Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Using Application Insights to Improve Mobile Beta Testing

I was recently asked to write a post for the Microsoft MVP Award Program Blog about how you can use data captured with application insights to improve your beta testing.

Application Insights - lightbulb logoHere's a snippet:
When it comes to beta testing, unfortunately, many developers release the app to their testers and then just sit back and hope for feedback. In many scenarios just hoping for feedback isn’t sufficient and so to ensure you're getting both the most feedback possible and the test coverage you would like it is important to be proactive about capturing feedback and monitoring what the testers are doing.



Read the whole thing at:  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2015/09/22/using-application-insights-to-improve-mobile-beta-testing.aspx





How I fixed broken WiFi after upgrading to Windows 10 - and it wasn't a VPN issue

I just upgraded another laptop from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10.
I kicked it off overnight and all looked good in the morning. Until, that is, I tried to access the internet.
Everything was ok with the routers and I could connect to multiple networks from other machines but none would work on the newly updated machine.

Searching the internet I found many other reports of a similar issue and most seem to be due to a problem with old VPN software.

This wasn't my situation.
Eventually I found this solution:

Go to: Control Panel > Device Manager > Network Adapters > Select WiFi adapter > Advanced Tab > Roaming Aggressiveness > change to highest.


 This worked for me but YMMV.


This worked for me too:



Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Effective pixel sizes for different Windows 10 devices


When defining layout in a UWP app, measurements are in effective pixels (EP).
Here, for my reference as much as yours, is how the EP values for a range of devices compare.


Device Effective Pixels
4" phone 320x533
5" phone 360x640
6" phone 432x768
8" tablet 640x1024
12" tablet 960x1440
13.3" desktop 1280x720
23" desktop 1920x1080
xbox (42") 1280x720
55" Surface Hub 1920x1080
84" Surface Hub 2560x1440

Or to compare they can be visualized like this:



There's also HoloLens and IoT devices to potentially consider too.
Details for HoloLens are not yet available and the range of possible screens you could connect to an IOT device is incredibly broad so I chosen to leave it out.