The second screencast is now available. It is all about data sources and RSS feeds. You can find it here.
You can find both screencasts (and any new ones that I add) here:
If you are having bother getting your invitation code for App Studio I've got one here that might work for you:
MSFTMVP020
I’ve done a little screencast about getting started with Windows Phone App Studio. It covers making and deploying your first application, and actually shows you to build something that is useful. I’ll record a few more over the next week or so. You can find the screencast here.
I've set up a new part of the site for these screencasts. They will all be at:
If you fancy making a Windows Phone application but you’ve not done much programming then you might find the Windows Phone App Studio worth a look. It starts from a web based interface you can use to create applications that bring together your favourite web sites, RSS feeds and lumps of data. You can turn out very professional looking applications with menus, custom lock screens and tiles. What’s more, you can distribute them to any Windows Phone owner who scans the QR code that is produced when your app is built. And the apps that you build can be the basis of Marketplace your Products because you can download the entire solution and add your own behaviours alongside the pre-built ones.
If you are planning a party, want to tell the world about your amazing pizza collection, need to keep track of places you have visited or just want a quick way of finding all your favourite web sites and blogs, then you can create an application of your own to do just that. In around ten minutes or so.
I’ve discovered that one way to make sure that I remember how to do something is to drop it into the blog. That way I can go find it when I forget. This time it is the code that you use to open up the connection settings dialog page in Windows Phone 8.
ConnectionSettingsTask connectionSettingsTask =
new ConnectionSettingsTask();
connectionSettingsTask.ConnectionSettingsType =
ConnectionSettingsType.Bluetooth;
connectionSettingsTask.Show();
This will do the business. You need to include the Tasks namespace:
using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;
There are options that you can use to open up the WiFi, Cellular and Airplane modes.
Whenever I open the Airplane mode I always want the phone to say
“Surely you can’t be serious?”
”I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley”
I took this picture shortly after I arrived at the conference centre. Lovely sky.
Before I do a session I always test my demos. I’ve found that you really need to do this, as oddities in the network setup can sometimes catch you out. Anyhoo, I was happily (or rather non-happily) testing my file download demonstration and it got stuck. So I spent a painful while trying to get it to work, all to no avail. Then I found the problem.
My blog was broken. It was the source of the files that I was showing how to fetch, and it wasn’t there. Wah. So I re-wrote the demonstrations to use different servers (and local ones just in case everything broke again) and just as I’d finished this little exercise my blog came back again. Oh well.
The sessions themselves went nicely, and folks were polite enough to laugh at my jokes. You can find the Speech demos here and the Background Agents demos here.
These are some of the audience at my first session.
This is my demonstration setup. Note red rocket poised for lift off. 
These are some of the audience for the second session. There are some more pictures on Flickr. Apologies if you arrived a bit later,, and aren’t on the pictures. Although then again you might not be that bothered…..
I love doing TechEd sessions, the audiences are always great, and today was no exception. Thanks folks.
Tomorrow I’m back on a play to head for home.
The irony of this happening just after I'd done a post about the imporantance of paying for services that you can rely on has not been lost on me.
All I can say is that they responded to my cries for help really quickly, and they've just sent me another survey to find out how they did.
After a day of travel I’m now installed in the hotel in Madrid, nervously checking my demos and making sure that I don’t forget any plastic rockets for the sessions tomorrow.
The journey here was fairly uneventful, except for the “experimental road works” on the M62 as I was driving to Manchester Airport. The road works seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding out what happens if you reduce a busy three lane motorway to one lane. (The answer, by the way, is that you make everyone 25 minutes late).
If you are at TechED EU I’d love to see you at my talks tomorrow. Come and see me in room N12 at 12:00 to 12:15 talking about Speech on Windows Phone and at 3:15 pm lots of fun and games based around background agents. And you might win a rocket. Can’t say fairer than that.
I’m doing some sessions at TechEd 2013. If you want to know how to make your Windows Phone use background agents to add value to your application, or respond to what you say, then I’m your man. I’m speaking at 10:00 am on Thursday about speech and 3:15 about background agents. And I’m going to be around at Ask the Experts too.
