Michael Crump

Yet Another Podcast #65 – Windows 8 with Michael Crump

2012-05-23T07:00:00-07:00

Introduction

I was recently interviewed by Jesse Liberty for his podcast titled “Yet Another Podcast”. We talked for about 30 minutes on “The Ten Things Silverlight Programmers Should Know About Windows 8”. This is based off a presentation that I did last week at the Rocky Mountain Trifecta.

Details of My Session at Rocky Mountain Trifecta:

In this session, we will look at how a Silverlight developers skills translate over to WinRT. We will dive straight into 10 things that I have discovered while working with WinRT. We will quickly find out just how much you will need to learn to work with this new platform.

Links to the Podcast

Listen to the podcast

Full archive of all shows

When Debug isn’t enough with your Windows 8 Metro Applications.

2012-05-22T07:00:00-07:00

VS11 – Metro Application Quick Tips

Sometimes when developing Metro applications you need advanced debugging options such as suspending or resuming your application to observe the behavior of your app. Here is a quick post for those who are looking for the options to suspend, resume and suspend and shutdown your Metro application inside VS11. By default, your VS11 Toolbar should look similar to this:

If you run a Metro application then you may be wondering where the options are to Suspend, Resume and Shut Down your Application. All you have to do is right click on the toolbar and add a check to “Debug Locations”.

Now if you run your Metro Application and switch back to Visual Studio then you will see the following :

The first option shows a Thumbnail of your Metro App – NICE!

The rest of the buttons allow you to suspend, resume and suspend and shut down your application.

Wrap-Up

I hope this post helps . If you want to hear more VS11 / Metro Tips and Tricks just let me know. I’m thinking of posting more of these. Thanks for reading!

Upcoming Events : Speaking and Attending

2012-05-14T07:00:00-07:00

Hello Everyone,

From time to time, I sit down and write out all the events that I will be speaking at or attending in hopes of connecting with other developers who may be attending these events. I’ll be at these events representing Telerik, so feel free to stop by the booth and ask say Hi. I have several different talks lined-up from Windows 8, Silverlight, OData and Windows Phone 7! That’s a lot of XAML if you ask me!

[Click below for more information including registration links]

All About XAML [May Meetup] – Alabama – May 15th, 2012.

Rocky Mountain Trifecta – Colorado - May 19th, 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

10 Things a Silverlight Developer Should Know when Building A Metro Application

Windows Developer Camp – Georgia – May 23rd, 2012 [Sold Out]

The only speakers at this event are Microsoft employees, so I will only be attending. If you want to talk Telerik products then send me a tweet/email and we will link up.

TechEd – Florida – June 11th – 14th, 2012

I will not be speaking at this event, but will be in the Telerik booth showing off all of our XAML products.

CodeStock – Tennessee – June 15/16, 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Getting your Feet Wet with OData in Silverlight 5 and WP7 Mango

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

That Conference – Wisconsin – August 13th-15th 2012

I have one sessions at this event:

Get Started Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

DevLink – Tennessee – August 29th-31st 2012

I have two sessions at this event:

Buliding Metro Applications for Windows 8 using XAML/C#

Silverlight - Not Dead Yet!

Wrap-up

If you are attending any of the events then please come up and introduce yourself. I really enjoy meeting new people and hopefully we can sit down and talk tech!

A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 2 of ?)

2012-05-08T03:11:00-07:00

Part 1 available here.

Introduction

Hey, you came back! Well thank you very much. I’m kind of surprised to see the amount of attention the first part received. From being featured on The Morning Brew to being featured in the ASP.NET community Spotlight, it seems that I have hit on a topic that a lot of people are interested in. Let’s not waste anymore time and jump back into the series.

The Series so far:

Part 1 - Dives into setting up your MVC4 Development Environment and exploring the templates provided by Microsoft. We briefly discuss some differences between MVC3 and 4 and then add a new page to our project. We end the first part with a basic understanding of ViewBags, Views, Controllers, Razor Syntax, ActionLink and ActionResult.

Back to MVC4

We wrapped up the first part of the series by creating a new page in our MVC4 project named Products. Our application looks identical to the default template with exception of the Products link.

We haven’t added any additional code but if we change the size of the browser window then we will see this :

Did you notice that the content adapted to the window size? How did this happen? Well, it is partially possible because of line 10 found in the _Layout.cshtml which is a meta tag named viewport. This will match my layout width with my device width. As the layout changes, so does the content. In MVC3, we had to manually add this to our page and in MVC4 it is added automatically.

 <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

The other piece to the puzzle (look at the Register and Log in buttons on the second image) is the CSS styling found in Content -> Site.css. You can scroll down the page to line 463 and you will see the following code snippet:

/********************
*   Mobile Styles   *
********************/
@media only screen and (max-width: 850px) {

/* header
----------------------------------------------------------*/
header .float-left,
header .float-right {
    float: none;
}

In this sample, we will see that we are using a CSS3 media queries to assign specific CSS depending on the device width.

If we go ahead and comment out the CSS3 Media Query and the Meta Tag and look at this in a mobile browser (like Opera Mobile) then it will look like the following:

Very ugly! Our register and log in buttons still have the grey background and the Contact link is not lined up. The only reason that I decided to show this now is that is important to know how to get your web applications working with a variety of screen resolutions. We are in the age of mobile devices like phones and tablets. Adding ViewPort and understanding CSS3 Media Queries is one method to combat this, but sometimes we need to create specific views in our MVC4 application. (more on that later)

Exploring Mobile Browsers a bit further before moving on.

