SlickThought.Net

The Greatest Developer Opportunity - Ever

jab — Wed, 09 May 2012 12:36:51 -0500

Windows 7 was the fastest selling operating system in the history of the planet. Windows 8 has the opportunity to be the next record breaker, and with that comes a huge opportunity for developers. In this email are some resources to get you started developing apps for Windows 8 and opportunity for potentially being one of the first apps into the Windows Store and available for download the day Windows 8 releases.

First of all, download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview from http://aka.ms/Get8 and the Visual Studio Beta tools for Windows 8 from http://aka.ms/Dev8 . Here are some developer resources to help you get started building Windows 8 Metro Style Applications.

· Windows Developer Center for Metro apps – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/ (there is a wealth of information if you click on the “Learn” menu item at the top)

· Design guidance – http://design.windows.com

· Sample code – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps/

· Forums for asking questions and getting unblocked – http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/category/windowsapp

Once you have an idea for an application, email me (jbrand @ microsoft dot com). Don’t wait to finish your application before emailing me. I will give you instructions for registering yourself and your applications(s). From there, you will have the opportunity to have your application reviewed and approved for submission to the Store. This opportunity may not last forever. Even if you are thinking about developing an app, or just have a vague idea, send me an email. You can always decline to participate later, but reserve your spot today!

Update to Windows Phone to Windows 8 Online Sessions

jab — Thu, 03 May 2012 09:38:24 -0500

My previous post has been updated with new registration links via EventBrite.

Please use those links, or these, to register via EventBrite. Online capacity is limited for these first two sessions, so please secure your spot.

http://wp7towin8-1.eventbrite.com/

http://wp7towin8-2.eventbrite.com/

Thanks!

Windows 8 Accelerator Labs

jab — Tue, 01 May 2012 10:33:48 -0500

Are you developing a Windows 8 Metro application? Thinking about creating one?

We still have seats open at the May 23rd – 25th Windows 8 Accelerator Lab at the Microsoft Edina offices. You can spend three days, head-down, writing code and moving your Windows 8 app closer to completion. There will also be technical presentations on various topics such as designing for the Metro UX, process lifecycle management, Contracts, and more. As an added bonus, you will be able to talk with members of the Microsoft Expression team to give them feedback on what you like, dislike and how you use Expression Blend.

You will also get info on how you can get into the Windows Store before anyone else, and take advantage of App Excellence Reviews with Microsoft engineers.

The best part??? It’s all free! Oh, and there is food. All you need is a laptop running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the free Visual Studio developer tools.

Windows 8 Demo Code

jab — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:24:14 -0500

Code for my Windows 8 demos is now available for download. You can get the files here. Enjoy.

Windows Phone to Windows 8 Online Sessions

jab — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 09:23:12 -0500

Online Workshops

Option One
Date May 16^th, 2012

Option Two
Date May 18^th, 2012

FREE Events
Capacity is limited,
so arrive on time.
Events run from
8:30am to 12:30pm CST

Updated on 5/3/2012 with new registration links!!!

Windows 8 with Metro-style applications offers one of the biggest opportunities for developers in a very long time. As a Windows Phone developer, you are uniquely positioned to be able to get in on the ground floor of this exciting new platform.

Microsoft has already provided some great resources that you may want to look to learn how you can move your Windows Phone applications to the Windows 8 platform:

Migrating WP7 to Window 8

Metro UX style, design and principles

Creating your first Metro app with C#/XAML

Samples and SDK

Because of your interest in Windows Phone 7 you are also asked to please join us for a special, invitation-only Windows 8 event created specifically for Windows Phone developers – Windows Phone to Windows 8 Workshop. Because of your interest in Windows Phone 7, and your past attendance at a Windows Phone Boot Camp, Microsoft would like to extend to you a unique opportunity to get ready for Windows 8.

