Getting Ready for Free PUG WP Training

Thanks for registering to Pune User Group’s Windows Phone Training event. If you haven’t registered yet, you can visit http://iunlockjoy.cloudapp.net for registration. We do have some seats available.

Attendees need to bring their own laptops for this event. And laptops should meet following requirements.

• Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2 – all editions except Starter Edition OR
• Windows 7 (x86 and x64) – all editions except Starter Edition
• 4 GB of free disk space & 3 GB RAM
• Windows Phone Emulator requires a DirectX 10 or above capable graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver. You can verify that by using dxdiag (in Start -> Run) tool. 
  
  
  
• DAEMON Tools Lite v4.45.2 (with SPTD 1.80) – required to mount ISO files

If you have Visual Studio 2010 already installed, make sure that, you’ve upgraded it with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 BEFORE installing next SDK.

• Microsoft Windows Phone SDK 7.1

Once you download the WP SDK ISO from Microsoft or take it from PUG, please run the setup.exe from mounted ISO. On next screen, read and accept the agreement as shown below:

Once, accepted, on next screen just click on ‘Install Now’ button as I’ve shown here:

Now, it will start installing the tools and SDK on your machine.

After completing the installation, you should get following window:

If you’re very keen to fire-up the development environment, click on “Run the Product Now” button or wait till the training begins.

For extra controls, you may want to download and install Windows Phone Toolkit - Nov 2011 (7.1 SDK). This will give you more controls like listpicker, phonetextbox, etc…. Please find more information on the same link.

For any technical queries related to Windows Phone Application development, post it on PUG’s Mobile and Embedded Forum at: http://www.puneusergroup.org/Forums/ForumView.aspx?pageid=2&mid=23&ItemID=21 and we’ll make sure that those will be addressed.

See you soon at PUG Windows Phone Training Event.

Namaste

Mayur Tendulkar | www.mayurtendulkar.com

PUG Windows Phone Development Training for FREE!

Pune User Group is back in action. This time with a bang. :)

With Microsoft, PUG is hosting 4 days (Saturdays only) training program for working professionals and hobbyists. This training program is absolutely free for all registered applicants. Key points to note are:

• Register to AppHub (http://create.msdn.com) with annual subscription fee $99 or INR4500, which will be REFUNDED (in terms of gift/cash voucher from Microsoft) only after successful submission of 1st application. Note your ISV ID from AppHub account info.
• Register to PUG SIte (http://iunlockjoy.cloudapp.net) and provide your ISV ID.
• Attend free training at ICC Tower, Sanapati Bapat Road, Pune
• Develop Windows Phone application and submit on MarketPlace for testing & certification
• Claim your goodies at iunlockjoy (http://www.iunlockjoy.com) after successful app submission. For Women (1) app and for Professionals (3) apps.

For any queries, please write to iunlockjoy {At} puneusergroup.org or call us, mobile numbers mentioned here: http://iunlockjoy.cloudapp.net/Event/ContactUs

Namaste

Mayur Tendulkar | www.mayurtendulkar.com

Diwali Gift: Sanskrit Shlokas – My Windows Phone App

 

Behind this application, I had two motives.

1. Sanskrit is very old language. This language has priceless collection of Subhashitas & Shlokas, which indeed has a great meaning. Unfortunately in the current era of English as a business language and various languages spoken at different states in India, hard to learn Sanskrit is missing its place. This app is just an attempt to share the great content in this language and keep it alive. This is just a first version, with few Shlokas. However, I’ve already started working on update to this application, which will have more content and more features. There may be some mistakes in the content or the meaning provided in this application. In this case, do write to me on my mail id mayur.tendulkar {at} hotmail.com and I’ll be glad to rectify those errors.
2. I wanted to understand the gotchas in Windows Phone 7 app development and the MarketPlace submission process. And I’m happy that I had a nice experience with this application submission and testing process. Pretty well.

During this application development, I surfed internet for Sanskrit content and I landed up on www.samskrutam.com, which has a great collection of Sanskrit literature. I ‘m really thankful for their content.

I hope, you’ll like this application. Do let me know your feedback on this (positive or negative).

