Links for South Florida Code Camp Presentation
Link to source code and slides:
http://new.efficientcoder.net/2011/10/windows-phone-and-kinect-playing.html
Link to Video:
http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Kinnect-and-Windows-Phone-Playing-Together
-twb
On Feburary 16, 2012, we will have our first annual meeting of the “Southern Most User Group Dev” or “SMUG Dev” in Key West Florida. This is timed to coincide with the South Florida Code Camp in Ft. Lauderdale.
Here’s a rough schedule of the full day events:
Speakers:
Nikita Polyakov, Local Developers
Topics:
1) “Radical Change in how we consume software”
2) “What it’s like to develop software in paradise (by Local Developers)
Location:
Katie’s Cottage
Ambrosia Key West Tropical Logging
622 Fleming St.
Key West FL
Adult Beverages and light snacks will be provided sponsored by Software Logistics, LLC
9:00 PM - ?? – Activities on Duval Street, potentially involving adult beverages.
For more information and if you plan on attending contact Kevin D. Wolf kevinw@software-logistics.com or sign up at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2556380202
Hope to see you all there!
-twb
In 2012 I’ve again been awarded an MVP as a Windows Phone Development professional.
The last few months of 2011 have been very busy with client commitments and it looks like both January and February will be as well. Once I meet my commitments, I’m going to be turning my focus to figuring out a real-world strategy for the vision Microsoft has been projecting for the past few years “3 Screens and the Cloud”. With a hopeful beta of Windows 8 sometime in the first half of the year, Windows Phone 7.5 and the latest XBox 360 dashboard update there are a lot of things are going to be converging to create an eco-system like no other. My focus will remain on mobile devices, however having the software we build provide a cohesive experience across all the three delivery platforms with the cloud as a common denominator makes things very interesting.
Also, I have very high hopes for Windows Phone this year, especially after looking at upgrading my HTC HD7 to an HTC Radar on the T-Mobile Site. It was very interesting to see the ratings on the phones. First up was the Samsung Galaxy S II with a whopping 9 reviews. Then a Blackberry with two whole reviews, a couple of SIM cards which we can throw out but then the HTC Radar with 106 reviews and as you can see they are almost all 5 stars. So not only a very high review but a considerable number of folks are buying the devices!
Until we meet again!
-twb
I recently upgraded laptops, it has a dedicated AMD/ATI graphics card as well as an Integrated HD graphics adapter. After getting it all setup I tried to work on a Windows Phone app. Everything went fine but when I started the app on the emulator after the initial “Windows Phone” … “Loading” screen, the screen went blank as shown below
After putting this out to a mailing list I’m on I received good feedback from Rob Miles and Den Delimarsky that the issue might be this sort of dual graphics adapter configuration.
After a little bit of searching, I found a mechanism within the Catalyst Control Center where I could assign different modes to different applications.
So after finding XdeLauncher.exe at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\XDE Launcher I configured it to use the Power Saving graphics processor and life is good again (i.e. my emulator works great! 
) .
-twb
Attached you can find my materials for my Windows Phone Developer talk
If you are building a Windows Phone 7 App, you should be aware that if your application uses more than 90MB of RAM it will get rejected from the marketplace. One easy way to check how much RAM your application is using is to add Peter Torr’s most excellent memory counter. It adds an additional counter to your app. You know, those counters…those funny little numbers on the right to your application when you run it in the debugger.
Anyway, check out Peter’s post, and while you are there, you might as well subscribe to his blog…
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ptorr/archive/2010/10/30/that-memory-thing-i-promised-you.aspx
Peter is a great asset to Microsoft and works on the Windows Phone 7 Platform Development Team.
-twb
This Quick Tip was stolen for DevFish’s TackleBox app. I wanted to put some configuration data into my application to be picked up at runtime. For this approach Isolated Storage didn’t make a lot of sense. This data was stored as a simple text file, but it could be an XML document, JSON or even and image. I just needed to get my hands on the content of the files and do something with it. After fixing the bugs in Joe’s code, I found you can access these files with the following code snippet:
Where the file name that is passed in will be the full name of the file. In our case we would pass in something like Manifest.txt.
One very important note: Even though you are calling Application.GetResourceStream, you MUST specify that your content type is of type Content. This will make sure the file gets packaged up and included with your XAP and not compiled into your binary.
-twb
