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As some of you might have seen/heard, I am speaking at TechEd New Zealand and TechEd Australia the coming two weeks. This is the reason for my blog being kind of quiet lately, I have just had a bit too much to do.

One of the presentations I am doing, is presented together with Chris Auld and is called "Phone Zero to Phone Hero in 60 minutes". It is a  "double feature presentation" with two projectors, two computers, two presenters and two applications. And at the end of the presentation, the two applications come together to form a Windows Phone 7 application backed by an Azure service.

We have finally got all of it built and up and running, so I thought I would give you a sneak peak of what is to come.

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I know that I possibly shouldn’t say this, but I downloaded the hacked WP7 emulator image and started using that while developing. Why? Well, I wanted to try out some of the OS integration that wouldn’t be possible with the regular emulator. So I did it…I admit it…

And it is kind of cool to be able to see more of the phone functionality in the emulator…even if I don’t have a touch screen. And to be honest, the interface gets a little clunky compared to the real thing with a touch interface when using a mouse…

But do remember that it is NOT the original image. So even if it looks as though it is just an unlocked version of the original image, it is actually a bit different. I haven’t found a lot of things that are different, but push notifications are unfortunately farked on the hacked version. It doesn’t throw an exception or anything. It just swallows the request for a new channel Uri.

I’m not sure if it is only me, or if it is like this for everyone running the hacked version, but it can be a thing to keep in mind if things aren’t working as they should…

Having that said, I probably should also mention that my computer has issues loading up the original emulator as well. It is VERY slow to start. Or rather, it starts quickly, but it takes ages for VS to deploy to it the first time. I think it might be due to some hardware issues on my machine or something, because I am not seeing the same issue on my office computer.

So I assume that this could possibly have an effect on the hacked emulator…but I haven’t been able to confirm this as I am not using the hacked version at the office…

I have recently worked on several projects that have been built to utilize the Microsoft cloud platform called Azure. Azure offers a lot of really interesting benefits, and especially when it comes to being elastic. You can basically throw however much data you want at it, and as long as you are willing to pay for it, it will handle it. It doesn’t matter if you throw data at it that needs to be computed, or if you throw vast amounts of data that needs to be stored. Azure will handle it for you.

On top of that, it is really easy to build for. There isn’t really a whole lot to learn before one can get up and running in the cloud. Microsoft even offers a sweet SDK that gives you access to the cloud based services locally on your machine. It offers you the ability to deploy your webroles (web applications) straight to a local “cloud” and debug it. So you don’t even need to have an Azure account to starting to work with it.

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Lately I have been working a bit on a couple of Windows Phone 7 apps, and I found a couple of interesting things along the way. I am going to try to blog more frequently soon, and try to cover as much of the interesting stuff as I can find. But it will have to wait until after TechEd New Zealand. But if you happen to be going to TechEd Australia or New Zealand, don’t forget to come to one of my talks and say hi.

Anyhow, the funky problem I am going to write about today is around a feature called InputScopes. On the phone, you can configure your TextBoxes to use different InputScopes. The InputScope defines which of the different software keyboards to use when writing in the TextBox. This is a really cool feature as it helps the user to write the type of info he/she is supposed to provide. It can be things like numbers or currency or chat. Each InputScope results in a different keyboard. Or at least some of them do. There seems to be more InputScopes than cool keyboards at the moment though…

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