Search results matching tags 'Paul Foster' and 'developer'

Catch up – WP7 and blog

paulfo — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 11:09:15 GMT

Hi all, I’ve been on hols for most of June and then straight back into the thick of it with device based testing for our Windows Phone 7 Showcase partners. We have some great applications and games coming along but all this testing has meant my blog has been neglected.

Well this can’t go on so, I will be making a concerted effort to post on the techniques and tips learnt during the device testing. I would like to also high light the great WP7 XNA developer blogging going on at the XNA UK usergroup’s site. The Dark Genesis blog is full of interesting WP7 posts.

We have more dev labs booked so if you are building a Windows Phone 7 application in the UK please give me a shout and we will see if we can get you into a lab for some on device testing fun!

The experience so far has been pretty darn good. XNA projects built against the emulator have worked very well when tested on a real device. The key here has been to build the games on a suitably powerful machine – this ensures the emulator gives representative performance.

The best machine for the job is clearly an i7 Core based box. I’ve seen an Acer 8942G in use and it is brilliant to develop on. There is virtually no delay in spinning up the emulator, deploying the game and then playing it.

You do need to take care because this sort of machine can also mask issues. The game we were testing originally had a package size of 100mb – pretty big for a mobile game – but most of this was audio content. On the i7 machine it deployed to the emulator in no time, and the game loaded the content in no time. On a real proto-type WP7 device it took a fair while longer. The deployment took longer, and the content loading at game start up took a very long time.

Luckily we learnt some stuff which enabled the package size to shrink to 37mb for deployment, and the content loading at game start up is now a matter of seconds.

But the point has to be made – if you are iterating through a debug testing cycle you are going to be much more productive working against the emulator on a suitably powerful PC. Clearly you can’t test everything in the emulator and at some point will need to move to the device, but you should plan to test as much as possible in the emulator.

What did we do to reduce the package size and increase content loading performance?

1) Re-encoded the background music and ambient looping sounds from 128bps to 96bps. This reduced over all file size.

2) We moved the background music from being played with XNA’s SoundEffect to be played by Windows Phone 7’s MediaPlayer. When the XNA content pipeline processes mp3 content it re-encodes to wma at varying rates of compression based on the quality of the original encoding. This can result in a 2mb mp3 becoming a 28mb wma if you are not careful because PCM or ADPCM encoding is used. Using the MediaPlayer to play game music also enables the user to switch music to something from their collection if they wish – it also means your original content file remains unprocessed assuming it is compatible with the WP7 codecs.

There are some challenges to using the MediaPlayer in the current public Windows Phone Developer Tools. The tools will soon be an updated – watch this space.

There have been a number of Silverlight games and applications in testing too. These projects have again worked extremely well when taken from Windows or the WP7 Emulator environments onto the devices. The quality of the UI in general is fantastic.

Our biggest challenge with WP7 SL apps is helping developers build WP7 UI apps rather than iPhone UI apps. Its a VB3 moment all over again really. The iPhone app approach says I must have a highlighted, chromed UI to identify a button/touch area in the app. Result: loads of complex screens populated with content AND buttons to do stuff.

To achieve the beauty of a WP7 app we take a hatchet to the chrome and the buttons – the best way to sum this up are the statements: Your content is the chrome and Expect to touch everything in a WP7 app. This ‘tactile’ approach to WP7 apps means users will have an expectation to touch everything on the app UI. Therefore, the content in the UI can be ‘your button’ and you don’t need more buttons or chrome to highlight touch areas!

Result: a simple, clean UI which is nice to look at and fun to interact with.

When we get apps to this point everyone can see the difference and the app has clearly moved up to a new user experience level.

More technical stuff soon….

