Today, I went to the WPUG (Windows Phone User Group) event for the first time ever in a place called the Juno Bar along Shoreditch High Street after work, before this I did not know that a user group community existing for Windows Phone 7 until I stumbled upon www.wpug.net.
I was not to be disappointed, the event went very well indeed despite the location being in the underground floor of the bar with little seating, there was a bar so it made you feel relaxed. I was a the back of the room for a bit, and having asked the people at the back where there was a large free seat, it was much to the bemusement that once i sat on it, i couldn’t see a damn thing of the projector screen. I realised that the guys at the back were the organisers of the event headed by Rob Lyndon, and the guy I briefly sat next to on the forbidden leather chair was actually Derek Lakin (@dereklakin). Although a bit reluctant to go right at the front as the sound wasn’t that great but i did managed to grab a free beer at break.
Eventually after the break I did get a free seat, and the discussion was about developing a WP7 application using Expression Blend given by Sam Bourton (@sambourton). The talk was fairly detailed, and having not used Blend before, I was surprised how easy it was to create icons and animations that worked well with the WP7 application. He talked in detail about control templates that used UI elements to display a control, setting animations for things like buttons, and had set timelines and recorded these changes using the properties of the object like widening the circular icon a bit more when pressed. I especially liked the fluid layout animations which make changing screens or in this case, viewing user details from the side menu in to the main screen look impressive! It involved exposing XAML objects via adding objects look more interesting via these.
During the breaks, I did managed to speak to people who have made applications before, this guy who had made Free Wikipedia showed me how he integrated the Wikipedia API and the localisation API using Google Translate into his app, and how long it took to submit each of the languages into the marketplace in Microsoft but it had paid off in the end. It is currently free, and I have downloaded it, which works like Wikipedia.
The most impressive application demo was made by Derek Lakin, who showed his RunKeeper application that recorded your heart rate and running paths anywhere, what was most impressive was that you can resume back to the recording of your run after a phone call or clicking the menu, as well as his own use of the GPS tracking location using Bing Maps.
Afterwards, the final talk was given by Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz), who developed as part of an independent development team an application called Cocktail Flow http://cocktailflow.com/ which shows you the various cocktails and their recipes. Heinterestingly gave a talk about improve performance with WP7, and talked about various hints and tips to improve the speed of your application, here are the summary: -
Don’t use Listbox, as this is a very resource demanding UI.
Binary Serialisation is much quicker than DataContract Serialisation, although it needs more work to set up, it is much quicker to load.
http://mobile.dzone.com/news/wp7-understanding
Don’t use ProgressBar tool as that its by far the worst consuming resource UI, use alternatives.
Reuse animation objects if you can rather than clearing the screen, as it uses less memory.
Use bitmap caching images (bmp) than png, as they load up quicker!
He even gave out a free license to a knowledgable developer as a freebie of the software Telerik as I believe he was sponsored closely by the company.
All in all, I really enjoyed the event, it was relaxed as well as an informative event which talked a lot about WP7, and slides and code are up on the web www.wpug.net, I would be mostly likely to go again next month.
