Search results matching tag 'Windows Phone 7 Series'

Windows Phone 7 RTM

paulfo — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:44:11 GMT

Windows Phone 7 has been RTM today (1st Sept 2010). Tally-ho!

Best Practices for WP7 Execution Model - Silverlight

paulfo — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:42:25 GMT

With the refresh of the tools we see significant advances in the implementation of the Windows Phone 7 execution model. Developers of WP7 applications should take the time to read about the Execution Model and how it affects your application. This is critically important to ensure your users have the best experience.

A summary of the Execution Model Best Practices.

Yochay’s eloquent blog post explaining the Execution Model.

MSDN overview document for the Execution Model.

These documents currently discuss the execution model as it is implemented for Silverlight applications. Best practices for XNA games will follow, but differ only in elements of implementation.

Please go read – this is important to understand.

Building panoramas on Windows Phone 7

paulfo — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:39:57 GMT

The panorama style application is a powerful and compelling application design. At present there is not a released Silverlight control for knocking up a panorama but this can still be EASILY achieved with very little effort using for example Expression Blend.

As a colleague put it ‘stuff a horizontal StackPanel inside a ScrollViewer and call it done’. This will certainly give you a proto-type until our controls are released. Alternatively, there are richer demonstrations of how to build panoramas out there.

Here is a link list of blog posts that demonstrate different methods of building a panorama.

Amiee Gurl – Amiee provides two step by step tutorials for building panoramas using Blend. One with code, one without. She also provides the code download which works well.

Clarity Consulting - put out a pretty elegant panorama control, complete with parallax scrolling effects.

Codeplex project - The Windows Phone 7 controls project is a sample implementation of Silverlight controls for Windows Phone. At the moment, it implements 2 controls :
- Panorama : for creating "Panoramic style" applications
- Pivot : for creating "Tabbed style" applications

You can read more in the Windows Phone UI Design and Interaction Guide (direct link here: http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9713252), section titled “Panorama Application

XNA on Windows Phone 7 samples

paulfo — Mon, 24 May 2010 08:19:41 GMT

Darkside (aka Simon Jackson) is blogging about building XNA games for Windows Phone 7. The first of several planned blog posts is already up on the XNA UK User group blog Dark Genesis.

All change please

paulfo — Tue, 18 May 2010 07:59:01 GMT

Just a note that I moved teams yesterday. I’m now focused on supporting Windows Phone 7 application development. If you’re building a WP7 application in the UK please do get in touch!

I’ll continue to blog about the cool capabilities of WP7.

Cheers

Paul

Windows Phone demo videos on YouTube

paulfo — Tue, 11 May 2010 13:42:29 GMT

If you haven’t found them already, there is a collection of Windows Phone demo videos up on YouTube. Most of the stuff is cut from the Mix keynote but there are some other bits as well. The two videos on the Office Hub and Email and Calendaring are interesting, particularly from an application design point of view – we’ve all been wondering how the Office team were going to implement Office app menus on the Windows Phone. If you application has lots of menu configurations you should watch these videos closely for the small insights – which pass very quickly – to learn how your application could do things.

WP7 XNA text input

paulfo — Mon, 10 May 2010 08:45:53 GMT

I’ve seen a few queries of how to get text input into an XNA game on Windows Phone 7 – so I thought I’d show you how.

It is all very simple. All you need to do is call Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput. This uses the IAsync pattern to provide asynchronous input to game play. To get the string result from the input ‘dialog’ you call Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput putting the output into a string variable and passing in your IAsync Result object.

The code for my simple demo is below:

 protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
    // Allows the game to exit
    if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed)
        this.Exit();
 
    if(!Guide.IsVisible)
        if(input=="")
            Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput (PlayerIndex.One,"Enter a string","Hello world",".",delegate(IAsyncResult result) { input = Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput(result); }, null);
 
 
 
    // TODO: Add your update logic here
 
    base.Update(gameTime);
}

The key line (excuse pun) is:

Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput (PlayerIndex.One,"Enter a string","Hello world",".",delegate(IAsyncResult result) { input = Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput(result); }, null);

I’m using an anonymous method to implement the callback. This purely puts the result of Guide.EndShowKeyboardInput into the app level public string ‘input’.

I check for Guide.IsVisible because I am calling the Guide in the Update method for this demo – this gets called every 1/30th of a second. I only collect one input.

