Thursday, August 28, 2014

Half a million views - wow!

According to the stats in blogger, earlier today, views of this blog passed the half a million mark.
It sounds like quite a big number so it must be a big deal. I don't know people who talk about how many people actually view their blog so don't really have anything to compare it with. I expect that there are many with fewer views and many with more though.


So, many years ago I started a blog as an excuse to write stuff. A few years I started posting mostly about Windows Phone development related topics and renamed the blog.
It was really after this point that anyone really started reading what I've written. I still just write what I want to write but I've also tried to document things I've discovered that weren't documented anywhere and may be of use to others.
It's good to know that some people have found what I write useful and interesting. It still shocks me that people at Microsoft even read this stuff (sometimes) and I've even known some of them find solutions to their issues here. You're welcome.

I've no plans on stopping writing here. I'm just going to continue writing about what I want when the mood takes me (so it'll continue to be intermittent). Do feel free to tell me if I write something of use to you. :)


Friday, August 08, 2014

OCR in Windows Phone and Windows Store apps

Over the years, lots of developers have asked about having OCR (Optical Character Recognition) capabilities in their apps.
Well, last week a preview of the ability to do this was released by Microsoft.
I've not seen much publicity of this but know many people will be interested so I'm trying to help spread the word.

If you're interested, it's the same code that powered the Bing client on Windows Phone, Bing Translator app, OneNote and OneDrive.

You can find the documentation (and sample) on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/windowspreview.media.ocr.aspx and the NuGet package at http://www.nuget.org/packages/Microsoft.Windows.Ocr/