New App Hub Features Still Need Work

The July 18 Marketplace updates look like they still need some tweaking. I updated one of my apps and set the publish status to “hide” after certification. After app certification approval, for  some reason, it showed an update to the app on my phone (doesn’t seem hidden to me). I updated the app to the new version, and the splash screen was updated, but the icons were not updated and the application just showed a “My Application” header at the top of the page with no app content at all.

I thought maybe that was the result of the “Hide” status. So I un-hid the app in the marketplace. It didn’t prompt another update so I uninstalled the app from my phone. When I searched in the marketplace for my app to reinstall, it could not be found.

In order to reinstall the app, I had to navigate to my Lean Bites website on my phone and click the Zune Marketplace deep link in the right column of the website. After following that procedure, the app installed and is working correctly again with the new updated version.

I hope Microsoft gets these issues worked out before the consumer frustration gets to a new high and it doesn’t make my app look like it’s the problem. With so much riding on the new Windows Phone platform, it is unfortunate to see them stumbling over issues that probably should have surfaced in beta testing.

Creating a Windows Phone 7 app using WCF, and SQL Azure

Last night I gave a presentation with demos for fwPASS creating a Windows 7 app displaying a list of gymnasts from a SQL Azure database using WCF (Windows Communication Foundation). The WCF service used the Entity Framework and the .Net Membership provider.

Windows phone 7, WCF, and SQL Azure

View more presentations from Dean Willson

The application was surprisingly easy to create despite the fact that were a lot of moving pieces with integration between all the different components.

The presentation covered the following tools:

• Windows Phone Marketplace App Hub 
• Visual Studio IDE
• SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
• Windows Azure Platform Management Portal
• SQL Azure Migration Wizard
• Windows Phone 7 Emulator

 

All that in 70 minutes. Yes, I talk fast. This was a first time presentation. Below is the demo script I used:

Marketplace

1. Preview App Hub http://create.msdn.com

· Show app details text, iconography

Database

1. SSMS – show local ChalkChimp database

· Show script for creating additional users?

2. http://windows.azure.com SQL management interface

· No query designer

3. SQL Azure Migration tool

· Scripts out db

· Shows unsupported features

· deploys

4. Azure limitations in SSMS

· No query designer

· Admin account (other users don’t have access to the master database)

WCF

1. Create new project WCF Application

· Highlight Framework version 3.5

· Change binding to basicHTTPBinding

2. New Item à ADO.Net Entity

· Azure connection

3. Switch to finished project

4. Modify Iservice.cs, modify Service.cs implementation

5. Show .Net membership bits in web.config

6. View in browser (copy url)

WP7 client

1. Open Visual Studio (another)

2. New Project à Windows Phone 7 application

3. New item à Phone portrait page

4. Add Service reference

· Show service methods

· Advanced show generate async methods

5. Switch to finished project

· Show xaml bindings

· Show async methods and completed event handlers

· switch device to emulator

6. Run it

Optional

· Show property pages and iconography

 

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone 7,WP7,WCF,Silverlight,SQL Azure

Download for WP7 Badges

Since I never seem to remember where to find the official "Download for Windows Phone 7" Badge and Logos, here is my reminder http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=202116.

Submitting an AppMakr app to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

I made a Windows Phone 7 app using AppMakr for reading Lean-related content from prominent Lean bloggers. That was easy, but there didn’t appear to be any instructions for how to get the app added to the App Hub. So here they are.

Log into your AppMakr account. There are a number of ways to get to your build. Either click the “App Builds” link in the top navigation or click the “Builds” button on one of your applications (as shown in the image below).

Pick the latest build that you want to submit to the marketplace and click the Download App button.

You will be presented with a dialog to open or save the zip file. Choose to save it to a location on your PC.

Important: Rename the file extension from .zip to .xap (which is the Silverlight application package deployment file). You will have to create the necessary Windows Phone 7 iconography (icons and screenshots needed for submitting to the app hub). You may be able to use some of the ones you used to create the application in AppMakr.

You will need an App Hub Developer account to submit applications to the Windows Marketplace ($99/year). After you have that, log in and from the “my dashboard” navigation link, select “Windows Phone”.

Click the “submit new app” button.

Fill out the form fields. Click inside the Application package box with the Plus (+) sign. A file open dialog will appear. Select the .xap file that you renamed after downloading from AppMakr earlier.

Continue through the process of providing an application description and uploading the necessary icon images. After you finish, sit back and wait for your app to go through the testing and certification process.

