It’s spring, sun and happy days, and on top of that it’s only 10 more days to go before the next Windows Phone Developer Community meetup.  The may meetup takes place on Thursday 26th of may, at The Scotsman in Oslo. Doors open at 6 pm.

Einar

The May meetup got a really exciting program. First we got Einar Ingebrigtsen, (@Einarl) Silverlight MVP and author of the Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, XNA and OpenGL 3D engine Balder. He’ll talk about the engine and show us how it works.

After Einar’s talk there will be a short break for everyone to fill their glasses with something refreshing and take part in the developer quiz hosted by Glasspaper. There will be some really cool prizes.

Gøran

After the quiz break Gøran Hansen, (@goeran) Client App Dev MVP and Microsoft Regional Director will take the stage and talk to us about DDD, Domain Driven Design. He has practiced DDD for a while now and see that it has helped to get better quality in projects, both for the code and the end product. Some of the things he will talk about is how to begin your product with the user interface, how to get feedback from the client from day one, and continually through the project, how to isolate your self from external dependencies like hardware, data stores and services – and finally how you develop UI code that can be tested.

So, reserve the day if you are in Oslo and join us for an evening of tech deep dives! Sign up for the event at our meetup.com page.

Some links:

Einar’s blog: http://www.ingebrigtsen.info
Balder 3d engine: http://balder.codeplex.com
Gøran on twitter: http://twitter.com/goeran

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Callout to Silverlight devs in, and around London. (Or any dev looking for a good excuse for going to London, possibly paid by your boss)

On Wednesday, July 28 from 6PM – 8PM Windows Phone User Group is hosting it’s first UG meeting.  The meeting will be held at 36 Southwark Bridge Road, SE1 9EU London. If you are located near London and got an application you’d like to share contact them for details.

wpug.net writes:

We’re proud to finally announce our first meeting will be on July 28^th. We’re also very proud to announce that we’ll be joined by Paul Foster and Rob Fonseca-Ensor who will be presenting for us. and Rob is taking a two hour break from writing a book on Windows Phone 7 development (for Wrox) and will be helping us get deep into XNA for WP7. For those of you who don’t know, Paul is Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 Development Evangelist in the UK and he’ll be sharing some top development tips and tricks.

We’re also looking for a couple of people to demonstrate any Windows Phone 7 apps they’ve made. If this appeals to you then please get in touch.

You can follow and contact @wpug on twitter. Their site with registration for the event can be found here.

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Today i received an e-mail from the Microsoft MVP Award program congratulating me with the MVP Award 2010 for Device Application Development.

I am stoked and very happy to receive this award, and it’ll be a great inspiration for me in my continued work for mobility in communities and professionally. As I am the first MVP on Device Application Development in Norway I hope we’ll be able to use this in our effort to make the Windows Phone Developer Community grow even further.

A big thank you goes to former Microsoft Norway Community Manager Rune Grothaug!

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Windows Phone Developer Community

Vi ønsker deg velkommen til WPDC sin September-samling.

Vi kommer tilbake med mer informasjon og detaljert agenda for denne samlingen.

Foreløpig agenda:

De tre vinnerne av Windows Phone 7 app konkurransen vil bli annonsert (mer informasjon om konkurransen finner du her: Windows Phone 7 app konkurranse.
Presentasjon/demonstrasjon av Windows Phone 7 applikasjoner/spill.

Velkommen skal du være

Oslo – Norway

Thursday, September 30 at 6:00 PM

Details: http://www.meetup.com/Windows-Phone-Developer-Community/calendar/13778914/

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From the bag-o-goodies that the 2010 NDC conference agenda provides, it’s been a real challenge to pick sessions.

I hope for post conference video release of all sessions like they did last year. It will certainly bring some piece of mind thinking of all the sessions i’ll miss out on.

I´ve already posted my first day and second day agenda and it´s now time to pick my top selection for the third day. Day three will mostly be filled with the hotshots of software development and agility

9:00 – 10:00: The three laws of TDD with Robert C. Martin

The jury is in, the case is closed. TDD works, and works well. In this talk Uncle Bob makes the point that TDD is not a testing technique at all. Rather, TDD is a way to ensure good architecture, good design, good documentation, and that the software works as the programmer intended. TDD is a necessary discipline for those developers seeking to become professionals. This talk is half lecture and half demonstration. Examples are in Java and Junit.