I had this brilliant plan for TechED US, where I’d give away 3D printed phone cases at my session. I even printed them and everything. Then I found out that the phone that I’d printed the cases for is not actually sold in the US. Which makes me an idiot.
So, instead, this time I’m giving away “I learned something from Rob” ceremonial plaques. These are completely unique, except in the sense that there are more than one of them in existence. I’ll also be giving away lovely 3D printed red rockets. So come along to my session, answer a question and you might be in the running to win.
Above you can see the 3D design for the plaque.
This is what the real thing looks like. With a bit of luck I might see you in Madrid, and give you one.
The Windows Phone calendar tile is nice enough. But it could be better. It could be like the one from Simple Calendar. This gives you the date and day in a nice, funky, format, along with details of your next two appointments. I really like it. When you run the program you also get a view of your entire month with teeny tiny text showing the appointments which is surprisingly useable. I can’t show you an example of that because I’ve already given away two top secret appointments for tomorrow in the screenshot above, but there are some sample screenshots on the Windows Phone Store page.
The application is free, although if you want the fancy tile above it will cost you a little bit. I actually don’t mind this. I find that adverts in an application are distracting and I like the though of paying the author a reasonable sum for a useful program. Seems somehow fair. Just for fun (and because number one wife likes it) I’ve changed the background and foreground colours for my phone as well. My Lumia 920 has an IPS display, which means that displaying lots of white doesn’t actually cost me any battery life.
One little Windows Phone tip: If you like to read your emails as black text on a white background, but you are using the Dark theme you can select this from the mail settings page, which is nice.
Not too shabby for a phone camera, eh?
My plan was to spend today writing content for a Raspberry Pi course that we are doing next week. The idea of my session is that we connect a Raspberry Pi to a bunch of LEDs and switches and then have fun writing Python programs that read the switches and flash the LEDs. Of course, the content needs lots of pictures of the hardware and the wires. And of course this is the one day of the week I didn’t bring my camera to work. So I used the one in my Lumia 920 and the results were astonishingly good.
To make things even better, I could take the pictures on the phone and then, when they appeared on Skydrive a few seconds later I could cut out the images that I wanted and paste them into the document on my PC. This made for a really fabulous workflow. If I had been using a “proper” camera I’d have had to take the pictures, get the SD card out of the camera, plug it into the computer and then drag the pictures off one by and drop them into the document in the right order.
Mobile phone cameras are great for close up photography. This is mainly because the focal length of the lens in a mobile phone camera is very short, which means that it has good depth of field (near things are focused as sharply as far things). This is great when taking pictures which are very close to the lens, when it is hard to make sure that everything in the frame is the same distance from the sensor.
The bad news with mobile phone cameras is that tiny cameras make for tiny sensors, so that images can be grainy. But my Lovely Lumia doesn’t seem to have that problem and so I was able to get good quality pictures into my document much more quickly than if I’d remember to bring the camera in. I’m definitely going to work this way again, it might even be worth making a little macro stand for the phone.
Did my final session for TechEd US today. Great fun and a lovely audience. You can find the demonstrations for the session here.
We started the day with a walk around the French Quarter, which was rather nice. Then it was time to head into TechEd and give my session on creating agents for Windows Phone. I was a bit worried, what with it being the last session on the day, but the audience was great and even seemed to like the “Everything Sound”. The slides will be on the TechEd site soon, I’ll post the link when I get it. You can find the demos from the presentation here.
Sorry about the lack of a picture of the audience, it was just too dark..
Thanks to Ginny for the photograph. And for suggesting on Twitter that I might need some new jokes.
As if.
Anyhoo, this morning found me on the Windows Phone booth extoling the virtues of Windows Phone development. I told the happy tale of my PlayMusic application (22K downloads so far), the future with VoiceMusic and the dire tale of Procrastination Challenge. The game they dare not sell.
I was showing how easy it is to make programs and how you can navigate smoothly from one Windows Phone page to another. And then I completely forgot how to do it. Wah. Fortunately, after opening an existing project I managed to find the line.
