Hello World App in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7

In this section, I will help you to write the widely used “Hello World” application for the Windows Phone. This may seem little bit silly for hard core programmers and non-programmers like. But here the situation is little bit different, we are going to create and compile app in a pc and is deploying and running it in a mobile device or at least an emulator. According to me this simple code serves two purposes, it will help to understand and how easy is to write a text on to the Windows Phone Screen and secondly, it helps us to experience the process of creating, developing, compiling and running a program without too much difficulties.

I will guide you to write the “Hello World”, in both Silverlight and XNA. In most of the cases you will be using XNA for developing games, but I wanted to show that the functionality can be achieved using both technologies.

For writing your first application you need, Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, which includes Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone Emulator and it is a free download from the Microsoft Download Center

Writing the App in Silverlight

Power up Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone from Start Menu or from Desktop.  From the File Menu select New Project -> Visual C# -> Silverlight for Windows Phone from the installed templates. Then from the middle area, choose Window Phone Application. Enter a Name for the project and also the location, if we don’t want to create a directory for the solution, you can uncheck the Create Directory for the Solution.

After clicking Ok button and project will be created with a lot files, which I will explain latter. You will be welcomed by a large screen of windows phone in portrait mode, to be more precise 480 * 800 pixels by far largest screen to this date in phone world.  This is shown in the design view and one can add more controls by dragging and dropping them from the control toolbox. Instead of drag n drop we will write markup for creating the controls. For that we need to switch to markup view and this can be one by clicking any of the icons which may appear to the bottom of your screen.

K-MUG UG Meet on Dec 11, 2010 @ Kochi

This month's usergroup meeting for Central Kerala region will be on Dec 11, 2010 at Mastermind Computer Institute, 2nd Floor, New Kochappilly Building,Near Federal Bank,Civil Line Road,Chembumukku. For event details, click here, and registration for the event can be done here.

Agenda                                                                           

09:30 - 09:40 Community updates

09:40 - 10:30 Introduction to WCF

10:30 - 11:15 Lambda - It's uses and abuses

11:15 - 11:30 Tea Break (15 min)

11:30 - 12:15 Introducing Razor – A new view engine for ASP.NET

12.15 - 01:00 Memory and Resource Leaks in .NET application

Microsoft Releases Platform Preview of IE9

Microsoft released platform preview version of IE9 today and can be downloaded from here. According to Microsoft,  Platform preview version is not a full browser, its intended mainly for web developers  to give a sneak preview on upcoming web platform technologies coming in the next version of the browser. For more FAQ's please visit the IE9 site here.

It also supports side-by-side installation along with IE8, but nothing is mentioned about the side-by-side installation with IE9 beta. So its up to the users  to decide on the installation....

Lifecycle of a Windows Phone 7 App

 

The model for for the entire lifetime of  an application, ie from the launch to the termination is called the Windows Phone Execution Model. Each Application moves through the stages of the life cycle.  The events are 

1) Launch/Start

2) Running

3) Pause/Deactivation

4)Resume/Reactivation

5) Close

 

Launch State
 

A Windows Phone Application is considered to be in a Launch state when it is initiated by a user, either from the list of installed applications or from the tile for the application in Start. When the application is started a Launch event is raised and it’s here we creates a new instance for the app. This event is raised before the application is visible or active. So loading data from isolated storage or performing time consuming tasks are highly discouraged coz it will increase the startup time of the app there by providing a bad user experience. 

Running State
 

Once the app is loaded, then it will be in the running state. In this state, the app keep tracks of its state as the user goes back and forth through the application pages. 

Paused State.
 

This is an interesting state in the lifecycle of an app.  The app enters Deactivated state when it is interrupted by an incoming call or other tasks such as taking a photo or sending an email or even starting another app. Any of these interrupts will cause the Deactivated event to fire. When an app is deactivated the OS will keep a record of the application and stores the state to the isolated storage. MS guys calls this process as TombStoning. 

