The silverlight toolkit is now the #wptoolkit

If you've done any Silverlight development on Windows Phone 7 there's a 90 odd plus percetage chance you've used (or at least looked at) the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone.

Now, with the release of Windows Phone 8, it's been separated into a separate, phone specific project.
Go and get all your favourite, essential, additional controls from:

http://phone.codeplex.com/

Windows Phone sessions at #bldwin

Update: See the final list at  http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/05/it-s-a-wrap-on-windows-phone-at-build-2012.aspx



If, like me, you're not at Microsoft's Build conference this week you'll probably want to keep up with the Windows Phone (8) related sessions that are happening there. Fortunately, they're all being made available online.
You can find a list of all sessions at http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2012/ but if you just want the phone related ones I've linked them all individually below:

• Deep Dive into the Kernel of .NET on Windows Phone 8
• Designing awesome XAML apps in Visual Studio and Blend for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
• Developing Mobile Solutions with Windows Azure Part II
• Create Cross-platform Apps using Portable Class Libraries
• Building Cross-Device Xbox Games
• Building data centric applications for web, desktop and mobile with Entity Framework 5

No, that's not a lot of sessions so let's hope for quality, not quantity and also hope that there will be more information and events coming soon.

Debugging an MPNS issue

After struggling with debugging an issue with the Microsoft Push Notifications Service for Windows Phone (MPNS) today, I discovered that it's not possible to get a ChannelUri when on a Wi-Fi network that uses a proxy. It can also take several seconds (up to about 10 if today is anything to go by) before a channel is obtained. (Previously I've only known it to take less than 1.)
If a device has a low battery or battery saver is enabled you cannot get a URI either.

Just documenting as useful to know.


via http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/wpnotifications/thread/8af38ab5-f6b9-441f-af68-b9fefe0184a5

Preparing for Windows Phone 8 - Slides

In the last few months, I've spoken at WPUG, DDD10 and DDD North about Preparing for Windows Phone 8.

Sorry, there's no secrets revealed*. This is all public knowledge and sensible assumptions based on many years of working in the mobile space and with Microsoft products.

Sorry, as with most presentations the slides on their own don't give the full picture but may be useful - and some people have asked for them.



* I know very little that isn't public knowledge and don't have access to the SDK - yet.

What's going on with WPUG?

Short of time? Here's the skinny:
WPUG is 2 years old. It's been awesome, helped loads of people build loads of great apps and is gonna continue.




Really?

Windows Phone?

Still beating that old horse?

Isn't it dead yet?





Not quite.
There's still lots of opportunities for enterprising ideas and with the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 announcements there are some exciting times ahead.


How did we get here?

We've picked up 1900+ followers on Twitter as we tweet lots of Windows Phone development related tips, techniques and news articles. (Yeah, it's been a bit quiet recently but will pick up again soon.)

We've had over 70 talks and demos, at 22 meetings, with over 650 different attendees.

I know of at least six people who've got jobs as a result of contacts they've made at the group.

We've spawned a couple of spin-off groups in Cardiff and Manchester.

And according to our recent survey:
We're directly responsible for helping over 200 people create and release their first app.
40% of the developers who've attended have released more apps as a direct result of attending meetings.
76% of attendees claim to have been able to release better apps as a result of attending meetings.



Moving forward

Our next meeting is next week and I'll be talking about how the announcements at the recent Windows Phone Summit provide some exciting opportunities for designing and developing for Windows Phone in the future.

Register via eventbrite or on meetup.

Longer term, we'll be meeting again in August and have plans to keep growing and having more meetings later in the year as we look towards Windows Phone 8 and partnering with other groups to learn and share about Win8 development too.

We hope this will be helpful as 91% of developers who've attended are planning on upgrading their apps to WP8 and 96% of attendees are interested in learning about developing apps for Win8 as well as WP8.

Plus more.....


As part of the survey we also asked people what they enjoyed about our meetings so far. Here are a few quotes:

"I enjoy the social aspect of it"

"The breadth of topics discussed is great." 

"The demos and talks have been great" 

"The networking, the helpful advices, the motivation that you are not the only one who develop for Windows Phone." 

"I have enjoyed talks about the design considerations, techical architecture design that gets round specific problems and how people have monetised their apps"

We'll have some more feedback from the survey on the WPUG blog soon.