Windows Phone Jumpstart Ends

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What the Outside World™ looks like round here. Pity Borders is closing.

We did the last sessions today. Great fun. Andy did most of the morning, and I did the afternoon. Lots of great questions and congratulations to Frank Mondorf and Kelvin Challcot who won Windows Phones and Alexander Shevchenko who won the “Private Jet”.

If you are looking for the content (all the slides and the sample code that we showed off) you can find it on the BornToLearn site for the course.

There were some questions that we couldn’t answer in detail during the sessions, I’ll try to remember what they were and put up answers on this blog. One I recall was about the Windows Phone Desktop Passthrough program (WPDTPT), which you need to debug applications on the phone that use media. You can find this on your machine in the tools folder for your SDK installation. This is where they are on my machine.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect

You run this in place of the Zune client if you want to debug programs that use media content on the phone. Normally such programs won’t work because the phone locks media when it is syncing to Zune. This is how you use it:

  1. Plug your phone into the PC.
  2. Zune software will start.
  3. Stop the Zune software.
  4. Open a Command Prompt
  5. Navigate to the appropriate folder (paste the above path into the command prompt if you like). Make sure you use the right version (there are 64bit and 32bit versions).
  6. Give the command WPConnect. This should connect to the phone and display a message indicating that the connection is active.
  7. This will take the place of Zune, you should now be able to debug programs on the phone that use media.

You can run the WPConnect program by double clicking from the desktop, but that makes it harder to see whether it worked or not.

More answers as I remember the questions….