I’m a big fan of using the Windows Phone 7 emulator that ships with Windows Phone SDK, but unfortunately it is not supported in VS11 Beta. That is ok though as Opera has a pretty solid mobile browser available to download and it works just fine on Windows 8. You can download it by visiting: http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mobile/.

Once that is downloaded and installed then you can easy switch profiles to target the device you wish to optimize for. You can also change resolution, pixel density and the preferred input. In my case, I left it as custom and hit Launch, but I’m sure it would be fun to test with the Kindle Fire profile.

Once it is launched then you can see what your application looks like in a mobile browser with your specific settings.

Back to our App – Some Quick Fixes

Two things that I think we should fix before going further:

The “your logo here”
The Page Title

We can fix the “your logo here” by going into the _Layout.cshtml and changing line 16 to something similar to the following:

<p class="site-title">@Html.ActionLink("Sell Something", "Index", "Home")</p>

Next up, we need to fix the Page Title by default it looks something like this for our Products page: Products Page - My ASP.NET MVC Application.

We can fix that by going to line 5 in our _Layout.cshtml page and changing it to something like:

<title>@ViewBag.Title - Sell Something</title>

In case you didn’t notice, we did both of these changes in the _Layout.cshtml where the changes would carry over to all of our pages. We want to make sure the ViewBag.Title remains in the title tag as that will give us the current page they are on. It is also worth noting here that the changes would not affect other views with a name of say ViewName.mobile.cshtml.

Creating Mobile Specific Views in our MVC4 application with the help of Recipes

Recipes? Is this something that I use to help me cook a dish? No, recipes in MVC4 are what Phil Haack describes as “scaffolding on steroids”. These are what I like to call mini-applications that allow you to accomplish tasks. They are delivered via NuGet and can be written in Windows Forms or WPF. Let’s go ahead and look at one of the most common and useful one.

If you don’t have NuGet installed then go ahead and do that. NuGet is simply a package management system that is included out of the box if you are using VS11 Beta. So right click your project and select “Manage NuGet Packages” and you will see the figure listed below.

Make sure you click Online and do a search for haack and select MvcHaack.ViewMobilizer and then hit Install.

Now, you will need to right click on Views –> Add –> Run Recipe… from within your MVC4 application as shown below:

I’ve only installed the one that Phil Hack created, so click on View Mobilizer and select OK.

You can use this recipe to create device specific views. By default, it is going to create views of all of the views that you selected and add “mobile” to the filename. So, your mobile view filename for products would be: Products.mobile.cshtml. This will allow your users to see the mobile view if they enter your site with a mobile device (duh!) You can change the word mobile in the textbox to something more specific if you wanted to target certain mobile devices such as the iPhone. You may something like “iphone” and it will create views named SampleView.iphone.cshtml.

Go ahead and select some views and hit Mobilize.

You can see in the Views folder now your new mobile pages have been created.

If you make a quick modification to say your Index.mobile.cshtml (I just added the word Mobile) and view it in your mobile browser than that view will be shown once a mobile browser is detected.

Inside of a desktop browser that view is not served up and the user would not see the text mobile because it served up Index.cshtml.

Wrap-up

We touched on a variety of topics in this section, from ViewPorts to CSS3 Media Queries, to exploring a mobile browser offered by Opera. We also added some quick fixes for page title and fixed our logo text. We wrapped up by looking at recipes in MVC4 to help us create mobile specific views. So if you are wondering where we are headed next, then I’m hoping to add more functionality to the Products page and continue documenting my ride in MVC4 – but anything goes at this point. I’m planning on digging into JavaScript as well as look at other ways to enhance our application.

Be sure to check out Telerik's MVC extensions if you have not done so already. They support MVC4 Beta and are available in both a commercial and an open source version. The commercial version with dedicated support is available here, and the open source version is available here. If you are a XAML person (like myself) then check out their Silverlight and WPF offering.

Also, the “latest and greatest” bits of all Microsoft Products can be found below.

Unblock Files in Windows 8 using PowerShell and Registry

2012-05-01T04:36:00-07:00

Introduction

In case you haven’t noticed, the following “Unblock” button is missing from Windows 8 file properties.

This can be a tad annoying when downloading zip files from the internet and answering security prompt after prompt to get the file loaded. So, what did I do? I fixed it by using PowerShell and a quick registry entry.

The Solution

Note: If you don’t want to dig into the registry yourself then you can just download the completed .REG file here.

Create a new registry entry in : HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\ and call it powershell, now set the Data to be “Unblock Files”.

Underneath the powershell key we just created, add a new key called command and set the data to be C:\\Windows\\system32\\WindowsPowerShell\\v1.0\\powershell.exe Unblock-File -LiteralPath '%L'

Just copy and paste that entire line.

Now if you right click on a file or files, then you will see the option to “Unblock Files”

Also as stated earlier, you can download a .REG file from here to avoid performing any of this work. The contents of the registry file are as follows:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\powershell]
@="Unblock Files"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\powershell\command]
@="C:\\\\Windows\\\\system32\\\\WindowsPowerShell\\\\v1.0\\\\powershell.exe Unblock-File  -LiteralPath '%L'"

Wrap-up

I hope this helped! Thanks for reading.

The “latest and greatest” bits of all Microsoft Products can be found below.

A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 1 of ?)

2012-04-27T04:27:00-07:00

Part 2 is now available!