These FREE half-day workshops will provide you an overview getting from Windows Phone to Windows 8. Leveraging your XAML and .NET skills, these workshops will introduce the fundamentals of developing Windows 8 Metro-style applications, tips for migrating your Windows Phone applications, and guidance on Metro UX. Technical experts will be on hand to address your questions, discuss your existing Windows Phone applications, and help get you started on developing your applications on Windows 8 and getting them into the Windows Store.

To participate in a workshop, all you need to do is pick one of the two dates and attend the online seminar. Each workshop is the same, so you only need to attend one workshop. Each meeting has limited online capacity, so join on time.

Heads Up: Working with JSON on Windows 8

jab — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 10:42:13 -0500

Just a quick heads up for working with JSON on Windows 8.

If you have worked with JSON on Windows Phone 7, you are most likely very familiar with the DataContractJsonSerializer class. When working with JSON, using DataContractJsonSerializer is the most common approach I see. The approach typically looks something like this.

First, you define a class that will contain the parsed JSON data. You mark with class up with [DataContract] and [DataMember] attributes. If I was getting data from Twitter, it might look something like this:

[DataContract]

public class Tweet

     [DataMember("text")]

     public string Text {get;set)

     [DataMember("profile_image_url")]

     public string ImageUrl{get;set)

     [DataMember("from_user_name")]

     public string Poster{get;set)

While straightforward, it is a bit cumbersome. You have to create class. You then may want to map the property names from Twitter to different property names in your .NET class. It gets even more complicated if the JSON has properties that contain other JSON objects. Now you have to create additional classes to parse those results.

Once you have your classes created, you would then parse the JSON as shown:

var jsonSerializer = new DataContractJsonSerializer(typeof(Tweet));

var results = jsonSerialzer.ReadObject(someStream) as Tweet;

The above is closer to pseudo code than real code, but the one thing to point out is that the ReadObject method requires an input stream that provides the JSON. If you are working with a string of JSON, you have to put it into a MemoryStream and then parse it. The extra step can be annoying.

JSON in Windows 8 – A Simpler Approach

In Windows 8, we have the JsonObject class that makes life simpler when working with JSON. The JsonObject has existed in “regular” Silverlight for sometime, but never made an appearance on Windows Phone. It has undergone some changes on Windows 8, giving us some new methods to work with. For quick and dirty JSON processing, the JsonObject works pretty well. If you have more complex needs, you may want to checkout the JSON.Net library.

With the JsonObject, we can parse are JSON like this:

var json = JsonObject.Parse(jsonString);

Things don’t get much easier than that. I can access properties on the parsed results with just as easily:

var prop = json.GetNamedString(“someProperty”);

There are other methods like GetNamedBoolean, GetNamedObject, and GetNamedArray. Let’s take a look at GetNamedArray, in particular, since I think it will be used frequently.

If you take a look at this Twitter search, you will see that the actual results of the search are contained in an array of JSON objects called “results”. This is a pretty common occurrence in the world of JSON.

Handling it with JsonObject is pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it. If I wanted to databind the results of that search to a list of tweet results, I could do something like this:

var results = json.GetNamedArray("results");

var tweets = from r in results

                      select new { text = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("text"),

                                           image = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("profile_image_url"),

                                           poster = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("from_user_name") };

The “tricky” part is that the values stored in a call to GetNamedArray are not JSON objects, even though we know the results property contains JSON objects. The returned array is actually a list of JsonValue’s because it is possible that we are dealing with an array of strings, for example. As a result, when iterating through the results, we need to make a call to GetObject on each item in the list.

