Over at the weekend, I went to the Windows Phone 7 workshop, the first one of four in the following weeks hosted by AppaMundi who create several WP7 applications Like Where’s My Car? & AppaTraffic.
The turnout wasn’t too bad, and it seemed pretty relaxing, and my friend and I really just got on with making the application, and they were at hand in helping out with Pete Vickers at our table.
We were given lots of free stuff including $299 worth of Mindscape controls http://www.mindscapehq.com/store?p=phone%20elements courtesy of AppaMundi, and many prize draws were done including a free XBox 360 with Kinect controller, books and phone cases. If you request this, I can supply the code for you.
I predominately spent the time setting up Zune, and was unfortunately that whilst the phone was downloading the updates, it crashed, and the only resolution was to reinstall Zune as I tried the phone on Pete’s computer and it had worked.
I was also running the WP7 Geolocation Emulator, which i eventually got working by supplying some sample data and using an external CS file that hardcoded the geolocation points, but wanted to test this live on my phone, which using Zune was the obstacle.
A useful thing I learnt was that GeoLocation API relied heaviliy on event handlers, and you can change to optimise the location accuracy of your GPS detection via the code below: -
This also allowed you to pinpoint and write the latitude and longitude of your geo location onto a text box.
After reinstalling Zune, the phone detection worked but I realised you needed a developer account registered to the phone (sigh!), I will discuss this further in a later blog.
Mike Ormond even discussed standard guidelines on how to publish your WP7 application successfully on the market, and the do’s and dont’s of what to do.
After lunch, I worked predominately on layouts and databinding for my first that i am going to create which is a weather forecaster but will extend this capability to do more things. What I had found trouble was setting up the databinding to see the text in the designer view of the XAML code and spent several hours trying to find this out, eventually Pete had mentioed to use the templates in the Startup box of Windows Mobile 7 templates called the DataBinding, and in there you can actually hardcode an example data XAML file into the header of the main XAML page, and it worked!
Despite a very long train journey back with major delays to London due to a rare fatality in Wembley, causing most trains to be delayed for an hour and a half. I did find the event really useful and would like to go again next weekend at London.
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