Windows Phone 7 Push Notifications Revisited
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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Using Windows Phone 7 Push Notifications
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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Subtitling videos
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft asked me to add closed captioning to the videos on the www.office2010themovie.com. And no…not automated subtitles that converts to what is said into text, like YouTube does…just subtitles from a file. This is not very complicated, not even when you add the fact that the videos are actually being streamed using Smooth Streaming. But I wanted roll it al into a control, to make it fast and easy to add subtitles to any MediaElement in future projects…
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Silverlight 4 COM-interop…I can’t believe I am excited…
Silverlight 4 has now been out and about in beta for a couple of months and I still haven’t knuckled down and tried it out to any great extent. I have just been too busy at work with version 3. But I guess there is a time for everything, and now is the time for me to get started on version 4…
Silverlight introduces a heap of new and cool features. Everything from webcam support to more features when data binding and support for printing. This time however, I have decided to write about COM-interop.
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Silverlight and non-IIS hosted WCF-services
I’m currently working on a kiosk application for a company called TicketDirect. They sell tickets to different events all around New Zealand and have decided to create a kiosk based solution where customers can buy tickets. The application needs to be Silverlight based for a couple of reasons, and must run Silverlight 3 as 4 doesn’t have a go-live license yet. The problem with this is that the application needs to talk to a credit/debit card unit as well as a ticket printer. The problem as you probably realize quickly, is that these units are connected to the computer physically and therefore are not available to Silverlight. And yeah…as you know, printing support is “limited” in Silverlight, so printing custom ticket layouts to a special ticket printer will not work…
This is how I solved it. I created a couple of WCF services to run locally on the machine and then had Silverlight connect to those to access the local system. The problem was that I did not want to run IIS on the local machines. Why? Well, for different reasons…such as the need for simple XCopy deployment. So the services would be hosted by a Windows application instead.
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Button “hacks”
After that somewhat useless title, let me explain. I’m currently working on a kiosk application in Silverlight (there will be more about it later). And while working with it I had two issues with the Button that comes with Silverlight. First of all, as with most controls, it swallows some of the events that I needed, and second it raises the Click event before the VisualStateManager takes the state back to Normal. The second one is very specific to my kiosk application, or at least to touch screen interfaces…so I wrote a couple of custom buttons to help me with these problems…
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OpenXML + Silverlight using a little library
As I mentioned in my last post, I decided to try to create a simple little OpenXML library for Silverlight. The goal with the task was to see how it could work and if it was possible to roll it in to something useful. And to be honest, it is very useful. And even though the library that is available for download at the end of the post is small, it is aimed to be as open and flexible as possible. A small intro on how to use it might be in order…
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OpenXML + Silverlight
I’m back again with another one of my interesting and insightful posts…or well…at least another post. Unfortunately, since it is quite a big subject, I will have to divide it in to two parts. This first part contains information about what OpenXML is and how to use Silverlight to creates office documents. While the second part will show the how to use the simple library I built to make it simpler.
For those of you who don’t know what OpenXML is, it is a standardized XML based format for storing Office type documents, which is used by MS Office as well as some other office packages. It is certified by ISO as well as ECMA. You can read a lot more about it at http://www.openxmldeveloper.org. Normally you work with it using the OpenXML SDK, but that is not available to Silverlight…yet at least…
I personally had very little experience in the format as such, until recently. Just before x-mas, I got assigned to a project at my company that opened my eyes to it though. I got the honorable task, together with another developer at our office (who actually did most of the work), to update the lab material on the OpenXML Deverloper site and make sure it worked with the upcoming Office 2010. After just a few slides about the standard, it dawned to me that it seemed like a pretty simple task to implement a small, but extensible, OpenXML library for Silverlight. So I did…
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Silverlight 3 multi-touch development 101 – pt 3 - Rotation
Welcome back for the 3rd part of the multi-touch 101 series. If you haven’t already read the previous parts I suggest that you do so as the code in the current part will build on top of the code from the previous parts. Part 1 is available here and part 2 here.
This part will cover the last type of gesture that the demo application uses – rotation. For me, the rotation is by far the most complicated thing to implement. Not because the code is very complicated, but because the math behind it isn’t that simple. Well…the math is actually not that complicated, but most of the developers I know are not big fans of trigonometry and thus couldn’t really help me out when I had questions. I even called up my dad who used to be a math teacher. But when I explained what I was trying to do, he just shook his head and wondered what I was talking about…But let’s get started.
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Silverlight 3 multi-touch development 101 – pt 2 - Zoom
I’m back with the second part of my series about multi-touch in Silverlight 3. This time I am going to tackle zoom, or pinch depending on who is talking. The zoom will be handled by pinching, but I prefer the term zoom for some reason. Go ahead! Flame me in the comments… :)
This part builds a lot on the previous part about Pan. So if you haven’t read it, I suggest you do so before reading any further… Otherwise, here we go!
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