The UK Gov does a me too on sharing data, but bigger than US

paulfo — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:33:10 GMT

This article on TechCrunch Europe really got me excited, so I jumped over to the UK site immediately. Although still running the site is clearly getting pounded as perf sucks. However, this move can only serve to increase the volume of mobile applications as back room devs across the land look for a ‘fast buck’ opportunity. However, I also worry about the back room devs in other lands which look to make a dishonest buck from us too. Close the ‘windows and bolt the doors’ – personally informed phishing attacks imminent…

The U.K. government has decided to make the non-personal data it holds available for web developers to create a new wave of public applications. It’s a bold move which will open up more data than even the U.S. government holds at its Data.gov. The new Data.gov.uk site is officially launched today by Web creator Sir Tim Berners Lee and been has been running for the last six months in beta with almost 3,000 data sets available. By contrast, the U.S. site Data.gov, has less than 1,000 data sets. So far over 2,400 developers have registered to test the site and 10 applications built. These include PlanningAlerts, a free service that emails you if someone has put in a planning application to build near your house and FillThatHole, which lets people report potholes and other road hazards across the UK.

sidebar: Project Mobile AR

paulfo — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:12:31 GMT

As discussed at the recent OTA09 event, I’m working to build out an AR platform on Windows Mobile. This is a ‘skunk works’ project filling my waking hours between work and the family.

Currently, I’m exploring the DirectShow capabilities of the Windows Mobile device. DirectShow allows us to get hold of the device camera and provides a mechanism, via filters, to manipulate the video stream before rendering.

I currently envision building a transform filter that will enable a form of the Windows Video Mixing Renderer on Windows Mobile. The filter would take layer definitions, graphics or video as an input for the AR elements.

Performance is going to be a killer on these devices, so will see how rich the VMR functionality can be.

I haven’t done any serious DirectShow stuff, my only experience comes from some work nearly a decade ok, so I’m ramping up my skills.

One interesting Bing find, and a proof point for my envisioned solution, is Alex Mogurenko’s excellent DirectShow.NetCF project. Alex provides two DLLs which implement a custom SampleGrabber filter, making it possible to build a simple .NET CF application that can display video preview and capture stills from the camera.

My little WM6.5 test project is here (.Net CF 3.5 app). It works well, performance lags compared to the native HTC Camera application, but not by much. I need to explore this in more detail.

Following Alex’s lead, I’ll be implementing my own filter next and aiming in the end to provide an AR solution to .NET CF developers. Once I get this going I’ll publish the project on Codeplex.

TTFN

Visual Studio Team System – shows how to build software

paulfo — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:47:57 GMT

Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is an excellent example of a business solution implemented using the Microsoft platform. Through clever instrumentation business processes are measured, guided and enforced providing the business with reduced bureaucracy while obtaining the detailed level of oversight required in the modern marketplace. Extraordinarily high levels of integration and accessibility ensure everyday productivity tools and specialist developer tools can fully participate in application lifecycle management. While additional extensions, methodologies and new tools can easily be integrated into the solution as future projects or technology choices demand. It is also used by Microsoft product teams – usage stats below.

At the centre of VSTS is the Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS takes advantage of several key Microsoft products and Windows Server features to deliver enterprise class project management and source control. Implemented in classic three-tier architecture, TFS uses SQL Server as the data tier with both an operational relational store and a data warehouse.

In the application tier, SQL Reporting Services and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) provide significant functionality and infrastructure. By utilising WSS, TFS gets version-controlled document libraries for all those non-source code artefacts typically built and requiring management during a software development project. Using the WSS document libraries enables the broad project team to capture project vision, requirements, design, test plans, deployment procedures, and training plans, in a wide variety of productivity tools, as suits the purpose or standards of the organisation. The document libraries are easily accessible through the Team Project Portals automatically built, via WSS, by TFS at the setup of a new project.

Specific TFS functionality is implemented in and exposed via the TFS Web Services to complete the application tier. The TFS Web Services provide to the client tier an API to TFS functionality, such as Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). TFVC provides enterprise class source code version control, being built from the ground up to address the challenges of large development projects. TFVC uses SQL Server as its robust, scalable and high-performance storage mechanism.

To illustrate the scale and reliability of TFS, Microsoft’s internal IT department has published statistics on Microsoft’s own use of TFS. This data covers not just the internal deployment of TFS for Microsoft development projects but also Microsoft’s open source internet service Codeplex, which is built on top of TFS.

VSTS Internal Usage Summary as at May 2009:

Microsoft Internal TFS Usage		CodePlex TFS Usage
Unique Active Users	15,613	Unique Active Users	1,095
Total Active Users	17,680	Projects	10,092
Projects	3,434	Work Items	63,530
Work Items	3,934,238	Source Code Files	2,309,342
Source Code Files	60,253,062	TFS Instances	10

You don’t need to be using Microsoft development tools to take advantage of TFS. Microsoft’s eternal ‘wingman’ – the partner ecosystem – ensures other development tools, methodologies and technologies (such as Java development) can participate as first class citizens.