Introduction

Through and through I love XAML. I love building and working with SL, WPF, WP7, and Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps. But one thing that I’m aiming for is to have an understanding of other web applications frameworks (MVC in particular). Mainly for two reasons, to become better informed and for my passion of helping customers of Telerik to find suitable web solutions (be it Silverlight, WebForms, MVC, etc). I am not brand new to MVC as I have worked with it before, but I feel that it is time for me start “from scratch” and document my experience. As I’ve said many times before this blog was created for me as a quick reminder of how I did something. If anyone benefited from reading what I wrote then that was just a bonus. If you already know MVC then you won’t get much out of this series. If you are a XAML person, and want to see what the other side looks like then stick around. I’m sure I’ll make plenty of mistakes but hopefully we can learn together.

Starting with MVC4 Beta

I decided to start this series with MVC4 Beta because of some of the new stuff such as Web API. I’m aware that it is in beta and MVC3 is a more stable version. Anyways, if you want to follow along then you can grab ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta from the Web Platform Installer 4.0. It installs on top of MVC3 (which you will have if you have VS2010 SP1 installed). You may also want to check out the release notes here.

When you create a new ASP.NET MVC4 Project, then you will get the following templates out of the box. The ones circled below did not ship with MVC3. Also notice that the “Use HTML5 Markup” checkbox is not available anymore. That is because all MVC4 applications use HTML5.

What is the difference between the different Project Templates?

Empty - An empty ASP.NET MVC 4 project.
Internet Application - A default ASP.NET MVC 4 project with an account controller that uses forms authentication.
Intranet Application - A default ASP.NET MVC 4 project that uses Windows authentication.
*NEW* Mobile Applications - An ASP.NET MVC 4 project for mobile devices with an account controller that uses forms authentication.
*NEW* Web API - An ASP.NET Web API Project
*NEW* Single Page Application - A Single Page ASP.NET MVC 4 project with an account controller that uses forms authentication.

Start Me Up!

I am starting with the Internet Application and using the Razor View engine since that is the preferred view engine. If I hit F5 as soon as Visual Studio finishes spinning up then I see a fairly nice template to get me started.

Quick Note: The MVCContrib library contains 8 alternate view engines. Brail, NDjango, NHaml, NVelocity, SharpTiles, Spark, StringTemplate and XSLT. (source)

Much has changed with the default page as in MVC3 it looked like this:

Thankfully, the template in MVC4 is much better! So out of the box, we get a pretty nice template. Let’s now explore what makes up the application by jumping into the Solution Explorer.

The Solution Explorer

The only difference that I could tell in MVC4 Beta vs. MVC3 was that MVC4 includes an “Images” folder as well as a favicon.ico. The images folder contains the images found in the default templates and favicon.ico is of course the icon displayed when the user bookmarks your page.

I’m not going to break down the solution explorer as you can find a great write-up by Microsoft for the MVC3 Solution Explorer here.

Starting with Controllers

According to Microsoft, in an MVC based application, controllers are responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI.

We quickly find out that the framework requires the names of all controllers to end with "Controller". That is why we see the HomeController shown below in the Controllers folder.

If we double click on that file then we can see it is class that derives from Controller. The next thing we will notice is that under “Views” –> “Home” we have three files that match the ActionResult found in HomeController.

Quick Note:

The ActionResult encapsulates the result of an action method and is used to perform a framework-level operation on behalf of the action method.
Razor is not a new programming language itself, but uses C# or Visual Basic syntax for having code inside a page without ASP.NET delimiter: <%= %>. Razor file extension is ‘cshtml’ for C# language, and ‘vbhtml’ for Visual Basic. (source)

So, we have taken a brief look at MVC4 Beta Project Template, the Solution Explorer and dabbled with Controllers and Views. I’m more of a do-it kind of guy, so the next step is adding functionality to our existing application.

Adding an Additional Page

Let’s go ahead and add an additional page to our application. Right click on the Home Folder inside of View and select “Add” –> “New Item” –> and Select “MVC 4 View Page (Razor) – Visual C#”

Give it a name of Products.cshtml and you will see it generated the following code:

@{
    Layout = null;
}

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>
<head>
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <div>
    
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Right off the bat you can see the Razor syntax at the top with the Layout = null then you will see HTML5 markup with the famous DOCTYPE tag. *You know the one every HTML5 session says you can remember*.

We are going to remove everything and just add in the following code snippet:

@{
    ViewBag.Title = "Products Page";
}

<hgroup class="title">
   <h2>@ViewBag.Message</h2>
</hgroup>

What the heck is a ViewBag?

The ViewBag uses the dynamic feature that was added in to C# 4. It allows an object to dynamically have properties added to it.

In this sample, we are going to set a Title and use the built in title class (found from hgroup) to display the ViewBag Message which we are going to set in the Controller.

Back to Controllers

Navigate back over to the Controllers page and double click on HomeController.cs and add the following code below the Contact Method.

public ActionResult Products()
{
    ViewBag.Message = " Your quintessential products page.";

    return View();
}

Here we can see that we created a new method called Products (which matches our name in the Views –> Home) and gave the ViewBag a dynamic Message and finally return the view.

Run It!

If we run it then we will quickly find out the page hasn’t been added. That is because we need to navigate over to the Views –> Shared and modify the _Layout.cshtml

If you drill down into the header tag then you will find a list with the id of menu. Simply add Products to this list as shown below:

<nav>
    <ul id="menu">
        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
        <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Products", "Products", "Home")</li>
        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
    </ul>
</nav>

What the heck is ActionLink?

An ActionLink returns an anchor element (a element) that contains the virtual path of the specified action. (source) If you want to break down the parts of ActionLink, then look at the image below:

As you can see in our example, we are passing in the Title, The Action Method and finally the Controller Name. Notice the third parameter is Home. This will map to HomeController class.

