Blog #698

BlogPost #1859

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 21:52:04 GMT

The programming team that I coach at the local high school earned third place in the national STEM Fuse Got Game? competition. There were 57 entrants. Our team did a great job creating a highly original game. Congratulations team!

Link: http://www.stemfuse.com/GOTGAME2012Winners.html

BlogPost #1854

Sat, 19 May 2012 06:05:55 GMT

Great contest over at Extratv.com to win a free Lumia 900. I love mine and highly recommend it. All the better if it’s free!

Link: http://www.extratv.com/2012/05/11/enter-for-a-chance-to-win-a-new-windows-phone/

BlogPost #1850

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 18:37:07 GMT

I was using the Mail app, and by mistake I clicked Send without any recipients. Of course it told me I needed to add people, but look what it also says:

“We don’t guess very well.” It’s simple, and subtle, but nice! It’s more like Google to do something like that. That human touch is good. Not sure if it will remain in the final version, but I’ll take what I can get! Has anyone else come across anything else like that?

BlogPost #1843

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:45:39 GMT

In case you’ve missed it, you can download the latest Windows Phone SDK (7.1.1) from Microsoft now. It supports the new 256MB ROM phones and it runs in Windows 8! Note that you should install the Games for Windows – LIVE Redistributable first to get XNA support (link). Few changes that you’ll notice, and still no integration with Visual Studio 11 Beta, but it’s a start anyway!

Source: http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/03/26/wpsdk-711-now-available.aspx

BlogPost #1827

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:23:06 GMT

For web site work, you often need images to convey a concept. I found a great web site with quite a huge number of noun-based images: http://thenounproject.com/. Images like house, flag, person, badge, cart, etc. Enter a noun, and there's usually a good sampling of images. Now, if I could only find a "verb project" type of site!

Link: http://thenounproject.com

BlogPost #1820

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:14:02 GMT

Skype for Windows Phone is finally available! It's beta at this point so you can't find it on Marketplace, but here's the link:

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=c3f8e570-68b3-4d6a-bdbb-c0a3f4360a51

It's looking good so far. I don't like that it redirects you to the Skype web site to update profile information and you can't change your profile image on the phone. Call quality is excellent, and it looks great. I can't wait for full integration with the dialer and contacts, but this is a great start.

BlogPost #1818

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:37:18 GMT

Another site has picked up on AppDreamr. It's great that people see the value in it! It's fun adding little features here and there. Hopefully it will continue to have a positive reception.

Source: http://wp7lab.com/news/appdreamr-submit-ideas-for-windows-phone-apps/

BlogPost #1817

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 06:48:16 GMT

It's nice to see my new site, AppDreamr.com, featured on news sites. I've worked hard on it over the past year or so (along with my day job!) and it's exciting to have it out in the wild. It's off to a good start!

Link: http://www.wpcentral.com/have-idea-windows-phone-app-tell-appdreamr

BlogPost #1802

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:52:34 GMT

Get your awesome gaming rig! Get a chance to win a great Dell Alienware gaming laptop or an Xbox LIVE Gold Card just for publishing a game to the Windows Marketplace.

Visit the Microsoft User Community - You've Got Game Facebook page to complete your entry. For Event Code, enter "AKULP". Best of luck!

Contest ends on February 29, 2012 so get your entry in there...

BlogPost #1801

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 05:55:19 GMT

Go to Nokia's Facebook page for a chance to win a White Nokia Lumia 800 phone. I got one of these last week (a black one) and they are really nice. A little bit smaller than my first-gen Samsung Focus, and it has a great feel to it. Just click on the white tile within sixty seconds in order to get a chance to win. Probably not great odds, but why not try!

BlogPost #1800

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:32:35 GMT

I often have people tell me about apps that they would like to see. These aren't developers, just end-users with great ideas. Few people will commission their app ideas, or know people interested in making them. To help with that, I've created a site where end-users can brainstorm their dream apps, and then developers can cherry-pick the best ones to build, with a good expectation of success. The site is free and is open for limited use as of today (i.e. expect some errors!). I'm hoping to develop a community of people with ideas who can work with a community of devs to create great apps. To start with, it's Windows Phone only, but I'll likely open it up in the future. Check it out!

Link: AppDreamr.com

BlogPost #1799

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 02:43:37 GMT

If you write a lot of Windows Phone apps, it's nice for each one to give a shout out to the others. I decided to write a reusable user control to show off a list of apps, with each one linked to its spot on Marketplace. I embed it in the About/Settings page of my apps. It's great because it's always up to date when I release new apps! I decided to write a Coding4Fun article about it to share it with others. Link below the image. Enjoy!

