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MIX11: Day 2

Today was a really interesting day, with lots of new stuff being announced and sessions packed with interesting information. These are my findings of this day. Keynote (Joe Belfiore, Scott Guthrie) The keynote started off with an inspiring viral video. It appears a fan of Windows Phone created it by request of Microsoft after he created his own viral out of love of the phone. If the viral gets over 200k of views on YouTube, it is turned into a real commercial.

Thursday, April 14, 2011 Read

MIX11: Day 1

Today was the first conference day and my second day at MIX11. The day began with a keynote and after that a couple of sessions. These are my findings of today. Keynote (Dean Hachamovitch, Scott Guthrie) Dean started off with looking back at the development of IE9 and how successful is has been so far. Then he announced that they’re already three weeks into development of IE10, which didn’t come as a surprise looking at the shirt he was wearing with a bit TEN on it with the ‘E’ being the IE logo.

Wednesday, April 13, 2011 Read

MIX11: Boot Camps

Today was the preconference day at MIX11, which means boot camps for everyone that applied for them. There were options for the morning and afternoon boot camps and I chose the Silverlight and SharePoint & Silverlight boot camps. This is a brief summary of what I think were things of interest. Silverlight boot camp I didn’t came to this boot camp to improve my knowledge on Silverlight, but more because of the speakers: John Papa and Mike Taulty.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011 Read

Advanced MVVM: Doing visual states properly

An important plus of rich internet applications is the potential user experience you can achieve by applying UX patterns. A part of this is the visual states and their transitions. A visual state determines what the user interface looks like at a certain point in time and the transitions describe how the application moves from one visual state to the other, many times using animations to enhance the experience. The most obvious way when you’re unfamiliar with XAML is to change the visual state of an application by writing code to show or hide controls when events occur, like e.

Monday, March 14, 2011 Read

Using the Sync Framework on Windows Phone 7

For a mobile platform, like Windows Phone 7, you may be required to allow an application to work even when there’s no data connection available. Doing so is not that easy. You need to manage state locally, synchronize changed data (one-way or duplex) and maybe even handle conflicts. Luckily Microsoft offers the Sync Framework which makes it easier for you to accomplish this by taking much of the required plumbing out of your hands completely.

Friday, January 21, 2011 Read

Building a location aware Windows Phone 7 application

The Windows Phone 7 SDK contains a couple of APIs for interacting with different parts of the phone hardware, like accessing the camera or initiating a phone call. One of the cool APIs of Windows Phone 7 is the Location API. Just as in the desktop version of .NET Framework 4.0, the Location API enables you to get the approximate location of the user. To find the location of the user, the API uses GPS, WiFi or cell tower triangulation, where the first is the most and the latter least accurate.

Monday, December 6, 2010 Read

WCF RIA Services OData endpoint does NOT support update or LINQ

After struggling with WCF RIA Services v1 (Silverlight 4 RTM) to enable insert/update for the OData endpoint for use with Windows Phone 7, I finally figured it out. The current version of WCF RIA Services does NOT support update or LINQ! I think I searched for a couple of hours until I found the single line of information on this in this following Silverlight TV post: NOTE: The ODATA endpoint has very limited support in V1.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010 Read

MCE Guide Editor source code

I got a few requests for the source code of MCE Guide Editor. I once started working on a new release of it and during the process I discovered that the solution I chose wasn’t going to work. This meant I didn’t have the source of the working version of the tool. What I did was disassemble the executable. I’m currently working on a Windows 7 PC, so I wasn’t able to compile the disassembled code because I’m missing the ehome dll.

Wednesday, January 28, 2009 Read

Honk twice if you see us!

Today I witnessed the arrival of eight Avanade branded Fiat 500 cars. They arrived in a single line in front of our main office, where they stand now. The orange / black color combination draws a lot of attention and enthousiasm. Together with the branding and racing stripes they form the perfect car for our core services team. Secretly, in our hearts, the customer facing employees, driving our big luxurous lease cars, would die to drive one of these babies ourselves.

Friday, November 28, 2008 Read

Building Vista Media Center Add-ins (Dutch)

It’s been a while since I wrote an article on developing Vista Media Center Add-ins. A month ago the article was published in the Dutch .Net Magazine and today I found the digital version is available as well. In the article I demonstrate how to use the Viddler.com API to get a list of videos and display them in your add-in. The goal was to build a player for Viddler.com videos, but unfortunately the API method for getting the raw video is still not available.

Monday, November 24, 2008 Read

Day 0: arrived in LA

Yesterday afternoon we (my collegues and I) arrived in LA. Purpose of visit: the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference 2008 (PDC’08). It promises to be a very interesting week with a lot of new stuff from Microsoft, including Windows 7, ‘Oslo’ and ‘Dublin’. After arrival we checked into our rooms, grabbed a slice of pizza, had a drink and went to bed. We tried to join the party by Jeffrey Pallermo, but the waiting time was about 40 minutes and we heard there was no more beer (no problem for me as non-alcohol drinking person, but some of my collegues seemed to mind :)).

Monday, October 27, 2008 Read

Consume WCF service using Sharepoint Designer

By default the SharePoint Designer is unable to consume WCF services because it fails to recognize the structure of the request messages. There is a workaround if you still need to consume WCF services using the Designer. However, this does not work via the datasource wizard but instead requires some manual intervention. There are two methods to do accomplish this: Modify the datasource Modify the code in the page The first method is easier to implement and gives you more control over the output.

Thursday, October 23, 2008 Read