 

Technorati Tags: Windows Phone 7,WP7,AppMakr

Switching to C#

After more than 7 years of VB.Net development, I have made the conscious decision to split my development into primarily VB.Net for most of my ASP.Net projects and C# for my Windows Phone 7, Silverlight, and WPF work. This transition was due to three primary driving forces:

• Early Windows Phone 7 development (pre-RTM) was limited to C# due to the lack of availability for VB.Net support on the WP7 platform.
• There appears to be a larger codebase of Silverlight and WP7 utilities, samples, and tutorials in C# to learn from.
• I have had an easier time finding advanced Linq syntax examples in C#.

The syntax differences are not much different. I was already used to the most common syntactic differences, such as parenthesis, squiggly brackets, and semi-colons from my earlier work in PHP and Java. I would have started in C# if it were not for the Classic ASP and VB.Net applications I was supporting years ago in my .Net 1.1 beginnings.

Of course, the language selection is always trumped by complying with my clients’ corporate development standards and selecting the appropriate language for the job where the differences are relevant.

photo credit: avlxyz / CC BY-SA 2.0

Lessons Learned in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

The following are a few of the things I learned during the development process and submitting a first application to the Windows Phone Market Place. Hopefully they can be of some help to others.

Application Name

If your application name is more than about 15 characters, the whole application name may be truncated on the various WP7 screens. This is also true in the thumbnail view in the Market Place. Note how the text fades to white toward the right side of the name in the screenshot below.

Iconography

Graphic design in the consumer market space is a necessity. Your icons are displayed immediately adjacent to other professional designs - regardless of app quality.

Application Icons

Initially I created a 31px application icon. I think that was the size used during the RC or beta version of Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 7. The following are the default icon sizes for Windows Phone 7 application certification:

• ApplicationIcon.png 62px (transparency allowed)
• Background.png* 173px (transparent allowed)

* Tip: don’t put the application name in this image (or any important cosmetic detail at the bottom) as the Application title text from the Visual Studio property page will be rendered on top of the 173px icon near the bottom of the image (see the “Start Screen” in the screen shot below).

The following is a composite image containing multiple screen shots:

• Phone Windows menu screen (left)
• Visual Studio project properties, application tab (center)
• Phone Start screen (right)

Note in the image where the text is displayed and which images are used on the various app screens. Click the image for full size.

Market Place Icons

The following square icons (without transparency) are required for display in the Market Place:

• 99px
• 173px
• 200px

WP7 application screen shots can be uploaded to showcase key functionality.

• 480 x 800px screenshots
• vertical orientation for upload
• set zoom level on emulator to 100% for correct screenshot resolution (need a high enough resolution monitor to capture the screenshots. 1024X768 is not good enough)

Marketplace Detailed description

I copied my description from a website where the application is described. I’m not sure I would do that in the future as it did not display properly on the app hub submission page (note the incorrect text wrapping at the end of the lines. There doesn’t appear to be an option to edit the description without re-submitting the application.

I was pleasantly surprised the text looked correct when my application was certified as approved, but I don’t know if the person testing the app corrected the description text formatting during prior to approval/publishing.

Another developer had the misfortune of an unfortunate example using a bullet list format.

Submission and Certification

I submitted my application to the App Hub on a Sunday evening and it was certified by the following Wednesday morning. It was accepted on the first submission, but the feature set (and graphic design) was kept intentionally simple in the first version.

Windows Phone 7 Testing a Date Change in the Emulator

I wrote a WP7 application that stores a bit of data based on today’s date. Tomorrow when the date changes, yesterday’s data gets cleared out to start fresh. Before submitting the app to the App Hub I needed to test whether it would work as expected when the date changes. At the time, I didn’t have an actual Windows Phone 7 for testing so I used the Emulator. The testing process didn’t work out quite as I expected.

Happy Path

1. Load Emulator
2. Deploy app to the emulator
3. Run app
4. Click some buttons that store today’s data
5. Change the date on the development box (assuming that is where the emulator gets its current date)
6. Click the windows key to unload the app
7. Return to app (which should have a different date since I changed the date on the development box)
8. The app data should be empty because it is a new day

Fail

There were a few misconception to the above.

• It appears that the emulator loads today’s date when the emulator starts up, because it didn’t change when I changed the date in my development environment.
• When you click the back button it unloads the application and you lose the data stored in Isolated Storage.

Fix

Replace steps 5 & 6 in the above “Happy Path” with the following steps to effectively test the date change:

1. Click to the System Settings page in the Emulator
2. Click “date & time”
3. Toggle the “set automatically” slider to Off
4. Click on the date in the date field
5. Change the date to a different day
6. Click the windows key and left arrow icon to see the app in the menu.