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/GameOverPage.xaml",
UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute));
This takes you onto the GameOverPage. How one earth could I have forgotten that? Anyhoo, I finally got to the end and people were kind enough to clap, which was nice.
Thanks to a great bunch of folks who were good enough to sit and listen. Larry was kind enough to video the session. With a bit of luck nobody will ever see it.
If you want to find out the awful truth behind “Procrastination Challenge”, I’m doing some more sessions on the Windows Phone Booth later in the week. Drop by to find out when. We’re in Hall D.
Tomorrow I’m doing my first session, Secrets of using Agents on Windows Phone tomorrow afternoon at 5:00pm in Room 383, followed by a session at 6:30 on Ask the Experts.
I found out last week that I've been appointed as a Nokia Developer Champion.
I'm not sure if it is for those WAP pages I used to write for my Nokia 7110 (I actually had a script that would read my email and convert it into WAP so that I could read my mail on the move), but it is rather nice.
Thanks to those of you at Nokia who thought enough of me to make the award. I hope I prove worthy of it.
I got asked a question about Page Navigation in Windows Phone applications. Having a spare 10 minutes I thought I’d record a tiny screencast about it, which you can find here.
It tells you how to make a multi-page Windows Phone application and then navigate between the pages. You can find the sample application here. The text that is referred to in the screencast is the Windows Phone Blue Book, which you can find here.
I’ve been chuckling over this phone advert ever since Ginny pointed me at it. Absolutely awesome.
When I was a kid, whenever someone gave me some toy or other one of the first things I would to was take it to pieces to find out how it worked. To my credit, I was usually able to put the thing back together again, although I must admit that as devices have got more complicated I don’t do as much dismantling as I used to.
And the good news is that with the rise of the internets, I don’t have to. The folks at iFixit have recorded a lovely video of a Lumia 920 being taken to bits and then, most importantly, put back together again.
I’m not advising that you should do this kind of thing for fun, but the important part for me is that that I reckon that I could probably get away with having a go. Particularly as all the breakable bits like the headphone and usb sockets are on modules that look like they can be easily removed and replaced.
Even if you have no intention of ever taking your phone to pieces I recommend watching some of the video just to bring home just how much is going on inside that smooth plastic block.
You don’t get much for free these days. Except that sometimes you do. Getting training on things computing is often a horribly expensive business. But now and then you get some astonishing offers. Nokia and Microsoft have teamed up to set up some training days in London which are free to developers with an interest in Windows Phone development. There is one this Saturday, and another on the 11th May. Click on the dates to find our more and register.
I know they are going to be high quality because Andy Wigley is doing the training. If you have coding smarts and a good idea for an app, but have never written for Windows Phone, then you should go along and get some great insights into mobile development. Tell them I sent you.
If you want to see a proper Gadgeteer session, not in rhyme, but with working demos and a lot more detail, then you can get hold of my TechDays session on gadget development by clicking on the above image. If you want to see all my Channel 9 sessions (including the ones on Windows Phone Agents and Windows Phone Speech) you can find them here:
Today I was up bright and early to fly out to the Netherlands for TechDays 2013. I’m doing some sessions on Windows Phone and Gadgeteer. I’ve been doing sessions in TechDays for quite a while, they have a great atmosphere at the conference and the audiences are always great.
Today was no exception. You can tell the quality of the audience by the questions that you get at the end, and in this session I got some really good ones. One of which I couldn’t answer at the time. The question concerned the behaviour of application created alerts. A Windows Phone program can create alerts which will appear at some point in the future. These are useful because you get them whether the application is running or not. When the alert fires the user can drop back to the application and do something. I made a program for timing eggs which causes an alert when the egg is ready. What the delegate wanted to know was what happened to the alert if the phone is displaying the lock screen, or powered off.
I’ve done some experiments , and now I think I know the answer. If the phone is locked the alert will appear on top of the lock screen, just like any other appointment would. If the phone is turned off, you don’t seem to get the alert displayed when it is powered back on though. Hope this helps.
You can find the slides and the sample code (including the egg timer) here.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Make your own programming language. Find out more here.
