Gonzo blogging from the Annie Leibovitz of the software development world.
Updated: 1 hour 45 min ago
The Big Dummies Guide for Windows Phone Developer Resources
Windows Phone apps are growing in popularity as does the 50,000 60,000 apps in the marketplace today. Microsoft has done a great job at putting together some resources for developers including full documentation. When you first land on App Hub there’s all kind of samples, toolkits, and quick starts to get you going.
This post is to fill in some gaps and direct you to some additional resources that I’ve built up over the last couple of years of building phone apps. I won’t regurgitate the Microsoft resources here, you can get all of those at the App Hub itself. Instead these are other resources that will hopefully be useful.
Toolkits and Utilities
What you get out of the box is a lot but there is a lot more to offer out there that others have come up with. Here are a few.
Here’s a collection of utilities put together by the Dutch Windows Phone developer community. A lot of great small classes here that you can leverage in your app with some cool controls and new behaviours. It even has NuGet Support so adding it to your project is a no-brainer.
This is a nice little set of classes and while not as all-encompassing as others, does have a couple of killer things you must have on your phone. Namely an error reporting system (Little Watson) and a system to let users know of new versions and features. Must have!
I’m always writing code to call HttpRequest (or WebClient), download data from a site, deal with callbacks, then deal with updating my ViewModel. Agfx takes the heavy lifting out of a lot of this and tosses in free caching (with policies you specify like auto-refresh) making it a breeze. Highly recommended for any Windows Phone project that needs data.
Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone
This is from the Windows team and again, open source, providing you with a dozen or so controls including a frame system that lets your apps look and behave like the core ones, just with one line of code and a few lines of XAML markup on each page.
I’ve always had to write classes and plumbing code when dealing with tombstoning (saving the state of your app). This helper comes as a NuGet package that you can handle all your tombstoning needs with 1 line of code. Simple and easy.
We all hate writing the same boring get/set code for our MVVM properties. Enter this tool. It adds a custom MS Build task to your project and will take care of that for you. Now you just write POCO classes and the rest is handled for you. You're welcome.
Tired of writing about dialogs and screens? Install this (via NuGet of course!) and call it with one line of code. Viola. A complete A bout page with your own user definable pivots, license information, credits, etc. You can even load pages remotely and if there’s no network connection no problem, the library will handle it.
Another great about page, this one is driven from local resources and requires no coding, just configuration. I use this on some of my apps where I want to programatically hide/show sections of the above page (for example showing a "buy" button but only for trial apps). Nice!
Another useful library with a smattering of great controls, helpers, and converters. Drop in, use, profit (okay, the last part might take some work).
Silverlight apps on Windows Phone 7 greatly benefit from databinding and not the databinding you learned to hate in VB6. This is true, two-way databinding that lets you separate your concerns with your app correctly. MVVM Light is one library that helps do this (you can just use IPropertyNotify on your own classes) but provides other things like behaviours that can be bound to properties for eventing. Very useful.
Another MVVM library that works great with Windows Phone 7 (be sure to get the latest code, the NuGet package at the time of this writing didn’t support Mango and needs to be updated).
This is a great add-on that will help you deal with checking if the phone is in trial mode or not which will let you toggle different features or parts of the UI. An added feature is a simple toggle in your App.xaml file will let you put the app into Trial mode to test things out before sending to the marketplace. I packaged this up into a NuGet package so you can add it to any project quickly but check out the documentation on the project site as to how to use it (it's really easy).
Design
Design is a huge part of Windows Phone apps looking to capitalize on the Metro Design Language.
This is a simple class that overlays a series of translucent boxes, all evenly spaced, on your app during debug time. It’s invaluable to check the lining up of those controls and titles. By Jeff Wilcox and the Windows Phone team.
31 Weeks of Windows Phone Design
The UX design team got into the habit of posting detailed articles on the Metro design language and it's nuances. It's a fascinating deep dive with a ton of great ideas around how the design of Metro apps works and provides some excellent insight into the design process that you can use in your apps.