Obviously, not a lot of error checking going on, but it does a fine job illustrating the core concepts. If you are interested in how this would be used in an application, here is an example method that calls the Twitter search reference above:

private async void SomeMethod()

    var http = new HttpClient();

    http.MaxResponseContentBufferSize = Int32.MaxValue;

    var response = await http.GetStringAsync("");

    var json = JsonObject.Parse(response);

    var results = json.GetNamedArray("results");

    var tweets = from r in results

                          select new {

                                    text = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("text"),

                                    image = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("profile_image_url"),

                                    poster = r.GetObject().GetNamedString("from_user_name") };

Consuming HTTP Streams in Windows 8 with C#/XAML

jab — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:58:42 -0500

Let’s say you play a multiplayer game online that provides updates via a Twitter stream. Let’s say it’s a game like QONQR. Now, you may be a little bit addicted to playing that game. I’m not saying I know anyone that is, but if someone was, they may want to consume that Twitter stream and do some fun things with the information. You could mess around with some kind of traditional polling client, but Twitter has a Streaming API available, so why not use that? Of course, if you were going to write some cool new app to leverage that data, you would certainly test it out on Windows 8, right?

Conceptually, the idea seems pretty straightforward. I want to consume the Http Stream on a continuous basis, and update my application as new tweets are received. A couple things complicate this idea. First, we usually deal with Http requests in a connect-request-receive-disconnect approach. Get in, get out. So how do we keep a connection open to the server that we can read from continually? Second, in Windows 8, all of the network operations are asynchronous, so how do we get the updates from the async operation back to the UI?

First, we will create class to handler the streaming. In trail blazing fashion, I will name this class HttpStreaming. Because of problem #2, I know that any work that is done by the HttpStreaming class will most likely need to be marshaled back on the UI thread. In my simple app, all I want to do is read in Tweets and add them into a GridView control. My class starts of looking like this:

public class HttpStreaming

        CoreDispatcher _dispatcher;

        public HttpStreaming(CoreDispatcher dispatcher)

            _dispatcher = dispatcher;

The HttpStreaming class asks for the Dispatcher associated with the application’s UI thread. We’ll see how to that shortly.

Now, it is time for the meat of the problem. Accessing and processing the Http stream. The basic operation looks like this:

public void Start(Action<JsonObject> action)

    try {

        var webRequest = (HttpWebRequest) WebRequest.Create("https://stream.twitter.com/1/

                                                              statuses/filter.json?follow=255956231");

        webRequest.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user","password");

        webRequest.BeginGetResponse((callback) => {

        try {

            Encoding encode = Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");

            var request = callback.AsyncState as HttpWebRequest;

            var response = request.EndGetResponse(callback) as HttpWebResponse;

            while (true)

try

                    var responseStream = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream(), encode);

                    var json = responseStream.ReadLine();

                    var data = JsonObject.Parse(json);

                    if (action != null && data != null)

                        _dispatcher.InvokeAsync(Windows.UI.Core.CoreDispatcherPriority.Normal,

                        (s, e) =>

                            action(data);

},

                        this,

                        null);

                catch (IOException ex) { }

                catch (OutOfMemoryException ex) { }

        catch (WebException ex) {}

        catch (IOException ex) {}

        catch (OutOfMemoryException ex) {}

        catch (Exception ex) {}

        },webRequest);

    catch (WebException ex) {}

There is a lot going on here, so let’s break it down because it is really not that complicated. First, the Start method accepts an Action that expects to get a JsonObject passed to it. This makes sense since the Twitter stream will be feeding us Json representations of the tweets.

Next, we set up the HttpWebRequest. Twitter requires authentication to access the stream, so you can omit this if yours does not. We start the async request by calling BeginGetResponse. The callback lamda expression does all of the processing. The heart is the continual while loop. The only time we break out of the loop is if there is an Exception.

The loop does continually reads from the Http Stream, and if there is a json object, it uses the dispatcher to call the Action. I’ll leave it up to you on how to handle the various exceptions.