Reactivated State.
 

When the user comes back to a deactivated or tombstoned app, the application is restored to the point where the user has left the app. There are chances that an user may or may not return to a tombstoned app. This can lead to drainage of the memory and storage space. Inorder to avoid this OS keeps track of long running tombstoned apps and terminates it appropriately so that the phone doesn’t run out on memory and storage.

What is Windows Phone 7

 

Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 7 to the public during the Mobile World Congress 2010 @ Barcelona. During the initial stages, MS developed this one as an upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5, but the developments made by Apple and Google in the mobile arena prompted them to rejig its mobile offering. Then @ MIX 10, they revealed more features and then released the beta toolkit for developers to build applications targeting the  Windows Pone platform. As of writing this post the toolkit has been put to gold and RTM version is now available for download from the Microsoft site. The home page for Windows phone is located here and it contains lots of documentation and code samples.

Snapshot of Windows Phone 

My Session on Windows Phone 7 - Powerpoint Slide

Windows phone 7

View more presentations from amaldevv.

K-MUG UG Meet Nov 13 2010 - A Retro

During the Community Tech Days 2010 held at Kochi, K-MUG decided to conduct monthly user group meeting for Central Kerala region at Kochi. First meeting was conducted on Nov 13, 2010 and the venue was Mastermind Institute of Engineering,  Kakkanad, Kochi. I was given a chance by the K-MUG people to take a session on Windows Phone 7. 

Although I had started making slides and creating some demo applications, last minutes hiccups is unavoidable. The case is no different here, I didn’t wanted any issues to surface during the presentation coz of my unstable development machine, so I decided to demo the application inside a VM. For that I created a new one with Windows 7 64-bit as OS and then went on to install the Windows Phone Developer Toolkit which is a free download from MSDN. Even though I had 3GB memory and a dual core processor, it took a pretty decent time to install. But to my horror, I found out that the application is not loading in the emulator after a successful build. So after googling for a while I was able to get the problem behind that, Windows Phone Emulator will not work properly in a VM. The time was almost midnight and I had to catch the early morning train, so I decided to show it in my machine come what may. 

Next morning I got up early and reached the station in time. During  the journey I decided to go through the ppts and demo applications and made sure that everyone is working fine. I reached Eranakulam around 9.30 and thanks to ever present traffic blocks in Ernakulam, I was late by half an hour in reaching the venue. When I entered the hall, Yanesh was mid-way through his presentation on Test Driven Development and I was unable to listen to his talk coz I was busy with settling down and Safil was waiting for me to have my lap  to show his presentation. Although he had Praseed’s lap as a backup, I handed over mine to him to prepare for the session. By this time Yanesh wrapped his session and I was not able to pay attention. Really missed it, coz I had attended his last session on Generics at CTD Kochi and it was an excellent one.  In the meantime, if someone is wondering who Yanesh is, this is for them. He is a solutions architect with Millennium Consultants who has got 16+ years of experience in designing and developing application using Microsoft Technologies. Please visit the event page to know more about Yanesh .

My Session on Windows Phone 7 - Usergroup meeting @ Kochi on Nov 7, 2010

I am talking about Windows Phone 7 application development at an user group meeting conducted by K-MUG at Kochi on Nov 13,2010. My intention is to give brief description about the history and time line of WP7 and will be demo demonstrating some applications built using the windows phone developer tools targeting the mobile platform. If you are really interested in it, please come and join me on 13th. There are also other sessions on Microsoft Surface, Windows Communication Foundation and Test Driven Development. For more details about the event, please visit the K-MUG events page and registrations can be done from here.

Usergroup meeting @ Kochi on Nov 7, 2010

 

K-MUG has decided to conduct monthly user group meetings across Kerala. So on 7th of November, Kochi will be hosting the meeting for central Kerala region. And, I will be giving a session on Windows Phone 7, also there are couple more people giving sessions on very interesting topics. 