Now if you run the application then you will get your “Products” page and the text you defined in the dynamic ViewBag.Message.

Notice our clean URL: (doesn’t have the ugly .aspx page found in WebForms)

We can now go ahead and add an additional parameter for example : http://localhost:13945/Home/Products/123456 (depending on the port number assigned to your project) and notice that nothing happened to our page. It did 404 out. Why is that? It is because we don’t have anything defined to handle the “id” that is being passed in. Let’s investigate this further by going back to our HomeController and replacing the ViewBag.Message code for the Products with the one listed below:

public ActionResult Products()
{           
    ViewBag.Message = String.Format("{0}::{1}::{2}", RouteData.Values["controller"],
                                                     RouteData.Values["action"],
                                                     RouteData.Values["id"]);

    return View();
}

Now if we run that same page and enter the following URL: http://localhost:13945/Home/Products/123456 then we will get the following result:

As you can see we get the controller named Home, the action is called Products and we passed in 123456 which is the id. Stay tuned for the next part of the series as we are going to do something with the id that is passed in and explore much much more of MVC4.

Wrap-up

We covered a ton of MVC fundamentals in this first part. While nothing blogged about in this first part is earth shattering (especially if you are an MVC guy/gal) it really helped me wrap my head around ASP.NET MVC. I would recommend if you are interested in diving deeper much much faster than this series then check out Steve Sanderson’s book Pro ASP.NET MVC 3 Framework from Amazon.(not a referral link). Feel free to leave comments and suggestions below if I’m doing something wrong. Thanks for reading and until next time – Michael signing off.

The “latest and greatest” bits of all Microsoft Products can be found below.

Getting Rid of the “Plug-in Not Responding” Message when Debugging Silverlight Applications in Chrome

2012-04-21T03:55:00-07:00

Introduction

I really love building Silverlight Applications and debugging with Chrome. One thing that I hate though is the constant popups that I get from Chrome telling me my plug-in is unresponsive when I’m trying to figure out why something isn’t working. I decided to take a few minutes and find out how to solve this once and for all and share it with you. Below you will see my normal routine and how easily we can solve this.

The Normal Routine

I set a break point on a line:

I start debugging my application and begin inspecting the Binding Statement or whatever and eventually Chrome gives me this message:

I hit the No button and eventually it comes up again asking the same question.

The Solution

Multiple Solutions exists for this but it all boils down to adding an extra parameter called --disable-hang-monitor to the command line.

So for example, I usually open an instance of chrome before debugging my SL applications. I went ahead and create a shortcut to chrome and add the parameter after chrome.exe as shown below.

You may have times when you are not debugging and wish for Chrome to notify you the plug-in is not responding. In this case, simply add another shortcut without the additional parameter.

Other More Permanent Ways

If you want to just set this parameter system wide then you can do that by opening Regedit and navigate to the following key: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML\shell\open\command

Change the default key to look like the following: "C:\Users\your user name here\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-hang-monitor -- "%1"

You are now ready to enjoy Chrome without ever seeing the plug-in warning again.

Wrap-Up

It is funny how these little things can annoying you to the point where you begin investigating how to fix it. I know that was my case. Anyways, I hope this post helps someone out there!

Build a WinRT Metro App to Access the Windows 8 File System

2012-04-14T01:16:00-07:00

I have a new article published on DevProConnections today called, “Build a WinRT Metro App to Access the Windows 8 File System”. This article takes a look at what is involved with accessing the Windows 8 file system to create, read, modify and delete files. We also discuss file attributes and the “Most Recently Used” list in Windows 8.

Article Introduction

Windows 8 introduces a new native runtime called Windows Runtime (WinRT), which is the backbone of the new Metro user experience in Windows 8. For Windows developers, now is the ideal time to explore the Windows 8 Developer Preview and start working with Windows 8 and WinRT. Because file system access is one of the first things any developer needs to understand when learning a new platform, a good way to help you get your feet wet with WinRT is to use it to build a file system–access application. I'll walk you through the process of creating a Windows 8 C# and XAML Metro application and demonstrate how to manipulate files programmatically. After building the app, we'll explore additional file features, including reading file properties and adding a file to the Windows most recently used (MRU) list.

The Full Article

The full article is hosted on DevProConnections and you can access it by clicking here. Don’t forget to rate it and leave comments if you have any problems.

10 Things you Probably Didn’t know about Windows 8

2012-04-02T07:00:00-07:00

Introduction

I have been playing with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview since the day it was released. It is my primary operating system at nights and weekends. Since I have been investing a lot of time in Windows 8, I thought I’d share 10 things that I certainly didn’t know about Windows 8 at first. This list should be helpful for someone new to Windows 8, but a power-user may learn a thing or two as well.

In case you don’t have them, download the bits here:

Windows 8 Consumer Preview Download
VS11 Beta Download

The other “latest and greatest” bits that work with Windows 8 can be found here (may need VS2010 though):

Let’s get started:

1) On some Tiles that take up 2 spaces, you can select the tile and either make it smaller or turn the live tile off. This functionality has to be turned on by the developer.

2) In semantic zoom mode, you have the option to select a group then name it.

3) In the Windows Store, you can scroll through additional images (if the user provided it) by touching or clicking on the arrows indicated below.

4) If you just start typing the application that you want to launch from the Metro Home Screen, then you will automatically see search results.

5) Any page that you are viewing in the Metro browser, can easily be opened in the Desktop Browser with a simple right-click and “View on the desktop” button press.