Namaste

Mayur Tendulkar | www.mayurtendulkar.com

Windows 8 Developer Preview Experience

It’s been a while (actually since the day WIN8 was made available for public), since I’m using Windows 8 as my host machine, I mean no Virtual Box, no Hyper-V, direct install and using in day-to-day production use. And I must say, I’m pretty much amazed by this release from Microsoft. In this blog post, I’m going to share my experience with WIN8.

Note: For people, who want to run WIN8 within virtual environment, please read blog post from Kunal Chowdhury at: http://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2011/09/step-by-step-tutorial-to-setup-windows8.html. Also, if you want it to run within Virtual Box, select VHD as hard-disk format, rather than VDI.

• Nice METRO User Interface and built-in social apps:
  Microsoft, introduced METRO UI in WP7 and now, it’s available in WIN8. For sure METRO gives lot more detailed information on home screen rather than traditional iconography. The UI is fluid and fast. It’s intuitive too, very easy to get used to.
  
  
  
  You can find more in-depth information about METRO UI here
• Detailed Information Panes OR Charms:
  In one click, you get detailed information and single point access to many features. For example, Settings charm which gives access to screen brightness, volume and shutdown options
  
   
  
  By the way, as there is no traditional Start Menu, to shut-down the PC, press combination of Win Key + I which will bring Settings charm and there, you’ll see Power button, press it to see different options
  
• Built In Hyper-V Support
  Previously, I needed to install different virtualization solutions to work with virtual PC images e.g. Virtual Box, VMware Player. Hyper-V is great with many nice features, like dynamic memory management and new VHDX virtual hard drive format (Up to 16TB + power failure resiliency). However, it was part of Windows Server System. However, with WIN8, Hyper-V will be available in client operating systems as well. You can enable it from Windows Features
  
  
  
  For more details about Hyper-V in client, read this
• Internet Explorer 10 Preview:
  In above picture, you can see that current build of WIN8 also gives IE10 platform preview, with support for HTML5
• Built-In ISO Mount capability:
  I was dependent on many ISO mounting tools to install software from MSDN subscription downloads, like PowerISO, Daemon Tools or others. And sometimes, after installing these tools, I need to restart the machine to initialize the virtual drives. Now, with WIN8, ISO mounting is built-in. Just right click the ISO and bingo
  
  
  

Apart from that, there are many small features, which actually kind of improves the productivity or makes life simpler.

However, there are glitches with some applications e.g. skype crash. And, I can understand, this is pre-beta software. There are workarounds and it’s just a matter of time. Once WIN8 will RTM, these applications will support the build.

I’m really enjoying this build of Windows. Hope you’ll enjoy it too. To download your own copy of Windows 8 click here

Thanks,

Mayur Tendulkar | http://www.mayurtendulkar.com

Multitasking in Windows Phone 7 [Mango] - Part II

In my previous post, I talked about different ways [or options] to build applications which can do multitasking on Windows Phone [Mango] devices. In this post, we’ll do hands-on on one of the option – PeriodicTask

From MSDN: PeriodicTask inherits from the base classes ScheduledTask and ScheduledAction. It allows applications to perform processing even when the main application is not in the foreground. This class is used for tasks that need to run regularly for a small amount of time and are allowed a very limited amount of device resources.

To create application which will run in background, you’ll need to “host” it via another application of type “Background Agent”. And this involves three steps:

Step 01: Create a normal Windows Phone 7.1 [Mango] Application

In this step, you create a normal WP application, which you want to run in the background. However, keep in mind that few APIs will be unavailable while running your app in the background. More information here Unsupported APIs for Scheduled Tasks for Windows Phone 

Step 02: Create Windows Phone Scheduled Task Agent

Create a new project of type Windows Phone Scheduled Task Agent. It will give you OnInvoke method, which will run the scheduled task and do additional job, which you want to run in the background.

Step 03: Modifications in main application:

In your main application [which you created in Step 01] add reference to this Windows Phone Scheduled Task Agent application, and notice the WMAppManifest file in Properties tab. It’ll have following information embedded:

Now, add a button [button1] to main page and add following code your main application:

Here, you’re creating an object of PeriodicTask and passing agent application as parameter from main application.

That’s it. Now run your application, click on a button to start the background service. On Phone, go to settings > Applications > Background Tasks and there you should be able to see your application running in background:

Now, you can run your application again and see how it’s behaving.

Namaste

Happy Coding

Mayur Tendulkar | www.mayurtendulkar.com