Microsoft offers a design guide which is great but Jeff Wilcox turns it up to 11 with this post, covering all kinds of implementation tips developers should use before submitting an app.
Cheryl Simmons on the Windows Phone team has a great cheatsheet to follow here for all Windows Phone developers. Great tips on a variety of subjects.
Resources
Games for sure need music but nothing stopping you from putting original music into an app. Here are some royalty free resources you can use.
Hundreds of great looking Windows Phone icons you can use in your app, app bar, etc. all licensed under Creative Commons.
Development
Jeff Blanketburg took it upon himself to post 31 days of Windows Phone tips that covers all the basics you need to get going. Each post is deep on each topic and a recommended read to get into any of the core controls and features for building WP7 apps.
The last update for Windows Phone called Mango added all kinds of great new features like live tiles, search integration, running under lock screens, etc. Jeff comes back with 31 more days for Mango specific features.
MessageBox and Application Lifecycle
This can be tricky when you’re trying to not only pass certification but manage popups and screens. Here’s a post to help you through that.
Jesse Liberty, another huge name in the Windows Phone arena, has a whole set of tutorials focused on single tasks (currently over 30 of them). Great stuff and very useful!
Adam Nathan did the community a solid by creating 101 Windows Phone apps, then writing two books on it (there’s only enough room in a single book). Each app is detailed in a separate blog post on his site and covers various types of apps you would build with WP7 like stop watches, calendars, to do lists, and more.
Internationalization
Windows Phone is everywhere, not just English speaking nations!
A nice post on how your app can be more recognizable and (perhaps) popular in the Japanese markets. With Nokia phones hitting the marketplace, this tip is invaluable to reach out beyond your own backyard.
Globalization and Localization for your Phone
A great MSDN article (actually a series of them) that walks you through setting up localization for multiple languages. It’s easy and even if you only support one language, do this so all your strings are in a resource file and not hard coded for easy updates.
Achievements
If you’re building a game or even want to incorporate leaderboards and achievements into your phone app look no further.
This is a free and open source solution with a back-end server to keep track of your own user defined leaderboards and achievements. You define it on the site and with a few simple calls in your code, upload scores and award achievements to users and display global leaderboards in your app. Silverlight and XNA samples available to get you started.
Marketing
Building your app is just part of the process, then comes getting it out to the masses and keeping the word out.
Windows Phone 7 App Site Template
This is a complete one-page site template that’s completely data driven. You just make some modifications to the app name, provide some screenshots, deep links, etc. and you’re good to go. There’s even integrated Twitter and Uservoice support.
Adam Nathan puts together his own personal tips for submitting to the marketplace. Feel free to use this as a checklist. I do.
Training
No, this isn’t a link to some overpriced course. It’s a link to over 20 hours of free video training put together by Peter Kuhn. The videos include complete source code and walk through all the aspects of building Windows Phone apps from soup to nuts.
Tools
Tools are any part of a good developers kit and there’s no shortage of them for Windows Phone developers.
Think of it as Firebug for your phone. Why are you still reading this?
Wondering if you’re writing the right thing to your phone or want to take a look at where things are going in your app? This tool lets you peek inside the storage system for you.
This is an awesome tool and installs with ClickOnce so you always have the latest version. It lets you take screenshots effortlessly with or without an emulator skin so you can do cool shots for your blog and take the final images for the marketplace.
Bored with the out of the box emulator every time you launch it from Visual Studio? This tool let’s you change up the skin to something more sexy and fun, all with the click of a button. Be the cool kid at your next Windows Phone presentation and amaze your friends!
Monetization
Microsoft Advertising Services
Microsoft has continued to expand it’s monetization services by offering up ads in new markets (and markets are being added regularily). Various reports have different successes with these services but they’re baked into the Mango SDK and easy to setup and use.