In the the code-behind of my application’s page I put this code:

HttpStreaming httpStream;

ObservableCollection<string> tweetList = new ObservableCollection<string>();

public BlankPage()

    this.InitializeComponent();

    tweetView.ItemsSource = tweetList;

protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)

    httpStream =  new HttpStreaming(this.Dispatcher);

    httpStream.Start((json) => {

                var tweetText = json.GetNamedString("text");

                tweetList.Add(tweetText);

});

When the page is navigated to, it sets up the HttpStreaming object with the Dispatcher and then connects to the stream. You could set this up differently to suit the needs of your application. In my demo app, I have created an ObservableCollection that will hold the tweets that I want updated on my page. The Action assigned to the Start method simply takes the returned json object, pulls the text value, and inserts the text string into the ObservableCollection.

All in all, it is pretty straightforward stuff, but not intuitively obvious. At least it wasn’t for me. You may find it useful in this world of web connected software. Now, let’s see if I can figure it out in javascript. Stay tuned…

Note: Special thanks to Shannon Whitley that got me pointed in the right direction when I first thought about this problem with his helpful blog post - Open Source .NET (C#) Twitter Streaming API Client

Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 Lab

jab — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:40:49 -0500

Noodling on having a Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 lab in Minneapolis. A full day of tech briefings, examples, and discussion. The goal would be to get you up to speed on what it would take to move your WP7 app to Windows 8. It would be a free event. Thoughts? Would you come? Email me at WP7toWin8@live.com if you would attend this kind of event and what would you like to see and accomplish.

Twin Cities Windows 8 Dev Group Starts Next Week

jab — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 10:40:52 -0500

A developers group focused exclusively on Windows 8 kicks of its first meeting next week. Get more info and event registration here - http://windows8ug.com/Default.aspx

Mobile March WP7 Workshop

jab — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:27:42 -0500

I will be delivering a hands-on lab on Windows Phone development at the Mobile March Twin Cities conference in a couple weeks. Check out this great conference, and join me for the hands-on lab. I’ll have a sweet Nokia Lumia 800 to give away, and if things fall into place, I may have a special prize for the first group of people to show up to the lab. You can get all of the tools you need for the lab at http://aka.ms/MobileMarch

In addition, I’ll be going head-to-head against Rory Lonergan in an iOS vs. WP7 challenge on the second day of the event. Should be a lot of fun.

Back from Exile

jab — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 09:20:48 -0500

Ok, not quite exile, but certainly a period of “run silent, run deep” as the Windows 8 train got fueled and prepped. It’s good to come to the surface and I am looking forward to getting back on the speaking circuit and cranking out some blog posts.

A heavy duty speaking tour is shaping up with Nebraska Code Camp, Twin Cities Code Camp, the newly forming Twin Cities Windows 8 Developer Group, and some speaking gigs at the TC .NET UG and TC SLUG in the near future. Throw in some continued work on Windows Phone and this spring and summer are shaping up to be busy. Did I mention that Microsoft will also be hosting some local events centered on Windows 8 in addition to all of that? Yep – we will have some of those as well.

Phew! It is a fun and exciting time to be doing Microsoft development. I hope you will join me on the ride.

Evolving EcmaScript

jab — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:27:51 -0500

I’ve been spending more time with javascript (aka EcmaScript) and these would be some welcome additions.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/11/22/evolving-ecmascript.aspx

Live Connect with Silverlight

jab — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 08:01:38 -0500

The presentation and demo app are now available from my Live Connect presentation at the Twin Cities Silverlight User Group this week.

MDC Code Samples Posted

jab — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:05:13 -0500

Finally go around to posting the code samples. You can find the links to the presentations here.

Mango

Silverlight 5

CodeSlingers Challenge Follows Windows Phone Camp!!!!

jab — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:56:25 -0500

I tweeted earlier about http://codeslingerschallenge.com. What is doubly cool is that the day before the Code Slinger Challenge kicks off, Microsoft is holding a Windows Phone Boot Camp. What does that mean? Well, you can sign up for the free boot camp (http://aka.ms/wpbloom), get your skills sharp and frosty, then head to the Challenge on Saturday and kick some major ass. Don’t miss out on either opportunity!