Moving WP7 Blend 4 Beta projects to Blend 4 RC

paulfo — Mon, 10 May 2010 06:51:44 GMT

With the new tools drop for Windows Phone Developer Tools comes the need to move projects forward. Projects built in the beta do load successfully in the RC but then they fail to deploy:

This looks pretty serious but actually is very simple to resolve. In the new drop of tools all projects need to have the WMAppManifest.xml file. This file may have been created for you in the Beta tools but is not set up to be built correctly. To get your beta projects running correctly all you need to do is:

1) Locate your WMAppManifest.xml in the Properties directory of your project, and add it to your project (so that it is in the Properties folder of your project

2) Ensure the the <Capabilities> section of the manifest is populated. If it isn’t try adding the following:

That should get you going again, although I did also notice another odd element that needed sorting. My Background.png file, wasn’t setup correctly for inclusion as content in the build. I actually corrected this by jumping into my project’s .csproj file and updating the <ItemGroup> element that contained the ApplicationIcon.png to also include the Background.png:

<ItemGroup>
<Content Include="ApplicationIcon.png">
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
<Content Include="Background.png">
<CopyToOutputDirectory>PreserveNewest</CopyToOutputDirectory>
</Content>
</ItemGroup>

The .csproj and WMAppManifest.xml files now match those created by Blend 4 RC and the ‘upgraded’ Blend 4 Beta projects now deploy and run on the Windows Phone Emulator without issue :-)

Location Overview for Windows Phone 7

paulfo — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:55:47 GMT

Article abridged from the MSDN Windows Phone Development library.

Location Overview for Windows Phone 7

The Windows Phone OS 7.0 CTP Refresh Location Service allows you to create location-aware applications for Windows Phone OS 7.0 CTP Refresh. The service obtains location data from multiple sources such as GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular. It can use one or more of these sources to deduce the location of the Windows Phone balancing performance with power utilization depending on an application’s needs. The location is exposed to applications through an event-driven managed code interface.

Location Service Architecture

The first layer consists of hardware in the Windows Phone device. This includes the GPS receiver, Wi-Fi, and the cellular radio. These can all function as providers of location data with varying levels of accuracy and power consumption. On top of the hardware sits the native code layer. This layer communicates directly with the available sources of location data and decides which sources to use to determine the location of the device based on the availability of data and on the performance requirements specified by the application. The native code layer also communicates over the Internet with a Microsoft-hosted Web service to look up location-related information from a database. The top layer of the Location Service is the managed interface, exposed through a dll that is included with Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh. An application uses this interface to start and stop the location service, to set the level of accuracy required by the application, and to receive location data from the native code layer as it becomes available.

Location Programming Best Practices for Windows Phone

Minimize Power Consumption

When creating a location-aware application, developers must balance the need for the application to have precise location data with the desire to reduce the application’s power consumption. On mobile devices, these two application requirements have an inverse relationship. The hardware that produces less accurate location information, such as the Wi-Fi and cellular radio, uses less power than the GPS receiver which, in general, can obtain more precise location data. When designing your application, there are two basic rules to follow.

Use the lower accuracy, power-optimized setting for the Location Service unless your application absolutely requires higher accuracy.
Only turn the Location Service on when your application needs it, and turn it off when you are done with it.

Choosing the Right Level of Accuracy for Location Data

Although the Location Service uses multiple sources of location information, and any of the sources may not be available at any given time (e.g. No GPS satellites or cell phone towers may be accessible), the native code layer handles the work of evaluating the available data and choosing the best set of sources. All your application needs to do is choose between high accuracy or low accuracy (power-optimized). You can set this value when you initialize the main Location Service class, GeoCoordinateWatcher.

GeoCoordinateWatcher watcher = new GeoCoordinateWatcher(GeoPositionAccuracy.Low);

Set a Reasonable Movement Threshold

Because GPS hardware in mobile devices do not have an antenna, the sensors are usually designed to be very sensitive. This sensitivity can result in a small amount of noise in the signal from surface reflection and other environmental effects. The main Location Service class, GeoCoordinateWatcher exposes the MovementThreshold property. This property specifies the minimum change in position that must take place before the PositionChanged event is raised. If you set the MovementThreshold property to a very low value, you can cause your application to receive events that are actually the result of noise in the signal. To smooth out the signal to only represent significant changes in position, set the MovementThreshold property to at least 20 meters. This will also result in lower power consumption for your application.

Plan for Unavailability of Location Data

The Location Service uses multiple sources to determine the location of the device, but there will still be occasions when location data will be unavailable. Your application should handle this lack of data gracefully. The StatusChanged event is raised whenever the status of the Location Service changes. Your application can use the handler for this event to let the user know whether location data is available and to modify the behaviour of the application accordingly.

Even when the Location Service is able to obtain location data, initializing and obtaining the first reading could take up to a minute. Your application should be designed with this in mind and should warn the user if the application becomes unresponsive while waiting for the service to start.

Two ‘How To’ topics for using real location services and emulating location data are available in the new MSDN documentation for the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh.

Shawn Hargreaves Mix graphics demo available

paulfo — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 09:04:51 GMT

Shawn gave a superb demonstration of the five effects available in XNA for Windows Phone. He has now published the demo source up on the XNA Creators Club website. GO GET IT HERE.