This is by far a complete list so please leave a comment with more links, suggestions, and corrections as you see them. I’ll update the post as quickly as I can.
Now, go get building your first Windows Phone app!
Categories: Blogs
Visual Studio Achievements - Remember Kids They're Just For Fun
I followed a neat project for the last couple of months which today became a reality, Visual Studio Achievements. Achievements are something the gaming world are very familiar with. They're milestones of recognition to meet like "Blowing up 30 Enemies with 1 Grenade" or "Destroy a Super Tank playing the Classic Game". There are a lot of sites around the Internet to track them including one dedicated to just XBox 360 ones here.
They're fun and you get a bit of an internal high when you see this on your screen:
The Visual Studio Achievements follows the same idea and, once installed, are based on your activity as you work. Achievements are measured and discovered in the background when you compile. And hey, it's cool and fun to see this after a compile:
However when you look through the list of achievements one thing jumps out to those that try to follow good coding practices. These are certainly not that. In fact if I caught you writing a class with 10 levels of inheritance I would rip you a new one at the next daily stand up that would make even the likes of Gordon Ramsay shake in his knees.
Ahh but you say these are for fun. Yes, yes they are and far from me to be the party pooper. What sparked me to write this blog response is to emphasize F-U-N and not practice. Seriously you won't believe (or maybe you will) how many developers I talked to around me that thought this was a cool thing to install in their work environment.
Wait. Let's think about this for a minute.
- Install achievemnts add-on in work environment.
- Do work
- Get achievment
Okay, the first step is fine. The second step is what we do. The third step? Hang on. Didn't I just say that having 10 levels of inheritance is a bad thing? So if you get the achievement during your daily work it should be a *bad* thing, not something to celebrate.
It's like breaking the build (which we all do at some point and certainly people get ridiculed for it, it's all fun right). Breaking the build is a bad thing but it's a good spin. It means we recognize something went wrong and whatever mechanism you have to let you know (since everyone on the team should get notified) means you get up, rally around, and fix the problem. Good stuff. Build fixed, work continues.
Where's the rallying here? The only thing that will happen is the dev will see the achievement, pat himself on the back and have a chuckle then what? What *should* happen if you installed this and got an achievment should be:
- Do work
- Get achievement
- Chuckle
- Silently say "Oh shit"
- Fix problem
- Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Hopefully this is the case, but again I've asked a few people and they miss the point of the fun aspect here. This shouldn't be something you strive to achieve, the achievements here (as they stand currently) should be something to avoid. In fact it should set of an internal whoop-whoop alarm and cause you to think "What the Hell was I thinking".
Before you dismiss me, I'm all for fun. I'm the guy that has robot zombies and posters of Close Encounters in my cubicle and challenges developers to games of magnetic Angry Birds after stand-up. I'm all that. However I just want people to be aware that this is fun and there might be a message here. Keep focused on good practices and not bad ones. In the game achievement world, we *try* to achieve these tasks. Heck when I get a game and I'm bored I look through the achievements and set myself up to try to accomplish it (mostly failing since I literally suck at almost every game).
However developers should not be looking at these achievements as something they should be striving for (except just to get the achievement and make it onto the site). What would I really like to see? Some actual achievements that developers can strive for and be proud to achieve. How about "Eliminate 10% of the codebase without removing functionality" or "Mock a service and pass 10 unit tests against it" as achievements.
Herein lies the real problem though. Getting the *fun* achievements is easy. They're tangible and simple to measure. How do you measure "good code"? Can you scan code with a computer and determine separation of concern? Or if your code follows SOLID principles or not? Somethings are detectable but most of the good stuff is not. That's the real trick here (and if you figure it out in a system where you can automatically detect it and award and achievment for, all the better).
Like I said, have fun with this addon. It's neat and I applaud the developers for coming up with it. I don't discourage its use but keep in mind what it is and what the message behind it is. Hopefully one day with might have some positive achievements to strive for as well as the fun ones.