VSTS demonstrates so many great things. It delivers key functionality by reusing key Microsoft platform technologies, ensuring that users can use familiar productivity tools for ALM; but also, the IT Professionals who have to manage the infrastructure, get to manage familiar things. With consistent skills and reduced training costs all round, VSTS shows us how application solutions should be built.

Widgets!

paulfo — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:28:56 GMT

I’ve been lucky enough to obtain my very own HTC Touch Pro2 running Windows Mobile 6.5 :-)

Its been awhile since new gadgets landed on my desk – so to say I am keen to play with it, would be an understatement. It is also exciting to be back in the world of mobile development. I did a fair amount in the late 90’s and early 00’s but have been away doing other stuff for most of the last five years.

Windows Mobile 6.5 has many interesting features – including new UI stuff – but it also has a built in Widgets platform. Widgets are very much in on the mobile device these days. Everyone is doing them! And so are we now.

What are Widgets. They are best described as local HTML/AJAX and JavaScript pages. They install using a compressed file – not a .CAB, but a .Widget. The zip file contains localisation directories,together with image, CSS style sheets and script resources and of course the HTML page that pulls everything together. They run in the mobile IE (mIE) sandbox but have some special Widget JS objects which let you get to some of the device detail – including some events and soft key definitions. This enables the Widgets to look very much like native applications – but they aren’t. They are local web pages which can consume web services asynchronously using the XmlHttpRequest object; they even have a limited amount of local storage (each field limited to 4000 characters).

As web pages, they are easy to script and play nicely to the broad web developer skill set that exists. But because they ‘run’ locally, they can operate with more apparent integration to the device than starting a web browser and selecting a favourites link.

There are also some disappointments. Running in the mIE sandbox prevents Widgets from getting to any of the cool new device functionality – like the GPS or G-Sensors. You do get device rotation events which enables you to restructure your display for portrait or landscape viewing – this can be done very simply by switching between alternative CSS style sheets.

In theory, IDispatchEX COM components and ActiveX controls can also be hosted in a Widget, but I haven’t seen any examples as yet. I wonder if the Widget installer can register COM objects? Looking at an architecture diagram for the Widget platform there is a Security Broker between the ScriptEngine and plugins such as the Flash player, Windows Media, MSXML etc. I need to do some more research here to see how to create such plugins as I would really like to use the GPS from my Widgets!

Widgets will come into their own with the opening of the Windows ® Marketplace for Mobile. This is a gallery of applications directly accessible to Windows Mobile 6.5 devices via what appears to be a widget which is part of the Windows Mobile 6.5 implementation. Developers of Widgets can publish their creations directly onto the Marketplace to sell them. So along with XNA Community Games for Xbox Live, we now have a (or at least very shortly will) mobile applications marketplace where developers can sell goods for real money!

I think this is all very positive stuff. There a couple of rough edges: your device can’t install Widgets via any other means than the Marketplace application unless you enable the WMWidgetInstaller application via registry settings. Easy for us developers to do, but not so for the great unwashed. The Marketplace will go live when the Windows Mobile 6.5 devices are released to the shops – 6th Oct.

Also the OMTP’s BONDI project which provides Widget infrastructure for Windows Mobile 6.0 and Windows Mobile 6.1 is rather cut off and left drifting. Although, looking through the list of planned developments for BONDI, not many seem to have progressed beyond the drawing board.

Codeplex already has some nice utilities to help you build your Widgets. Some templates for VS projects as well as Expression Web. A packager application that creates your config.xml file which describes your Widget for you. Unfortunately, the current version requires some tweaking as it fails to include the config.xml or the icon files you need within the ZIpped package file – which is also called .wgt rather than the required .Widget. But these are easily solved and importantly there are a number of Widget examples provided in the Codeplex download – good for getting started with.

With so many service APIs now available (Bing has a whole stack of stuff to play with) building Widgets is productive, useful and fun!

I will be presenting a short session on Windows Mobile 6.5 Widget development at the Over The Air event this Friday/Saturday.