6) You can easily view Suspended Apps in the Task Manager by clicking, View –> Status values –> Show suspended status. (by default it will hide suspended apps)

7) No need for a Screenshot capture tool. You can simply press Windows + Print Screen and an image will appear in your Pictures folder.

8) Learn the keyboard shortcuts. Microsoft provided a nice keyboard shortcut cheat sheet that is available in PDF or XPS.

9) Bring the orb back with ViStart. One of the annoying things about the Consumer Preview is that they removed the Windows Orb. So, if I want to open NotePad then I would normally have to switch back to Metro Mode to launch it or pin it to my desktop screen. Simply install ViStart then you won’t have that problem anymore.

*Beware that ViStart tries to install additional software, just watch the prompts and select “No” to everything else*

10) Since most people will be using Windows 8 on a tablet, it is important to note that Windows 8 comes with an “Airplane Mode” out of the box. Just select your Settings Charm –> Click on WiFi –> Toggle the Airplane Mode switch.

Wrap-up

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions or comments then please leave them below.

Nokia Lumia 800 Review and Pictures

2012-03-24T07:00:00-07:00

Introduction

I’ve had the following Windows Phone 7 devices since September 2010:

LG GW 910 Prototype Device (located on my old blog)
Samsung Focus
HTC Titan

and now the

Nokia Lumia 800

As you can see, I’ve carried around a lot of Windows Phones over the years. This quick review is for the Nokia Lumia 800 that I recently received.

The Specs

OS: Ships with Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), so no update is necessary.
Phone Size: Very small! (That is a good thing) You can tell by the pictures located below, that it just how it fits in my hand.
Screen Size: I am spoiled with my HTC Titan’s 4.7” screen at the moment, but the Lumia 800 still has a beautiful 3.7” AMOLED 480x800 screen.
Battery Life: Very good. I’m able to use it for an entire day without a charge.
Camera/Video: It comes with an 8 Megapixel camera rear-facing camera only. Again, I’m also spoiled that my Titan has a forward-facing camera.
CPU: Comes with a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm and is very smooth transitioning from one screen to another.
Memory: Ships with 512 MB ram. This is standard at the moment. We will begin to see budget phones like the Nokia Lumia 610 shortly that has 256MB Ram.
Internal Storage: Comes with 16 GB built-in which is more than enough to store music, photos, etc.

Pros/Cons

PROS:

+ If you are looking for an iPhone competitor, then you have found it. Slick, Sexy, and even opening the box reminds me of my old iPhone devices.

+ Nokia Lumia specific apps like Drive and Music which allows you to get turn-by-turn direction and free music streaming.

+ Solid build – this thing is built like a rock. I’ve already dropped it and it still works like a charm.

CONS:

- Uses a Mini-Sim card and I’m not a fan of that format. Why? Because I use a lot of different phones and have to use an adapter to switch between devices. (and those adapters sometimes get stuck in phones)

- The screen is 3.7” and I’m used to the Titans 4.7”. It is hard for me to switch to a smaller screen. I wish the standard had of been like the Lumia 900 at 4.3”.

- No forward-facing camera on this phone. In order to compete with iPhone 4S, this device should have had a forward-facing camera.

Pictures

Most of you scrolled down to this part first and I don’t blame you. Here is a look at some pictures of the device shot from my Canon Rebel T2i .After scrolling through the pictures, we will wrap up with my final thoughts on the phone.

What’s included in the box?

Manuals
Case – Very nice addition!
Data Cable plus Power Adapter (I have the European version)
Earbuds
Phone

Wrap-up

If you are going to get a new Windows Phone, then I’d look no further than the Nokia Lumia 800 or 900 model. The few issues that I had with the 800 model are solved in the 900 version. This phone is small, slick and sexy and is just the device we needed to beat out our competitors. I am also a believer that the Windows Phone OS (Mango for now) is superior to any other mobile operating system. My wife, who was a huge iPhone fan has tossed her device for a Windows Phone 7. Why? Because she had the chance to carry one around for a few days and see for herself. I believe if Microsoft/Nokia markets this right then we will see sells of our apps and the platform rise.

Technology and Friends with Michael Crump on Silverlight 5

2012-03-19T07:00:00-07:00

I was recently interviewed by David Giard for his podcast titled “Technology and Friends”. We talked for about 20 minutes on all things Silverlight 5. We discussed the Free eBook on Silverlight 5 that I recently published and was sponsored by Telerik to talking about all of the new features in Silverlight 5 that a Silverlight 4 developer could benefit from. Check out the interview and let me know what you think.

Listen to the podcast

Full archive of all shows

Download the eBook “10 Laps Around Silverlight 5”

A Few Additional Options Inside the Windows Simulator in VS11 Beta

2012-03-12T07:00:00-07:00

Introduction

In case you haven’t noticed, the Windows Simulator in VS11 Beta has changed slightly. We have the same panel located to the right of the simulator as before, but with a few additional options.

Here is a look at the simulator options with the version of VS11 released after the Build event.

…and here are the new options available after the latest VS11 Beta released on Feb 29th, 2012.

Digging in

You can easily access the Simulator inside of Visual Studio 11, by going to Debug and selecting Simulator from the drop-down.

Once you run your application, you will see it running in the simulator as shown below:

Let’s explore these new options. If you want to review what all of the buttons do then read my previous blog post.

Set Location

If we take the first new option, then we can easily set the location for the app by inputting latitude, longitude, altitude and error radius.

Of course, if your tablet has the ability to send GPS coordinates then you can use your real location by unchecking “Use simulated location”.