10:20 – 11:20: Being an effective team leader with Roy Osherove

In this talk he’ll review practices and principles that make good team leaders into great ones.

From basic communication and influencing skills to essential day to day practices and things to look out for – this is a session every team lead should be interested in.

11:40 – 12:40: Agile estimating with Mike Cohn

The first step in creating a useful plan is the ability to estimate reliably. In this session we will discuss how to do this. We will look at various approaches to estimating including unit–less points and ideal time. The class will present four specific techniques for deriving reliable estimates, including how to use the popular Planning Poker® technique and other techniques that dramatically improve a project’s chances of on–time completion.

13:40 – 14:40: Advanced topics in agile planning with Mike Cohn

Velocity is perhaps the most useful metric available to agile teams. In this session we will look at advanced uses of velocity for planning under special but common circumstances. We will see how to forecast velocity in the complete absence of any historical data. We will look at how a new team can forecast velocity by looking at other teams. We will see how to predict the velocity of a team that will grow or shrink in size. Most importantly we will look at the use of confidence intervals to create plans we can be 90% confident in, even on fixed–price or fixed–date contracts.

15:00 – 16:00: Scaling agile to work with a distributed team with Mike Cohn

The early agile literature was adamant about two things: stick with small teams and put everyone in one room. However, in the years since the Agile Manifesto, the increasing popularity of agile and the dramatic improvements it brings has pushed it onto larger and larger projects. Additionally, having an entire team––especially on a large project––in one room, or even one building is a luxury no longer enjoyed by many projects.

15:20 – 17:20: LINQ – Beyond queries with Scott Allen

The C# language and the .NET platform introduced many new features to support language integrated query. In this session, we’ll look at using these LINQ related features to build rich, intention revealing logic. We’ll dive into the magic of expression trees and use them to implement type–safe reflection, apply lambda expressions for a functional programming style, and use extension methods to build an internal DSL in C#.

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Two weeks ago I compiled my agenda for the first day of Norwegian Developer Conference 2010. A killer conference day, but as a mobility developer the real goodies begins on day two. Here´s what i plan to attend:

Check out my first day agenda here.

9:00 – 10:00: Silverlight for Windows Phone  with Tim Heuer

Windows Phone 7 Series is coming…and if you are a Silverlight developer there is good news: Silverlight *is* the development platform for Windows Phone applications.

This session will provide an overview of the tools, the emulator, and the core APIs for Silverlight for Windows Phone development. Find out what is (and is not) possible in creating and porting your Silverlight applications ready for Windows Phone 7.

10:20 – 11:20: Silverlight applications for Windows Phone 7 with Jonas Follesø

Windows Phone 7 is brand new, totally fresh operating system that will appear in phones before Christmas. The new platform is a complete rewrite and offers lots of interesting opportunities to third party developers. The development platform for Windows Phone 7 is all based around managed code and the tools and frameworks you already know and love. This presentation you will give you an overview of the Windows Phone 7 development platform, and how you can leverage your existing Silverlight skills to build great applications for the Windows Phone 7 marketplace.
The session assumes some prior knowledge of Silverlight, as the focus of this presentation will be features that are specific to the phone. It will not only cover the basics of the Windows Phone 7 platform, but also how you can re–use many of the same patterns, frameworks, techniques and practices that you use when building regular Silverlight applications.

11:40 – 12-40: Silverlight data access and services not for the faint of heart with Gill Cleeren

For data needs, Silverlight can talk to services like WCF or REST enabled services. These service types are sufficient for most scenarios. But what if it isn’t? Most examples that can be found out there cover the basics, but in the real world, that’s sometimes not enough. In this session, we’ll explore the dark corners of Silverlight’s service access. Among others, we’ll cover duplex communication, debugging services, the HttpWebRequest, TCP communication and securing service communication from Silverlight..

