Published on Friday, November 2, 2012 7:46:23 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
I finally came around installing the SDK for Windows Phone 8 that has been released just a few days ago. The download page can be found here, where you can choose from using the web installer or download the whole package as iso file. I choose the latter because I wanted to put the SDK on multiple machines and not download the components multiple times. When I double-clicked the downloaded iso, I was presented with a rather bland error message though:
Published on Monday, October 1, 2012 4:12:05 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
It's not a secret that desktop applications are able to use certain WinRT APIs too. In some of the documentation, for example that of the Accelerometer class, you can read:
Published on Friday, September 21, 2012 5:15:55 PM UTC in
Philosophical
When I got up this morning, I read the following e-mail from The Windows Phone Apps Team which I had received some time that night:
Published on Monday, September 17, 2012 6:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
Our team started a new (German) blog post series on the new features of .NET 4.5. My first post is about the nature of .NET 4.5 in general, platform support, explains the concept of in-place updates and how this might affect your team and projects, and what other issues may arise when you update. You can find the post here:
Published on Sunday, August 12, 2012 3:51:00 PM UTC in
Programming
So far, this series has talked about all kinds of problems you may run into with background agents, like API restrictions, timeout/memory constraints, data exchange between your app and your agent and finally possible error conditions when you want to create tasks. There's one additional topic I want to talk about briefly, because it's a really important one, and it took me a while to figure out the exact inner workings of it myself.
Published on Saturday, June 23, 2012 11:00:29 AM UTC in
Tools
& Programming
My small add-in for Visual Studio to help you debug your Silverlight applications had problems running on Visual Studio 2012 RC. It installed correctly but did not show up in the respective menu, and wasn't able to do its work either. Time to introduce some changes I wanted to do for a long time anyway!
Published on Saturday, June 23, 2012 10:51:13 AM UTC in
Personal
You may have noticed that so far, the amount of blog posts in June was… zero :). The reason for this mostly is that I'm currently in the process of moving to a new place, and planning everything for that, while still doing my normal day job and work. I still managed to write some articles for our team blog though, so if you're capable of understanding German you may be interested in those too:
Published on Monday, May 14, 2012 9:30:00 AM UTC in
Programming
When you create an app like the SilverlightShow app, that accesses remote data frequently, thinking about a suitable strategy for local storage and caching is vital to provide a great user experience. In the previous parts of this series, we have already seen how several optimizations are used to improve the networking performance of the app. Overall, the costs to pull data from the portal could be reduced to far less than 1/10th of the original traffic by applying some relatively simple changes. However, this is only half the story. What we also wanted to achieve is that content that has been retrieved once should not be fetched again – we needed a solution for storing those items locally.
Published on Thursday, May 10, 2012 3:55:00 PM UTC in
Programming
& Tools
I once again would like to thank everybody who attended my session about Behavior-Driven Development with Windows Phone at this year's Entwicklertag Karlsruhe (#etka12), and for the great feedback and discussions afterwards. I offer both the slides and the shown demo code for download here:
Published on Wednesday, May 2, 2012 5:00:00 AM UTC in
Programming
It's been a while since the last part of my series on background agent pitfalls, where I talked about data exchange between your app and the agent, and what potential errors and edge cases you may run into with that. There are a few more topics I wanted to create awareness for, so today I'll continue with...
