WP7 Today and Tomorrow

Developer Economics recently published their bi-annual report on the smartphone world. There were some interesting tidbits that I wanted to look closer at. Especially those related to Windows Phone 7. For the full report, go HERE 

Exposing properties in Expression Blend

I work a lot in Microsoft Expression Blend. If you do any Silverlight or WP7 development, you should too. A problem I’ve had lately is when creating a large number of User Controls. I don’t want them to contain the same content, but since they’re custom controls, there is no field for these settings in Blend.

Wild predictions for MIX11

As I mentioned before, I’ll be attending the glorious MIX conference for the second year in a row this April. Last year, Microsoft showed off IE9 and Windows Phone 7 for the first time, and good times were had by all. This year, we could either see a more timid year with more focus on sessions, or an even more astounding show than the last. Beneath are some of my wild and baseless predictions.

Using WP7 accent color effectively

All Windows Phone 7 devices ship with ten different accent colors (mine’s orange of course). I’d like to show a few good ways to use this in XAML and runtime-code to get better looking apps.

Click below to read more…

Multitasking on Windows Phone 7

I’ve been receiving some questions from Avanade employees and people on twitter about how multi-tasking works on Windows Phone 7. Since this is also one of the topics I skipped over in my presentation at Nordtech, I’ll cover it here.

Many tasks, little time

WP7 has copy and paste

Just as the title says, Joe Belfiore just announced that copy and paste will be available for WP7 in early 2011. How useful this will actually be is another question. I almost never use cut and paste on my iPhone, but it’s nice to hear that Microsoft is listening. Now getting Silverlight in the browser should be the next step. It felt kind of dumb not being able to watch the press conference on my WP7 phone because it was broadcasted in Silverlight.

Nordtech wrap up

The annual Nordic Avanade conference was this weekend. I’m just returning from it with a few good takeaways. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, heard a few good ideas, a few bad ideas and eaten a LOT of salmon.

We stayed at a hotel/funland in Sarpsborg, Norway. After much struggling, I managed to pull my session on WP7 together fairly well. It generated the most interest of any session during the conference and we actually had to add chairs in the room to seat enough people. I also got to familiarize myself with the WP7 platform a little better. I like how I often find new little things which I enjoy. The demos I showed went very well and I hope I’ll be able to post at least a few of them online soon.

A final note on life in Norway, shit ain’t cheap. Everything was priced like in Sweden, only with the much stronger currency Norway uses. The cab prizes were truly Kafkaesque. Due to the lack of buses on the weekend, a few other people and I had to take a taxi to the airport (which was 90 kilometers / 60 miles) away. The final fare was over FIVE THOUSAND NOK! That’s almost a thousand US dollars for anyone who’s counting. Norway truly has taken the throne over Sweden and Japan as the most expensive country in the world.

Source: http://bigmacindex.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/2010-Big-Mac-Index.jpg

WP7 Talks Back to Me

After receiving the Windows Phone 7 device I’ll be using in tomorrow’s presentation, I decided to try out the basic functionalities of the device. I tried calling my girlfriend by using the voice command “Call Caroline”. A woman’s voice asked me; “Caroline, home or mobile?”, I answered that I wanted to call her mobile. The phone-woman then said in a snarky tone: “Next time, you could just say, Call Caroline Mobile”. I wasn’t used to my phone talking back to me. Feels a bit Animatrix/Bladerunner. I’d better sleep with one eye open.

Words

I’m putting the final touches to my presentation on Saturday.

“… This is one of the benefits of a standardized platform in combination with cloud services. When we know what to expect from the platform, we can expect even more from the applications we create for it.”

I feel like a god damned poet.

My day with WP7 (pictures)

I spent an afternoon at Microsoft a few weeks ago trying out the code I’ve written. We were among the first in Sweden to run actual code on a live device. It was choppy, but it worked. I’m posting the censored pics here. I have a few videos which I hope to be able to share some day.