Our stint with Windows Phone 7

I have been pondering around developing mobile apps for long. When I attended John Baird's session on Windows Phone 7 at the Central Penn .NET User Group, I knew this was the time. I pinged my geek friend Rajeev Venkitaraman and we talked about this a little bit. He also got excited, but we needed more brain washing :)

I had already been dwelling into Silverlight and XAML at my free time, and I was quite confident in doing the WP7 development. We attended the MVVM session by Miguel Castro at Microsoft's Malvern (PA) office and John  Baird's WP7 session (again) at Philly Code Camp. Their enthusiasm were contagious. We couldn't wait further.

After 2 days, we met and talked about various ideas. We came into creating apps for kids - kids who are beginning to learn. Shapes, alphabets, numbers and what not... We made 2 apps, one for Shapes and another for Alphabets. Both are being tested...


We are quite excited on this new adventure...

I will keep everyone posted on our trips, tricks, successes and failures...

What I have been upto

I haven't been blogging much lately... just posting activity updates of our .NET User Group. What I have been upto?  I have been:

• Learning Silverlight
• I have made several attempts to learn SL in the past, but for some obvious and not-so obvious reasons, I had to drop it. The obvious reason was for the fact that SL was not "enterprise" ready. But this time, I have had it all sorted out. With the SL4.0 being out, and Windows Phone 7 supporting SL4.0 development, it made quite sense (yes, I am not out of it yet :)) to get into the SL bandwagon (is there one?). I am reading mainly from the Wrox book and from the blogs around.
• Learning C#
• Ha.... I have been a VB(.NET) guy for long. I still am. But the world does not seem friendly enough to VB.NET developers. Almost all the articles that I read are of C#. I read C# pretty fluently, but my coding skills are still immature when it comes to this language. There is one truth that we VB.NET developers do not like to admit - C# is (going to be) the de-facto language of .NET. In my travel around the blogosphere and the web, I see more and more applications being written in C#. I have decided to break the barrier and learn it and make it my primary language of choice.
• Learning MVVM
• If you know Silverlight, it is understood that you know MVVM (Model View ViewModel) also. They go along so well. This became more and more clear when I attended the Get DevReady with MVVM session by Miguel Castro at Malvern PA. I am reading Josh Smith's article as my primary resource.

So, all the three at the same time. Hmmm... its fun! :)

On the side, I am developing an app in SL4.0, to apply what I have learned. Every week I try to do something with what I learn. This is a slow process for now, but I am getting there...  The world of XAML is pretty wonderful... As I said before, it makes easy things hard and hard things easier.

Expect more Silverlight related posts.... yeah... coming soon!

Windows Phone presentation

It was an amazing evening this tuesday. John started of with this statement: Silverlight (and WPF for that matter) makes easy things harder and hard things easier.
It couldn't have been explained better.

Windows Phone 7 Development

.NET developers are very much excited with the release of Windows Phone 7. The users like it's interface as much as they hate (that's a strong word, I know. Read it as "dislike") the 6.x version.


John Baird is coming to Harrisburg (once again), for his much awaited presentation on Windows Phone 7 development.

I have known John for quite a long time. I have attended his presentations in Central Penn .NET User Group meetings and code camps. He is one speaker with deep technical accumen and know the audience's nerve.

If you are in Harrisburg on January 18th, have a nice evening with John Baird and his Windows Phone 7 development slides. You will thank me for sure!

You can find more details on the event in http://www.central-penn.net/.

UPDATE:
The meeting has been postponed to the month of February 15th, due to the inclement weather forecast on 18th Jan.

Circus with DataPager and ListView

I have been playing with ListView and DataPager a lot lately. One reason is I have read a quite lot on these controls and thought very high of it. The combination gives us a light weight data control with Pagination facility. What more can you ask for, right?

To a vanilla page (with no gimmicks), these controls behave very nice. But once, you start your circus, they don't bend.

The magic of pagination lies in PageDataPropertiesChange() event of the ListView control. This is the event where you set the next page number properties to retrieve the next set of data. Whenever you click on a page number (which is rendered by the DataPager control), the PageDataPropertiesChange() event gets triggered.


One scenario I had was with a ListView control, the controls of which I wanted to change dynamically, particularly on ItemDataBound event. But, every time any control changes in ListView Item, the PageDataPropertiesChange() gets hit! So, pagination happens even before I hit the page numbers in the DataPager control. And that was my problem, and which it took some time to figure it out. Particularly after a heavy dose of Indian Bread and Tuna curry! :)

So there was no way out. I needed the dynamic behaviour of ListView and the pagination wouldn't budge.

After lot of googling around, I had to succumb. I split  up the pages, which I am not still happy about.

The one thing I don't understand, why would a ListView event get hit when the DataPager control is shaken?

If you know of any tricks, please pass me on.

ABCs of WCF - Coming Soon

This year, our user group had very few topics for novices. The only ones we had were run by our President, Judy Calla.

I would be presenting a beginner's session on WCF on November 16th - yes, that Whys and the Whats. And of course, the Hows! :)

If you are from Harrisburg or would be visiting during the month, come on in and join for a fun filled 2 hours of WCF.

Code Camp 2010 - Another Milestone

I should thank all the speakers who participated in our code camp and made it a successful one. The participants (attendees) had a full day of technical infotainment and had absolutely enjoyed.

Raffle books at the code camp

Code Camp 2010 has become another golden feather on our user group's hat. Many kudos go to the organisers who made it possible and Judy Calla, our President, who lead us to a heart-filling day.