Venue

Mastermind Computer Institute, 

2nd Floor, New Kochappilly Building, 

Near Federal Bank, 

Civil Line Road, 

Chembumukku, 

Cochin-682030

09:15 - 09:30 Community updates
09:30 - 10:30 Test Driven Development
10:30 - 11:15 Microsoft Surface
11:15 - 11:30 Tea Break (15 min)
11:30 - 12:15 Windows Phone 7
12.15 - 01:00 Introduction to WCF 4.0

For more details and info about the speakers, please visit the event page in K-MUG site and registration can be done here.

Community Tech Days Kochi, October 23, 2010 - Part 2

 

For first part, click here

After the session by Raj we had a small tea break, which I normalize utilize to network with similar minded ones. Here, I met a couple of guys who were working on environments as diverse as from Linux to windows to mobile devices. When we were back, Vinod was back on the dais for his presentation on T-SQL tips and tricks. I had attended his session once and his knowledge on sql has amazed me. This time he started with a simple declaration and initialization statement, a new feature in SQL 2008 and showed us the various ways to fine tune it. 

Then he went on to demonstrate the common errors we may make while creating indexes, usage of ISNULL & COALESCE and also the options we may overlook while creating databases. But the one I like the most is the tip to use HIERARCHY_ID to use for sorting the a list of IP addresses. It was a wonderful session, which caused many seasoned people like us in the crowd to take  extra care while playing around with databases and while writing T-SQL scripts. As always time was a constraint here, so he has to cut short his session and invited Shalvin for his session ADO.NET Entity Framework.

Shalvin, a .NET Corporate Trainer and Consultant is regular speaker a K-MUG events. His session was like an hands on session and I felt the need for a laptop, so that I can try it there itself. He started with explaining the advantages an ORM has over the relational model. Then he went to demo a small contact management application which was created using WPF and ADO.NET EF. He showed us how to create a data source, generate ORM mapping and then binding and displaying data in controls such as combo box and datagrid using LINQ. 

He wrapped the session by showing how easy is to maintain a data centric application developed using ADO.NET Entity Framework as it decreases the amount of code needed for CRUD operations and also it is loosely-coupled with the underlying schema, which makes it less error prone to changes made in the database. When Shalvin wounded up the session, everyone went to have lunch, which was a buffet arranged in the back section of the auditorium and the food served matched the expectation of many.

Community Tech Days Kochi, October 23, 2010

K-Mug organized the Kerala edition of the Community Tech Days at Kochi on 23^rd of October 2010. I arrived at Kochi a day before, on 22^nd and stayed at my friend’s place. I started my journey to the venue by boarding a bus bound to Kaloor from Kakkanad and the heavens opened up when I was about to get down from the bus. So I took an auto from the bus stop to the venue, which was behind the international stadium where the cricket match between India and Australia got cancelled recently and in my mind I was little bit worried about these conditions affecting the crowd participation .



I reached the venue around 8.40 AM, welcomed by Sathish, who like me landed at Kochi a day before at the registration desk. Sreeju was busy with finalizing the last minute arrangements and Vinod, Raj, Shalvin and Praseed were doing a last minute check on their presentation. So without wasting much time, I joined Sathish in the registration desk, which was getting busier by each minute. Although rain had played a spoilsport in the morning, it didn’t damaged the participants spirit as they turned up in huge numbers.

Although it was planned to start the event by 09.30 AM,  but delay in completing the registrations meant that the inauguration ceremony started only by 09.45 AM. Sreeju welcomed all the speakers and participants on behalf of K-Mug and then intimated us about the sad demise of Raj, passed away on .. due to an heart attack. He was looking after the academic activities of K-Mug and ever present face in all the activities of K-Mug.  So as a mark of respect Sreeju requested all to observe a minute silence in memory of fallen comrade.  

