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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The day before yesterday I was part of a Windows Phone 7 training day here in Wellington, New Zealand. Most of the day was presented by Nigel Parker, Web Development Advisor for Microsoft New Zealand, but I got to present some code demos for the attending developers. At the training, I promised to upload my sample code, so I did. But I also added some of my thoughts after the event. Sorry…
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First off, I need to say that these are my personal thoughts. They might contain erroneous information, they might be way off mark and they might be missing out on a lot of things, but this is what I am thinking of the platform at the moment. I also have to mention that however this post will sound, I have VERY high hopes for the phone, and I think that it will be very successful. One should also remember that it is not yet released so a lot can happen, and also that it is the first release of a whole new thing…
Please read the whole thing, don’t just take out small parts of the post. I will try to put down as much of my thoughts as I can in this post, and if you just read parts of it, you will probably get a somewhat distorted view…
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So…as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been posting as aggressively today as I did yesterday…(Well…it wasn’t actually yesterday… I started writing this post when it was yesterday, but got sidetracked and had to continue today, Wednesday). There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I have meet WAY too many people I knew to just sit in a corner and write blog posts. Second, I went to the official party last night…which was interesting with about 4000 people attending and only about 50 girls except for the staff…
But anyhow, the yesterday progressed as it should, a great keynote and lots of interesting sessions about the WP7. And even though I have found some gaps in the platform, I still find it VERY interesting. Not to mention that the UI is the cleanest looking UI I have ever seen on a phone. I guess I want to try it before saying it is the best UI, but it looks very promising…
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After my last session, which was about designing applications so that it fits in to Microsoft’s Metro layout, somebody asked why the tiles on the home page of the phone was off center with a gutter at the top and right. The answer was awesome and shows how much thought the design team has put into the layout. Or the guy on stage knows how to bullshit convincingly without any preparation. The answer was simply that the gutters where there for the touch gestures. By having a gutter the user won’t unintentionally start an application when it was supposed to be a drag to move around the screen. The right gutter simplifies scrolling vertically while the top one simplifies horizontal scrolling… As I said, either VERY well thought through or really good BS…
I have just attended the 2nd WP7 session. This was another 100 level, which means that it just just another run through of the vision and platform and stuff. No dev stuff yet. It did produce some new information though. First, the Silverlight environment on the phone will be a superset of Silverlight 3. That is SL 3 with some SL 4 features and some “custom” stuff. This first surprised me, but it is pretty obvious to be honest. A lot of the new features in v4 extended the offline feature of SL, which won’t be available on the phone anyway.
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