Screenshot

If you want to take a screenshot of your app, then simply click the "Screenshot” button.

With the button directly under it, you can make a few additional tweaks. Including where it saves the image and to open the saved image location.

By default, it saves to the Clipboard and stores the file in your Pictures Library.

It stores the images with the same resolution as set in the Simulator:

Help

The last option just opens your browser to the following page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/hh441475.aspx

Wrap-up

As you can see from this post, the simulator in VS11 Beta adds some functionality that we have been using with the Windows Phone 7 emulator. We actually had to wait well beyond the beta bits to get location and screenshots in the phone emulator options. Let’s hope the rest of Windows 8 is as polished as the simulator is. If you have any questions then feel free to contact me. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on twitter.

Community MegaPhone Podcast Ep 33 with Michael Crump

2012-03-09T08:00:00-08:00

I was recently interviewed by Dane Morgridge and G. Andrew Duthie for their podcast titled “Community MegaPhone”. We talked for about an hour and a half on all things Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. Dane and Andrew asked a lot of great questions and I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with them. Check out the interview and let me know what you think.

Listen to the podcast

Full archive of all shows

Main Community MegaPhone site

Porting a Silverlight App to a Metro-Style App published on Visual Studio Magazine

2012-03-05T08:00:00-08:00

I have a new article published on Visual Studio Magazine today called, “Porting a Silverlight App to a Metro-Style App”. This article take Scott Gu’s famous Silverlight 2 Digg Applications and ports it to Windows 8 Metro-Style. I had a lot of fun writing this article and hope that you enjoy reading it.

Article Introduction

Windows 8, which was introduced at the Microsoft BUILD conference last year, is an exciting new OS that introduced a new UI as well as a new runtime: Windows Runtime, called WinRT. It's the backbone of the new Metro experience in Windows 8. Like many others, I've been playing with Windows 8 and kept hearing that Silverlight skills can be reused in Metro-style applications. I decided to find out for myself by taking a Silverlight 2 project and seeing how easy it was to port to a Windows 8 Metro application using C#/XAML.

The Full Article

The full article is hosted on Visual Studio Magazine and you can access it by clicking here. Don’t forget to rate it and leave comments if you have any problems.

Build your first Windows Phone App Article Published on NetMagazine

2012-03-01T08:00:00-08:00

I have a new article published on NetMagazine today called, “Build your first Windows Phone 7 app”. This article goes beyond a simple “Hello World” app and guides you through building a simple yet highly functional Windows Phone 7 app. It is aimed at those new to Windows Phone 7 as well as other developers from different mobile platforms.

Article Introduction

In this article, we will get to grips with Windows Phone 7 application development, download the tools and begin building a simple app from start to finish. From discovering the rich toolset, to writing XAML and C#, Microsoft MVP Michael Crump has you covered

Whether any of us like to admit it or not, mobile is here. It has been and will continue to be a core skillset that every developer will need to embrace. But how does someone new to mobile applications get started in mobile software development? Better yet, what if you have already built mobile applications on one platform and want to see the process of building an application on another one? This is what this article aims to accomplish. Get everyone up to speed with developing their first Windows Phone 7 application from start to finish.

The Full Article

The full article is hosted on NetMagazine and you can access it by clicking here. Don’t forget to rate it and leave comments if you have any problems.

Visual Studio 11 Beta: Thoughts and Resources

2012-02-24T02:53:00-08:00

Introduction

A couple of things were announced today. First, Visual Studio 11 Beta will arrive on February 29th, 2012 with a Go-Live license and second we have a TFS Express edition coming out. But what most developers were interested in learning about is Visual Studio 11. So here it is, a screenshot of the next version of Visual Studio just before I head off to the MVP Summit next week.

(source)

And here is a similar screen of a Grid Application for Windows 8 taken from my Windows 8 Developer Preview box.

So, What do you think?

I’ve heard mixed reviews so far, but I must say that I kind of like it. As you can tell from the screenshot, this isn’t your typical Visual Studio. It follows the Metro guidelines that (some) have grown to love in Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 applications. My first thought was, where are all the colors? This reminds me a Windows 3.1 application with all the gray.

(source)

Then I read the following quote:

In VS 11 we have eliminated the use of color within tools except in cases where color is used for notification or status change purposes. Consequently, the UI within VS 11 now competes far less with the developer’s content. Additionally, notifications and status changes now draw user attention much more readily than before. (source)

Then it started to make sense.

The first thing I notice in Visual Studio 11 is the design view of the application.
The second thing I notice is the code.
The typography in Visual Studio 11 is also pretty to look at and easy to read.
In VS10/Windows 3.1, they used the white background everywhere, in VS 11 it blends in with the theme and is only used in the code.
You can now read the text in the toolbar easier. Go ahead and compare the toolbar of Visual Studio 2010 and Windows 3.1 to the Visual Studio 11 version.

But the question remains, as a developer can you stare all day at the metro theme and be comfortable? I think this is a question that we will have to see. Let me also remind you that it comes with a dark theme as well. You can also create your own color schemes like we did in previous versions. (source)

So for now, I’ll focus on the improved feature set that Visual Studio 11 brings and try out the metro theme when it is in my hands. :)

Links

I’ve rounded up all the links posted so far on Visual Studio 11 Beta, so you don’t have to go digging around the net to find them. I’ve also included the post on TFS Express and some additional screenshots of Visual Studio 11 found in the Press Pass from Microsoft.