After that Sreeju went on to give a brief talk about K-Mug and its activities to the audience and then called Vinod on to stage. Vinod, a developer evangelist works with Microsoft Corporation is an expert in SQL Server. He thanked all the participants for making the community a big hit and an active one, which in turn has helped K-Mug to bag the Best Community Impact Award for the year 2010. Vinod then went on to present the trophy on behalf of Microsoft to K-Mug office bearers, led by Sreejumon. 

Community Tech Day - 23rd Oct 2010 - Kochi

K-MUG,one of the most successful technical community in India, is organizing Community Tech Days(CTD) in Kochi on 23rd Oct, 2010

Where
IMA House,
J. N. International Stadium Road,
Palarivattom P.O.,
Cochin, Kerala 

Agenda             

08:45 - 09:15 Registration Confirmation

09:15 - 09:30 Welcome and Community update by Sreejumon & Vinod

09:30 - 10:00 Plunge into Mono by Praseed

10:00 - 11:00 Telerik Productivity Tools by Raj

11:00 - 11:15 Tea Break (15 min)

11.15 - 12:15 T-SQL Tips and Tricks with SQL Server by Vinod

12.15 - 01:00 Entity Framework 4 by Shalvin

01:00 - 01:45 Lunch Break (45 min)

01.45 - 02:45 Security Auditing and Accountability under Windows 2008 by Manu

02:45 - 03:30 NoSQL databases in .NET Apps by Shiju

03:30 - 03:45 Tea Break (15 min)

03:45 - 04:30 Generics - A Revisit by Yanesh

04:30 - 05:15 .NET Serialization And XML by Praseed

05.15 - 05:30 Closing Ceremony

For more details please visit the K-MUG events page .

For registrations, click here or 

if you have a Live ID, then go to Community Tech Days Site 

Internet Explorer 9 Beta - First Impressions

The much anticipated release of the IE 9 beta is out and didn't waste much time in installing it. The first thing caught my attention was the interface. Less congested design with less icons and more screen real estate.

Layout & Interface

 

IE 9 brings significant changes to its layout, the address bar, icons and the tabs now appear in a single row which there by increases the area for the content. Also Reload, Stop, Compatibility buttons appears next to the address bar and the Home, Favorite and Settings button now appear to the right of the screen. These icons are gray in color by default and changes the color when we hover mouse over them. The status bar is turned off by default and I found it bit annoying coz most of the users want to see the progress bar during the loading of a page. 

Another one catches the user attention will be the absence of the address box. This explains why they integrated Bing right into the address bar, so it works either as an address bar or a search bar and Microsoft termed it as "Private OneBox".

Visual Studio LightSwitch Architecture

What is Visual Studio LightSwitch ?

Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new rapid application development tool from Microsoft for building business applications with less emphasis on coding. It helps to simplify development process, coz it lets you to concentrate on the business logic and does a lot of remaining work for you. LightSwitch applications can be desktop based giving them the ability to interact with hardware devices such as card readers, scanners etc or browser based applications which helps to attain a greater reach. Since LightSwitch applications are created using Silverlight and .Net based n-tier architecture, there will be little change in the look and feel and behavior of both desktop based ones and web based ones.

Visual Studio  LightSwitch offers a wide range of pre-built templates and tools to build business application that target Windows Client and Windows Azure. It also helps domain experts to build applications by concentrating on developing business logic, with little focus on writing code. Every business application will have common features such as searching, sorting, rearranging grids, ability to export data etc. With applications developed using LightSwitch these kind of features are already built in. Common data operations such as adding, updating, saving, deleting are also built in and it provides basic validation logic.

Architecture Overview

Most of the business applications are based on n-tier framework and among them the 3-tier architecture is widely used. Typical 3-tier architecture will look like as given below.