Categories: Blogs
The Big Dummies Guide to Building a SharePoint Internet Site
I'm about to embark on a new project, building a SharePoint based Internet site. This is new for me as all the SharePoint work I've done has been Intranet facing and I know there are some challenges with SharePoint and outward facing sites. So I called on a few MVP friends and people that have some real world experience configuring SharePoint for Internet to see if I could come up with a list of tips, tricks, and things to watch out for.
Search Engine Optimization
- Out of the box URLs are not SEO friendly, you need a custom solution
- Jie Li, a program manager on the SharePoint team, has a great collection of tips for optimzing your search engine face
- For creating short urls (like bit.ly, tinyurl.com, etc.) Waldek Mastykarz has 4 ways to use short urls (which will help with the SEO)
HTML/HTML5
- Out of the box HTML is somewhat horrible and not very optimized for Internet sites
- If you want make SharePoint to output native HTML5 pages and get validated, then the answer is no. SharePoint 2010 is designed to output content in XHTML 1.0 natively.
- I *always* start with Randy Drisgills master pages on new Web Apps. They're clean, optimized, and easy to use. Highly recommended.
- Randy Drisgill has a post about HTML5 compatibility although it was for IE9 beta and hasn't been updated, but still contains some good info.
- Kyle Schaeffer has a new "responsive" HTML5 master page for 2010 that seems to have a lot of popularity so might be a good place to start from (or combine it with Randy's master pages)
Multilingual Support
- A good, detailed post by Serge Tremblay on setting up, configuring, and supporting multiple languages in SharePoint
- The Planning for Multiple Language support series of articles from Microsoft which is a good starting point
- An MSDN article on using MUI support with examples on changing and setting languages, good for writing custom JavaScript to let users toggle the language selection
Hardening
- Use ViewFormPagesLockdown to prevent access to system pages. It's still used in 2010 and turned on by default with publishing sites. Here's a blog post from the support team with some information about it.
- TechNet has an article about securing your farm for anonymous access. Unfortunately it's for SharePoint 2007 so some (most?) aspects might not apply to SharePoint 2010.
WCAG/508c
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 are the internationally accepted standard for web accessibility so you might want to look at providing this for your Internet facing site.
- SharePoint 2010 is WCAG 2.0 AA compliant
- Complete list of Web Accessiblity Compliance tools can be found here
Mobile Support
- The out of the box mobile experience doesn't support anonymous users, which is the standard for Internet sites. Waldek has one workaround here.
SQL
- A fairly in-depth blog post about optimizing the SQL side of things while making SharePoint peform better.
General
- Mavention has a nice site checking tool that's specific for SharePoint 2010. Highly recommended.
- Elizabeth Olson, a Program Manager for SharePoint, presented at MIX10 on designing an internet facing site in SharePoint. Here's the 45 minute video of that session.
- As this is an Internet facing site you'll probably want to hook up some kind of tracking system so you can produce nice stats for the suits. Google Analytics is a good start but feel free to use any tool. They all hook in usually through a simple piece of JavaScript you can add into your master page.
Features
Performance
As far as SharePoint and Internet sites you could probably write an entire book on just performance. There are so many things to take into consideration, both on the SharePoint side (configuration wise of the site) and the IIS one. Watch out for content and customization issues though, as they're not directly SharePoint related but people will blame SharePoint for issues. Things like large articles, missized images, unoptimized JavaScript, long running scripts, etc. can all lead to performance issues that have nothing to do with SharePoint.
- Some tips on how to Reduce page size
- Fiddler is an invaluable tool to see your pages load times (and tracking down errors)
- YSlow shows you where bottlenecks are in page loads and helps you optimize them
- Eliminating large JavaScript files
- Custom caching to optimize your sites. Good information with pros and cons of the different types of caching.