As always, leave any feedback or comments below and we can continue this conversation. I’m also on twitter if you want to connect on there.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards Book Released

2012-02-22T08:00:00-08:00

Winners: @ianormy @RonPuckett @MOverlund

Introduction

Almost a year and a half ago (as you can probably tell from my bio in the screenshot), I sat down and starting reviewing the Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards book. Fast forward to last month, this book became available for sale. It was a pleasure being part of the technical review for this book and I learned a lot of things throughout the review. I wanted to take a brief moment and tell you what the book has to offer.

But first, the Giveaway

I’ve got 3 copies of the eBook to give away – sorry no physical books. I know that a majority of people would rather have the electronic version where they can take it with them everywhere. All you have to do is leave a comment below where I can track you down. I’d also appreciate you leaving your twitter handle where I can send you a tweet. I will randomly select 3 winners on 2/29, so act fast.

Book Overview

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Silverlight enables you to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards that highlight Key Performance Indicators for your business.

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards is a concise and practical tutorial that shows you how to create, customize and design rich enterprise dashboards with Silverlight.

This book provides real world user experience design topics and starts by providing an overview of the Silverlight Platform and the clear advantages it provides for building dashboards. The book then dives into topics such as Silverlight design and development tools, building a basic Dashboard, Dashboard types and user needs, Designing for Insight, Styling, Building an End to End Dashboard Solution and Data Access Strategies amongst others.

The Table of Contents

Below is a list of topics that the book covers with a link to a page with more information.

Chapter 1: The Silverlight Technology
Chapter 2: Overview of Dashboards and Silverlight
Chapter 3: Silverlight Design and Development Tools
Chapter 4: Building a Basic Dashboard
Chapter 5: Dashboard Types and User Needs
Chapter 6: Designing for Insight
Chapter 7: Designing your Dashboard
Chapter 8: Building an End-to-End Solution
Chapter 9: Data Access Strategies
Chapter 10: Building Dashboards in SharePoint and Silverlight

Snapshots of the Book

I decided to take a few snapshots of the book, mainly because I like to look back at things I have been involved in. :)

Wrap-up

Thanks to Packt Publishing for giving me this opportunity to review such a fantastic book. Also, thanks to you my loyal readers for reading my blog over the years and don’t forget to leave a comment below for a chance to win a copy of the eBook.

The first 10 Minutes of a C# Developer Exploring a Metro Application using Visual C++

2012-02-15T14:11:00-08:00

Introduction

I’m a C# guy through and through, but I have recently been exploring Visual C++ . I decided to take you with me as I spend 10 minutes exploring the Visual C++ Metro Templates included with Visual Studio 11. This blog post is written with my background in C#. I will try to point out the differences as I see them. We will look at Visual C++ templates, solution explorer, some XAML and even some code-behind.

Let’s get started with templates.

The Visual C++/C# Metro Templates built-into VS 11

Visual Studio 11 has the following templates built-into it for Visual C++/C# projects:

The description of each project type is located below:

Application – A blank project using the Metro style framework.
Grid Application – A multi-page project for navigating multiple layers of content with item details displayed on a dedicated page.
Split Application – A project for navigating among a master list of items while viewing their details on the same page.
Unit Test Project – A Unit Test Project.
WinRT Component DLL – Template for a Windows Metro Style server DLL.
DirectX Application – (Only in C++) Template for a blank Windows Metro style application using DirectX.

The only thing to note here is the inclusion of a DirectX Application with the C++ Templates. Everything else is pretty much identical in terms of the template structure.

The Solution Explorer

If you take a look at the “Application Template” for C++ vs. C# then you will notice some differences.

Looking at the C++ Solution Explorer in depth

If you expand “External Dependencies,” then you will see a long list of header files along with other files needed to build a C++ Metro application. This is necessary for the application to compile as we also have standard references needed to use certain libraries in a C# application.
The Resources Folder contains 4 PNG images that we are used to seeing inside of the Images folder in a C# Application.
The only difference in the App.xaml and MainPage.xaml is that in the C++ application, it contains both a .cpp (C ++) and .h (header) file whereas the C# version only contains the .cs (C Sharp) file.
The Package.appxmanifest exist in both projects and contains metadata that describes your app, including display name, description, logos, and capabilities.
Finally, we get to the pch.cpp/pch.h files which are pre-compiled header files and are obviously not included in the C# application.

The other thing you might notice is that the C# application contains an AssemblyInfo.cs under Properties whereas the C++ version did not. This file consists of all of the build options for the project, including version, company name, GUID, compilers options, etc.

Looking at a simple “Hello World” Application – The XAML

A button and a TextBlock… it doesn’t get any easier than this. If the user clicks the button, then it displays “Hello World” in a TextBlock as shown below.

Thankfully, XAML is XAML – the following code snippet works regardless if you are using C#, VB or C++.

<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="#FF0C0C0C">
              <StackPanel>
    <Button Content="Click Me" FontSize="24" Width="200" Height="60" Click="HelloButton_Click" />
    <TextBlock x:Name="DisplayText" FontSize="48" Foreground="White" />
     </StackPanel>
</Grid>

The Code Behind

You knew this part would be massively different, didn’t you? I hope so – we are talking about an entirely different language. :)

Below is a “Hello World” that works with the XAML included above in C#:

private void HelloButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    DisplayText.Text = "Hello World";
}

That same “Hello World” looks like the following in C++

void HelloWorld::MainPage::HelloButton_Click(Platform::Object^ sender, Windows::UI::Xaml::RoutedEventArgs^ e)
{
    DisplayText->Text = "Hello World";

}

Look at the way the event handler is setup. Looks foreign right now doesn’t it? No worries, give this free e-Book a spin to convert your existing C# skills to C++.

