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UX-Dev camp at Microsoft

Today, I will be attending a UX-Dev camp with Microsoft Sweden. We’re currently at Stockholm’s Modern Museum getting ready to start the day off. Developers are starting to trickle in, and I’m looking forward to the day to come.

I’ve been working in secret on a remake of an old application that I did for Windows 7. I’m remaking it for Windows 8 as a training exercise.

Installing and activating Windows 8

This will be a short post. I just wanted to give two quick tips on the installation and activation of Win8 for developers.

 

Installation

 

When installing Windows 8, the easiest way is to just download the ISO file (from MSDN Downloads) and burn it to a DVD. However, since not everyone has a DVD drive these days, there is also the option of installing Win8 via USB.

 

 

1. Download Windows 8 ISO file

2. Get your USB drive (at least 4GB)

3. Download and install the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool.

4. Use the tool to load the ISO file onto your USB drive.

5. Reboot computer with USB plugged in (remember to check that your computer boots to USB).

 

If everything went well, you should then boot into the Win8 installation program.

 

Activation

 

The past days, the biggest issue for developers trying to activate their Windows 8 copies has been that their MSDN serial-keys doesn’t seem to work. I ran into this issue myself earlier today. There is however a rather quick solution:

 

1. Start CMD in elevated mode (type CMD on the new start screen, right click and select “Run as Administrator”).

 

 

 

2. type the following command:

 

   slmgr.vbs -ipk “YOUR-PRODUCT-KEY”

 

3. Press [ENTER]

4. You should be activated

 

 

Picnik is closing

This might be a bit late for a link tip, but I’ve always admired the site www.picnik.com . A photo-editing site where casual users can do amazing things without being a photoshop pro. I’m a bit sad to say that Picnik will be closing shop by mid-april. Until then however, the whole site will be free. Even the premium services. I’m excited to see what the Picnik team achieves in service of their new master Google. I hope to see some of their awesomeness come to one of google’s free services, such as Picasa.

Richard Klees coming to Stockholm

Microsoft TechNet and Knowledge factory are hosting a cool lecture later this month. The topic is how to give successful presentations. The speaker is none other than the famous Richard Klees flown in from the US by Microsoft. Here is a blurb from the event site:

We can feel and demonstrate confidence, professionalism and conviction when we are comfortable, feeling well, know our content inside and out, and the stakes for being successful are not so high that the pressure to do well isn’t so great. If we had a good night’s sleep and the audience is a manageable size made up of people we know and feel calm, we can do a good job.
But what happens when life is not going as well as we planned?

• We’re nervous
• We didn’t get a chance to prepare as thoroughly as we would have liked
• We must be successful because our boss is counting on us to do well
• We are jet-lagged or fighting a cold, and just don’t feel well-rested
• We are presenting to a larger audience than we are used to and they are complete strangers
• We feel pressure to do well and so we are constantly self-evaluating, even as we speak
• What’s at stake could mean the difference between moving ahead and staying in the same place
• WHAT DO YOU DO?

We would always like life to play fair, but it doesn’t. That’s where this seminar and “The Action Effect” come in. This seminar will show you how to be confident, compelling and persuasive under any circumstances, with any audience, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. That’s a big promise, but this seminar can deliver and you will see it before your eyes. Hope to see you there.
– Richard Klees

The event is September 29th here in Stockholm and is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to improve your presentation skills. Hope to see you there!

EVENT LINK HERE

Damned good coffee

Kahls coffee in Kista Gallerian serves damned good coffee. If you’re passing by, stop in for a good cup of java (mine’s empty since it’s so good)

September

August has been a strange month. I’ve been thrown between different projects, had a few slices of Mango and finally ended up on a migration project at a large telecom company. With little WP7 action in my future, I’m at least looking forward to giving a very delayed speech on what went down in Las Vegas earlier this year at MIX. I’m presenting along with my friends and colleagues Michael and Johan.

Tech breakfasts, as Avanade calls these tech-oriented morning sessions are a very good way to reach out to a growing company. I’m thinking about doing one around Windows 8 as well in a few weeks.

 

September wallpapers – Smashing Magazine

InfoPath Stupid Dropdowns

Quick “I-hate-InfoPath” tip: I had a bunch of dropdowns with Swedish text in them as values. InfoPath then proceeds to flag this text as faulty. “Ok” I think, “Let’s just switch that spellchecker off”. No dice. There is no setting for the spellchecker on dropdown menus. Once it’s there, it won’t go away. Not very user friendly.

The solution to this, I found, is to change the dropdown to a textbox via the “Change this control…” action. And then switch off the spellchecker. You can then switch the control back to a dropdown and the spellchecker is removed.

WARNING: This will reset all connections/preset values on the control, so be prepared for this.

InfoPath Case Sensitivity

Here is a quick tip for anyone struggling with InfoPath. It’s not the smoothest peach in the bowl, but it gets the job done.

When configuring an InfoPath form tied to a SharePoint list, you lose the ability to use custom code. This gets old really quick. I was struggling with fields not matching because of case sensitivity. Here is an example:

NameField = NameFromDatabase

NameField might be Viktor, viktor or VIKTOR. NameFromDatabase could also vary. What I did here was apply a translate function to each value I was comparing.

translate(X, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")

This replaces all the uppercase with lowecase letters. In my case it would read:

translate(NameField, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" ,  "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz") = translate(NameFromDatabase ,  "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")

It’s not pretty, but it works. Similarly, I used translate to fix phone numbers and postal codes which might have spaces in them with this snip

translate(X, " –.", "")

As you might have guessed, it replaces all the special characters (space, – and . ) with a blank value. In this way “08-40 12 13” and “08401213” matches each other.

Camera Issue on WP7 Actual

When I got around to running my application on an actual device, there were a lot of things which didn’t work as expected. Besides maps, the camera which had worked well before didn’t want to start. All my code was perfect but it still didn’t work. The fix for this was to first deploy code via debug/release and then untether the device. When running the app untethered, you can use the camera just fine. Hope this helps someone