Published on Monday, February 27, 2012 4:32:00 AM UTC in
Programming
In the previous part of this mini-series, we have learned about some limitations of agents regarding memory and execution time. Although these restrictions are severe in their details, they are nothing new to developers on the phone. Memory usage caps also exist for normal applications, and we do have quite some time-based requirements there too. When you work with background agents, you're however also facing a new class of problems that is completely irrelevant and non-existing to normal app developers.
Published on Thursday, February 23, 2012 11:21:00 PM UTC in
Programming
In the first part of this series, I mainly talked about issues with software design when you work with background agents. We saw that the partly really strict API limitations can have a pretty severe effect on how you need to structure your code to follow all requirements of the validation and certification process. This time, I want to get a bit more technical, when we learn about some other limitations of agents.
Published on Sunday, February 19, 2012 7:24:00 PM UTC in
Programming
There's a ton of resources available on the web that talks about the new features of Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" for developers, and about background agents in particular. Unfortunately, a lot of these resources use over-simplified samples that have little in common with complex real-world setups, and often the articles you can find don't even mention the several restrictions in place for background agents at all. In this open-ended mini series I am going to talk about the various problems you will potentially run into with anything but the most trivial applications, what effects and consequences this has for your application development, and how you can avoid pitfalls and plan ahead for background agents. This is not a general introduction on the topic; I assume that you are familiar with the concept and have a basic understanding on how agents work.
Published on Sunday, February 12, 2012 10:24:47 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
Almost two years ago, Firefox started to isolate plug-ins like Silverlight in a separate operating system process. One of the consequences was that debugging Silverlight applications with Visual Studio became somewhat more tedious, because the Silverlight debug engine was not able to automatically attach to the correct processes anymore. At that time, I started developing a small and simple Visual Studio Add-In named "Firefox Debug Helper". Later on, when I discovered that Visual Studio also had problems with other browsers like Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome, I extended support for this Add-In to these browsers, and renamed the tool to "Silverlight Debug Helper".
Published on Monday, January 30, 2012 2:40:09 PM UTC in
Programming
Sometimes seemingly simple things are the most expensive to achieve. One such thing involves the Windows Phone WebBrowser control that allows you to show arbitrary web content embedded in your application.
Published on Thursday, January 26, 2012 6:15:00 PM UTC in
Personal
I am proud to announce that I have joined the team at Applied Information Technologies in Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in 1991, AIT has gained outstanding achievements over the years. In 2011 it became the first Microsoft Gold Partner for Application Lifecycle Management in Middle Europe, and was awarded as Microsoft DevTools Service Partner of the Year. AIT also is a Microsoft Gold Partner as Independent Software Vendor and has won the BQI Agile Leadership Award last year.
Published on Tuesday, January 17, 2012 7:06:21 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
I'm happy to announce that starting today, my complete "Turn Out" Windows Phone training is available for free to anyone. In the past, individual parts were available to the public already, but now you can watch this whole series of development training, with over 20 hours of screencast material, at no cost.
Published on Wednesday, January 11, 2012 12:30:46 AM UTC in
Programming
Over the last weeks, some users of my project "YLAD" brought some additional localization scenarios to my attention. This resulted in both some improvements to the project itself (which I've just released as a new version on CodePlex and NuGet), and the need to talk about some obstacles you might come across.
Published on Tuesday, January 3, 2012 12:01:00 AM UTC in
Philosophical
& Tools
This is not one of my usual posts, it's more of a random complaint. A rant that has been sitting in my draft folder for half a year and finally deserves to see the light. Of course it will contain some technical details too (after all, this is a technical blog), but to be honest, I like complaining, so that's what I'm going to do today. In fact, I am known as the "complain" guy among my friends, because I probably spend more time complaining than doing actual work, sleeping, eating and shutting up during movies put together. The reason you've never heard me complain in this blog simply is that I complain so much during the day that there's hardly anything left to complain about in the evening when I write these posts (yes, I adhere to DRY even when I'm whining). So again, if you expect some fancy technical article, stop reading until it is too late, or skip all the way down to the - serious - conclusion. Unless of course it happens that you accidentally are a member of the team at Microsoft that maintains the Zune PC software. Then please, read on, no matter what. :)
Published on Monday, December 19, 2011 3:40:42 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
Ever since the first announcement of my "Phone as a Remote Control" project the goal was to work towards a release of the reference app in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Over the last month I've added some improvements and fixes, and I'm glad to announce that last weekend a first version has been accepted and is now publicly available – for free and without advertisement. You should now be able to find the app doing a search for "PAARC" in the Marketplace on your phone, or by visiting this web link. In this post, I'll talk about what reaching this milestone means for you as a developer, and what's in the box for normal users.