Link: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/articles/Let-your-apps-sell-themselves

BlogPost #1794

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:33:17 GMT

I've been struggling with an error in one of my Windows Phone apps. I finally was certain that I had fixed it but yet I continued to get error reports labeled with the newest version number (I include that in the subject of the error email). I even released a second update to fix it and still got reports! I finally figured it out though. My app writes out the stack trace to isolated storage when there is an uncaught exception (you can't send an email while the app is going down...). On next launch, the app prompts the user to email the stack trace. The problem is that if the crash occurs on one version, then they upgrade, the trace will reflect the newest version -- the one without the bug! I'll need to add the version of the app at the time the crash occurred, so if a newer version emails it I can tell! Kind of bone-headed I guess, but it took me way too long to figure it out. If you implement exception reporting like this, keep it in mind! Of course, you can just use the exception reporting on the Create hub, but it's nice this way since the user gets to have some control, and you get immediate notification.

BlogPost #1792

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:44:11 GMT

I want to apologize to all of the users of my Metro Lockscreen Creator app on Windows Phone. My last updates have caused problems for users of previous versions. This is a scenario that I haven't been testing, and unfortunately the Marketplace certification process doesn't take it into account either. If the app is immediately crashing for you, please remove and add it again from Marketplace. I just submitted a bug fix that should go live in a few days. I added some highly requested features in the new updates, but the problems have prevented people from being able to see them. I hope this helps. Thanks for your support, and some very kind reviews (in between the justifiably angry ones!).

BlogPost #1789

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 08:21:01 GMT

Have you been having trouble with Blend 4 crashing every time you start it up? I was, until I discovered the "easy" fix. It turns out that this happens if you install the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. There's a bug that they fixed right after releasing it! This is the price to pay for installing beta software alongside production software. For now, copy the following lines to a batch file and run it.

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Framework.dll"

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Blend.dll"

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.Project.dll"

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\ngen uninstall "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft Expression\Blend 4\Microsoft.Expression.WindowsPhone.dll"

Source: Microsoft Connect - Blend 4 Crashes on Startup

BlogPost #1788

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:24:35 GMT

I’ve had two apps recently that I ended up submitting with a problem. In both cases I had the AdControl, but no ads were showing (the control would appear for a second, then collapse). I made the mistake of assuming that this was a temporary problem and I just published them without waiting to see it work. It never did end up working though.

After way too much digging without finding anything, I decided to turn on all thrown exceptions while debugging.

Click the Debug | Exceptions menu command

For at least Common Language Runtime Exceptions, check Thrown

What a difference! With all thrown exceptions popping up, I could immediately see that I was missing two capabilities in the WMAppManifest.xml file (ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT and ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER). Such a simple fix! Expand your Properties node in the project, then open the file and add both of them to the Capabilities element:

I really wish Microsoft would add capabilities to the UI in Project Properties. It would also be nice if these were added automatically somehow when the AdControl was included. Hopefully this will help to prevent someone else from banging their head against the wall!

BlogPost #1786

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:07:37 GMT

I started getting this error message on a phone that I’ve had unlocked for some time. My App Hub membership is up to date, and the Windows Phone Developer Registration tool was returning “Registered” each time. After digging around in App Hub, I saw that under devices my phone was listed with an Expiration Date of a few days ago. Apparently, my first registration of the phone on 1/3/2011 expired a few days ago. I actually had to click Remove there, and run the developer registration utility again. Now it works great! Refreshing the devices page, I now see a current registration date with a future Expiration Date. Hopefully Microsoft can get this messaging improved in the future.

BlogPost #1768

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:35:05 GMT

Are you using tasks in Visual Studio? You should be! It can be difficult to keep track of things that you need to finish. Whether it’s hacks that need to be cleaned up, or code that’s unfinished, there are many spots that you might need to return to. Tasks are how you can track of these. On any line of code, create a comment starting with “TODO” and followed by the task that you need to complete:

This automatically becomes a task that can be managed across the solution. In order to see all such lines, go to the View menu and click Task List. Now you can sort by file, line number, or alphabetically by task.

You can also click the Comments drop-down list and then click User Tasks to create tasks that aren’t associated with specific lines of code.

There are settings available so you can create other tasks too. In addition to TODO, you can specify HACK or create your own. To to Options | Environment | Task List, and you can manage the prefixes and what priority they have:

Give tasks a try. Chances are, even if you weren’t aware of this, you were likely using code comments to indicate work to be done. Use this simple convention, and keep track of them in a more organized fashion!

BlogPost #1767

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:44:00 GMT

Like gaming? Like making games? Now you can step up your game with a new Dell Alienware M18x gaming laptop or an Xbox LIVE Gold card just for submitting your super cool Windows Phone game to the Marketplace. It’s easy – just go here to find out how you could win some pretty sweet prizes.

For event code, enter “AKULP” and get those entries in! You have until 2/29/2012 to enter.

Link: http://on.fb.me/WPgameApp

BlogPost #1766

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:37:36 GMT

Are you working on Windows Phone apps? If you’ve been working on something, now’s the time to get it published! Any app published between 10/15 and 12/31 can get you an entry for a Samsung Series 7 Slate (like at PDC)!

Every five apps gets you an entry for free advertising for the app of your choice. If you need help (within reason!), I’d be glad to provide some guidance. Once the app is published, use the below link to enter the app’s GUID as an entry. For promo code, use “AKULP”.

Link: http://www.windowsphone7event.com/GoMango/