- Minifying custom JavaScript files. Nice article by Wictor. Use any tool you need to or the built in one in Visual Studio to do this. JavaScript compressor will do this for you.
- Here's the article for optimizing the web content management site but it's for SharePoint 2007. Not sure how much is relevant in 2010.
- Chris O'Brien has a nice checklist for optimizing SharePoint sites like this although much of it is written for SharePoint 2007, but some is universal and works for 2010
- Joel Oleson did a great presentation on optimizing SharePoint 2010. Here's a PDF of that presentation.
This list is far from complete and should be an evolutionary thing as it's just what I've collected myself. Do you have experience building SharePoint sites on the Internet? What kind of issues did you come across? Feel free to leave comments with your experience, links to your blog, etc. I'll update this list with that information.
Enjoy!
Categories: Blogs
Some JSON Resources For You
As a developer I really dig JSON over XML for information exchange. It's clean, simple, and just works. I don't have to deal with complicated schema validation, reams of unreadable encoded text, and hierarchies that make no sense. I prefer to consume in apps and more and more services offer it up natively these days. Here are a few key tools I use that you might fun value-add in your dealings with JSON.
Hmm... is it JSON or Json? Anyway, here's a short list.
IMHO this is the key library for working with JSON. Yes, you can do some native de-serialization with .NET but the Json.NET library makes reading and writing JSON easy. You can de-serialize a JSON response with one line of code and suck it into a set of C# classes (or use the JObject class itself to pluck values out directly). If you're really hung up on the angle brackets, Json.NET can translate your JSON to and from XML (but that would be silly). Highly recommended and it even comes as a Nuget package so nothing to download and unzip!
Getting JSON and trying to look at it can be painful. Sure, it's a human readable format but sometimes it comes as a big gobbly-gook glob of text if the API returns your data with the whitespace compressed (to reduce the size of the package). This online tool lets you paste in a JSON string and reformat it into something more readable. Bonus feature is you can just plug in a URL that returns the data in JSON format as well. Handy.
Of course if you consume JSON with the Json.NET library one very slick feature is a single line of code to de-serialize it into a C# class. Here's an example:
var records = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RecordModel>(someDownloadedString);
The variable "records" will now be a complete object graph of your JSON (including child objects de-serialized into arrays, lists, or whatever your collection type is). For this to work you need some classes of course. They're simple to write and are just POCO but do have to match up with the structure of the JSON so it can be tricky creating them and a tiresome task.
Enter the JSON C# Class Generator project. This is a GUI tool that you plunk your JSON into, set some properties and generate a series of C# classes you can link into your project and perform the online-line-de-serialization above. Pretty nice and supports a lot of features plus it's open source to boot.
Going one step better (or worse depending on your point of view) is the online version of a similar tool. With the json2csharp site, you can either enter the JSON data directly or enter the URL and it'll fetch it for you. The class generation is simple (as it should be) with no options but it's nice as you don't have to download/install anything. I did find a few JSON APIs that didn't work with this one but did work with the formatter so in that case I had to enter the URL in the formatter to get the JSON, then plunk the data into this tool to get my classes. In any case, it's way better to use tools like these rather than writing the classes yourself (again, my opinion, your mileage may vary).
If you're using JSON and looking for a quick hit to see your data, look no further than JSONView, a Firefox add-on that will format the JSON data output for you. Once installed, just visit the URL to your JSON data and the output will render in the browser. That's as simple as it can get. No mess, no fuss.
There are a lot of tutorials out there on using some of these tools, including one shameless plug of my own. Here's a blog entry I wrote on consuming MediaWiki's content in JSON format. MediaWiki is the software powering Wikipedia (along with a ton of other wiki sites). It walks through using the Json.NET library and navigating around Wikipedia using the data in JSON created classes.
Got more resources? Post them in the comments if you have some other JSON related resources and I'll update the post with them. Until then, enjoy!
Categories: Blogs