As I was working with some of my demo code for the Azure posts I have been putting up lately, I came across a very odd thing. I had a solution with several projects that built and worked perfectly fine. I did however need to make some changes to the solution before zipping it up and putting it on my blog. So I made a copy of the solution folder, removed my source control bindings and everything else that shouldn’t be in the zip.
Before zipping it up, I thought I would just make sure it built ok after my changes, which it obviously should as I made no code changes. So I loaded the solution into Visual Studio and everything looked fine. But pressing Ctrl+Shift+B made Visual Studio cough and tell me that XXX was not available in namespace YYY, which is really odd as I had made no code changes.
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One “feature” in VS2010 (and 2008 I assume) that bugs the hell out of me, is the way that referenced assemblies are packaged in Silverlight projects… And please let me know if you know of any fix for this!
Imagine that you have a solution with at least 2 projects. One Silverlight application project, and one class library project. The app project references the class library project as it contains functionality it needs. The class library project in turn references another assembly (or maybe more than one) that is needed for it to be able to run. This (or these) other assemblies are not default Silverlight assemblies, so they will not be on the target machine and needs to be included in the deployment… Unfortunately, this is where VS screws up…
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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…
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…
I just found out that commenting has not been working for a while. Not that I think more than 1 or 2 people have noticed it, but that’s the case anyway. I have now fixed that problem and commenting should be up and running again… Sorry about that!
On another note, I know I have not posted a lot lately, but I have been on vacation and when I got back to work I had a pile of things to take care of. The good thing is that there will hopefully be a bunch of posts going online soon as I am heading to the MIX conference in Las Vegas on Saturday. I start off by helping out on the Azure lab (or watch Chris Auld in action…) on the Sunday and then follow that up with LOADS of Windows Phone 7 Series !@&%£* that is long…It will probably turn into WP7 real quick) sessions. I will also attend a “train the trainer” thing for the Windows Phone 7 Series. So hopefully I will be able to tell you all about how it is developing for Windows Phone 7 Series devices real soon.
16. December 2008
ZeroKoll
EPiServer
I spent a little time yesterday building a simple little PageProvider. For the record, it was an RSS PageProvider that would read an RSS fead and present the entries as pages... Not very complicated or special, but it needed to be done. It's going to be one of the exercises in the new advanced developer course for EPiServer. So, what was the problem...well...my provider worked, but only when I refreshed the page. The initial request would come up empty, but when I refreshed the page it would show up as it should...
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