Search results matching tag 'wp7s'

Windows Phone Developer Tools - RELEASED

paulfo — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 16:21:04 GMT

Windows Phone Developer Tools are released! Install from here. You just need a Windows Vista or Windows 7 machine to start building apps and cash in on the next wave of mobile technology!

Read about the details and a recent ScottGu/CharlieK event here.

Additionally, the Silverlight team have dropped a good bag over on CodePlex – More controls for your Windows Phone 7 SL projects including Date Picker, Time Picker, Wrap Panel and more :-)

Get building those apps – be amongst the first to deliver a Windows Phone 7 application!

Midlands XAP-A-THON tonight!

paulfo — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:34:18 GMT

I am attending the XBLIG user groups first meeting with my Windows Phone 7 dev lab tonight in Coventry. If you have a Windows Phone 7 app or game then do come along – bring your projects XAP file on a memory stick so we can deployed it to a Windows Phone 7 Prototype so you can see how it runs.

All event details are here: XBLIG UG

Oh and by the way: using the traditional ‘clapometer’ method we’ll judge the apps presented on the night. The winner will receive an XBox 360 :-)

<Note. XBox 360 will be sent to the winner because I have enough to carry!>

Windows Phone 7 game nominated for BAFTA Award

paulfo — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:36:09 GMT

I am very excited to report that Henry and team won Dare to be Digital over the last weekend and have had their Windows Phone 7 game nominated for a BAFTA :-)

Well done guys!

If you are a software developer building Windows Phone 7 applications/games in the UK then please get in touch. I am running a series of ‘XAP-athons’ in London where you can bring your code and test it on Windows Phone 7 developer devices. I have 12 dates currently booked in London, and will happily set up additional dates around the UK as required.

August

26^th,31^st

September

1^st,6^th,13^th,16^th,21^st,22^nd,24^th,28^th,29^th

October

6^th, 7^th

So please ping me to book your testing slot now! I will confirm your place by return email.

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

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.

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.

Windows Phone XNA effect demos

paulfo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 15:18:27 GMT

I’ve compiled a short video of Shawn Hargreaves’ XNA effect demos from his session at Mix (originally shown at GDC). Enjoy!

Getting started with Windows Phone 7 Series app dev

paulfo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:20:51 GMT

You seen the demos, and now you have an idea for the money making application or game on Windows Phone 7 Series. Seeing as this is a new marketplace, if you can use your existing mobile application development experience to build that compelling app and get it published as soon as the new marketplace goes live you could be in for a winner and make wad of cash in the next mobile device wave – Windows Phone 7 Series. The trick is to get up to speed quickly.

Well luckily for your there is plenty of stuff to help you get started. For starters, you just need a Windows PC to download the free Windows Phone Developer Tools to begin coding. Then you can download the Channel 9 Windows Phone 7 Series Developer Training Kit to get an idea of how to build Silverlight applications and XNA games.

Then you can attend the free Windows Phone Tech Day event on the 16th April to learn more detail, ask questions and discuss with your peers the opportunity potential of the new Windows Phone 7 Series platform.

Windows Phone 7 Series: Location Service

paulfo — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:39:31 GMT

One of the great opportunities in mobile is the delivery of context aware applications – applications that can determine stuff automatically when they are being used in order to give the end user a better, and maybe more accurate, experience.

Location services is one of the biggies in context awareness. Windows Phone 7 Series has a powerful location API that abstracts you the developer from the range of location services you might otherwise try to use to determine the device location. For example, you might first look up the current GSM cell id to find the rough location of the device – reasonable in the big cities but rubbish in the country side, you might determine if the device is using WiFi and try to resolve the location of the access point, or you might want to ask the user to use the GPS and then wait for it to resolve the device location. Quite a lot of stuff for the programmer to do – in theory. On Windows Phone 7 Series you are abstracted from all of this by the Location API. It enables you simply to ask for the device location with high level parameters defining the accuracy required and the level of power utilization – enabling you to again have a smart application balancing phone performance with power usage depending on your application needs.

The current Windows Phone developer tools emulator doesn’t make the location service available at this time. But Peter Torr in his Mix 10 session demonstrated a mock API he has implemented that gives you nearly all the Location API functionality but in a mocked up fashion – enabling you to write real code to test location applications with the current tools. When we do have an emulator (or a device!) to test against all we have to do is change the reference and using statement of our project to switch to the real Location API.

You can download and explore Peter’s Mix session demonstration application which also shows the core Silverlight application model on Windows Phone 7 Series.