessary workarounds in the code when the final version is released. Having said that, it still doesn’t stop you from playing around with the platform. I can still build most of my game logic and even test it in the browser based version of Silverlight while I wait for the next refresh. One feature that I wanted to try out straight away however is the push notification. Why? Well…let’s just say that I have my reasons…

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