Wrap-up

What did we learn in 10 minutes? We learned about several differences in C# and Visual C++ Metro Applications. But the real challenge here isn’t learning the new templates, differences in solution explorer or XAML. It is that we need to learn the language. I’m not going to go into why I’m spending nights/weekends dabbling in Visual C++, but I think learning native application development is a great way to go. I’ll probably expand on this post with a more in-depth article on building a complete application with Visual C++ if enough people are interested. Until then - take care everyone!

Treadmill Assistant Windows Phone 7 App Released

2012-02-09T03:00:00-08:00

App Information:
Marketplace Link: http://mcrump.me/treadmillasst
Price: FREE

Product Description:
Use this application to quickly track treadmill runs from month to month. You can enter and store dates ran, duration, miles ran and notes. You can also view your run log and email it to yourself. The application is free so give it a shot today!

Why a Treadmill app?

Back in December 2011, I decided that it was time to start losing weight. So what did I do? I made a lifestyle change – not a fad diet. I decided that I would start eating healthier foods and allow myself one cheat day. I also started an exercise program using a treadmill and light weights. I started running 3.5 miles a day at least 4 days a week. After running for about a month, I decided that it would be interesting to keep track of my runs in a calendar view. So, what did I do? I looked for an existing WP7 app that had the functionality I wanted. I found several apps, but they seemed to never fit the bill so I just went ahead and built my own. Surprising isn’t it? :)

The App

Just like all of my other personal adventures, this app was built whenever I had free time. Nowadays, that is few and far between with two kids, a wife and a very sick mother-in-law. So, I used a mixture of tools including Telerik’s WP7 controls. I decided that I’d also try out the local database feature in Mango as well to become familiar with it. I wound up creating several helper classes that I should be able to reuse in other apps. The app was fun to build as it solved my problem flawlessly.

What’s Next?

I’m going to add charting and several quick glimpse screens. Those screens would tell the amount of miles ran in a month, calories burned and so forth. I also plan on adding some additional polish to the app as the current state is functional (at least to me) but could improve. I’ll also add a product page similar to this one I used for FullScreen Browser. ( product page ) If you download the app and have any questions or comments, then feel free to post them below. I’ve added a few screenshots below so you can get a taste of what it is like.

Screenshots

Using the Live SDK in Windows 8 XAML/C# Metro Applications

2012-01-30T08:00:00-08:00

I have a new article published on SilverlightShow today called, “Using the Live SDK in Windows 8 XAML/C# Metro Applications”.

Article Introduction

The Microsoft’s Live SDK (or commonly referred to as Live Connect), provides a set of controls and APIs that enables applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) functionality using Windows Live ID. You can also use it to access data in SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger.

The library supports multiple platforms, including Windows Phone 7 Mango and Windows 8 Metro Style applications using either C#, Visual Basic or JavaScript. In this article, we will build our first metro style application using the Live SDK and XAML/C#.

The Full Article

The full article is hosted on SilverlightShow and you can access it by clicking here. Don’t forget to rate it and leave comments if you have any problems.

Michael Crump

Yet Another Podcast #65 – Windows 8 with Michael Crump

Introduction

Details of My Session at Rocky Mountain Trifecta:

Links to the Podcast

When Debug isn’t enough with your Windows 8 Metro Applications.

VS11 – Metro Application Quick Tips

Wrap-Up

Upcoming Events : Speaking and Attending

Wrap-up

A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 2 of ?)

Introduction

The Series so far:

Back to MVC4

Exploring Mobile Browsers a bit further before moving on.

Back to our App – Some Quick Fixes

Creating Mobile Specific Views in our MVC4 application with the help of Recipes

Wrap-up

Unblock Files in Windows 8 using PowerShell and Registry

Introduction

The Solution

Wrap-up

A XAML Guy digs into ASP.NET MVC4 (Part 1 of ?)

Introduction

Starting with MVC4 Beta

What is the difference between the different Project Templates?

Start Me Up!

The Solution Explorer

Starting with Controllers

Adding an Additional Page

What the heck is a ViewBag?

Back to Controllers

Run It!

What the heck is ActionLink?

Wrap-up

Getting Rid of the “Plug-in Not Responding” Message when Debugging Silverlight Applications in Chrome

Introduction

The Normal Routine

The Solution

Other More Permanent Ways

Wrap-Up

Build a WinRT Metro App to Access the Windows 8 File System

Article Introduction

The Full Article

10 Things you Probably Didn’t know about Windows 8

Introduction

Wrap-up

Nokia Lumia 800 Review and Pictures

Introduction

The Specs

Pros/Cons

Pictures

Technology and Friends with Michael Crump on Silverlight 5

A Few Additional Options Inside the Windows Simulator in VS11 Beta

Introduction

Digging in

Set Location

Screenshot

Help

Wrap-up

Community MegaPhone Podcast Ep 33 with Michael Crump

Porting a Silverlight App to a Metro-Style App published on Visual Studio Magazine

Article Introduction

The Full Article

Build your first Windows Phone App Article Published on NetMagazine

Article Introduction

The Full Article

Visual Studio 11 Beta: Thoughts and Resources

Introduction

Links

Visual Studio 11 Resources

TFS Express Resources

ScreenShots

Microsoft Silverlight 5: Building Rich Enterprise Dashboards Book Released

Introduction

But first, the Giveaway

Book Overview

The Table of Contents

Snapshots of the Book

Wrap-up