The presentation layer is the top most level of the framework, interacts with the end users, ie where the information is captured. It acts as a bridge between the application and the end users. The Business Layer coordinates the application, processes commands, making logical decisions and evaluations, and performs calculations. It also moves and processes data between the two surrounding layers. The Data Layer manages the storage and retrieval of information from data sources such as database or a file system . The information is then passed to the logic tier for processing, and then eventually back to the user. Designing and developing a new 3-tier architecture from scratch is tedious and time consuming. Many factors such as communication between the layers, technology to be used, system design, security etc needs to be factored in. But LightSwitch frees developer from making these decisions by making specific technology choices for you.

In a whole , presentation layer in a LightSwitch application can be a Silverlight 4.0 application,  which can run as windows as well as a web application. The data layer can be thought as a set of WCF RIA Domain services running in ASP.NET 4.0 and can be hosted locally or on an IIS Server or in a Windows Azure Web Role. The data layer uses SQL Server or SQL Azure as primary data storage and can consume data from existing SharePoint 2010 lists,  databases accessible via EDM provider and custom build WCF RIA Domain Services.

With inputs from Visual Studio Light Switch Team Blog

More resources can be found @
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2010/08/03/announcing-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff852064.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jasonz/archive/2010/08/03/introducing-microsoft-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bethmassi/archive/2010/08/03/rapid-business-application-development-with-visual-studio-lightswitch.aspx

DevCon 2010 Part 2 @ Technopark, Trivandrum on Saturday, Sept 4th

 

Second part of DevCon 2010 will be conducted at the Park Centre in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday, September 4th. The itinerary is given below.

08:30AM – 09:30AM – Registration Confirmation
09:30AM – 10:30AM – Functional programing with F#
10:30AM – 11:30AM – Power Shell – Your Wish is my Command
11:30AM – 11:45AM – Tea Break
11:45AM – 12:30PM – Visual Studio 2010 tips
12:30PM – 01:15PM – ASP.NET MVC2
01:15PM – 02:00PM – Lunch
02:00PM – 02:45PM – Great Developer Contest – Final
02:45PM – 03:45PM – Office Addins with Visual Studio 2010
03:45PM – 04:30PM – Entity Framework 4
04:30PM – 05:00PM – Closing Ceremony

The event is hosted by K-MUG, one of the most successful technical community in India and registration for the event can be done from here. More details about the event is available here.

DevCon 2010

DevCon 2010 was organized by K-MUG in association with Microsoft, Nokia, eSoft, KelNet. It was expected to be the largest gathering of software engineers in Kerala who are working on Microsoft technologies and it pretty much matched the pre-event euphoria.

As a volunteer my day started very early by setting up the registration desk,  last minute tweaks in the dais and setting up camera for live streaming. At first we were unable to do live streaming  due to unavailability of the internet connection, but by the time Anoop's started taking his session we solved the problems and was streaming live from then on.

As clocked ticked to 9.30, Sreejumon opened the event by welcoming the speakers and delegates to the function. We got a mixed response and the hall was more than half filled with audience ranging from budding young students to seasoned veterans. 

The Sessions were kick started by Janakiram MSV, a Technical Architect with Microsoft Technologies and whose focus is on cloud computing offerings from Microsoft, including the Windows Azure platform. His blog can be found at http://www.janakiramm.net. He started his session, "Cloud – The Meta Platform" by explaining what actually is cloud and how it got the name and then on to its underlying architecture and then to the Windows Azure architecture. He then went on to explain how Windows Azure works and it's pay per usage business structure and  in his second session, which occured later in the day, he gave a live demo of building and hosting an web application in Azure platform.  For More details on Windows Azure click here.

Jani talking about Windows Azure

Next man on the dais was Anoop Madhusoodhanan aka "amazedsaint", a Solution Architect and a Microsoft MVP in Client App Development. His talk was on the latest features in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. He went on to show the new features in VS 2010 such as intellitrace, parallel programming capablities, pinning the quick watch window etc. Then he explained the new features in .NET 4.0 such as Managed Extensibility Framework, dynamic programming capablities etc. For more these please visit his blog @ http://amazedsaint.blogspot.com/