I have just returned from the Developer Mania II conference that I spoke at today. It was a great one-day Microsoft conference about Windows Phone 7 development, and I heard some good speakers.
My part in the conference was to share the stage with Johan Lindfors and talk about MVVM. As a part of that talk, I showed off some code I have created to simplify navigation in MVVM scenarios. I thought I would share that code, so here it is: DeveloperMania.MVVM.zip (628.26 kb). It is a little on the heavy side, but that is due to the inclusion of Unity…sorry!
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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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…
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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