13:40 – 14:40: Introduction to MonoTouch with Chris Hardy

An overview of what’s possible using Monotouch, Novell’s tool to enable C# and .Net based applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Find out what you need to start using Monotouch and how to create a sample application. If you have any questions on why you’d use this, what are the benefits and downsides of using Monotouch then this is your place!

There has been some debate around MonoTouch lately after info from Apple and leaks about iPhone OS 4.0. Their developer license now states that applications MUST be developed with the use ob Obj-C, C, C++ or JavaScript. Banning all 3rd party frameworks but mainly targeted at Adobe and Flex/Air it looks like,

15:00 – 16:00: MonoTouch deep dive with Chris Hardy

A deep dive into developing applications with MonoTouch. Learn about the different UI components available on the iPhone and iPad and how to use these with MonoTouch as well as how you can create interoperability with your .Net libraries within MonoTouch.

I really hope Novell will manage to resolve this issue with Apple, MonoTouch is a great way of using C# for iPhone and iPad development.

16:20 – 17:20: Top Security Scenarios for WCF Services: On Premise & In The Cloud with Michele Bustamante

Today you will be hard–pressed to find an enterprise application that does not rely on distributed messaging and service–orientation. Client applications such as rich clients, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) built with Silverlight or some flavor or AJAX, and those targeting mobile devices all access resources via services exposed to the intranet or Internet. Oftentimes the middle tier also includes layers of services living in the DMZ or behind it. There are many possible security models available for scenarios involving the various client technologies and service tiers – and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) supplies the tools necessary to implement each and every possibility. In this session, you will learn the most common and practical security scenarios that involve WCF services within the intranet or exposed to the Intranet including classic Windows security, username and password, certificates, federated identity, REST–based and securing calls between tiers. The session will also discuss scenarios that can benefit from aspects of Windows Azure platform including AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control – such as for securing services behind the DMZ and enabling federation for REST–based services. All examples will cover requirements for the client and service, give you a formula to achieve each scenario, and show you custom components that simplify implementation. You’ll leave this session with a recipe for the most common security scenarios including sample code to get you on your way.

17:40 – 18:40: Introducing the .NET Service Bus with Juval Löwy

The .NET services bus is part of the new Microsoft Cloud Computing Windows Azure initiative, and arguably, it is the most accessible, ready to use, powerful, and needed piece. The service bus allows clients to connects to services across any machine, network, firewall, NAT, routers, load balancers, virtualization, IP and DNS as if they were part of the same local network, and doing all that without compromising on the programming model or security. The service bus also supports callbacks, event publishing, authentication and authorization and doing all that in a WCF–friendly manner. This session will present the service bus programming model, how to configure and administer service bus solutions, working with the dedicated relay bindings including the available communication modes, relying on authentication in the cloud for local services and the various authentication options, and how to provide for end–to–end security through the relay service. You will also see some advanced WCF programming techniques, original helper classes, productivity–enhancing utilities and tools, as well as discussion of design best practices and pitfalls.

NDC Party night

A great day for learning new stuff! But also a night of partying!

NDC is famous for arranging great parties, and NDC 2010 is no exception. Last year our main attraction was the world renown Datarock, which turned out to be a huge hit. This year we have been lucky enough to attract one of Norway’s best live bands to NDC. Ralph Myerz & the Jack Herren bands new record will be out this spring, only months before they play at NDC 2010. You don’t want to miss this show!

Hopefully the party won’t stop me from getting through my third day agenda, but I think i’ll haack it.

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WPDC (Windows Phone Developer Community) is happy to announce that their next meetup will be held in collaboration with Microsoft.

Keep the calendar clean and sign up for a day of development goodies  on Friday, June 11. from 9 am to 4 pm.

WPDC and Microsoft are hosting a full day of sessions on Windows Phone 7 development with both Silverlight and XNA. We will also talk some about how to make money out of your development through the Marketplace and have a Q&A session to help answer any questions you may have about Windows Phone 7.

Important notice: For this meetup you cannot use the regular meetup.com sign up, but need to use MS Events signup form.

I hope I´ll see all of our WPDC members there. We also hope we can announce something that can be a fun challenge for us all. If you are interested in phone development also sign up and become members of our meetup group. It´s the place to stay in touch with other phone developers and receive notifications whenever we host group meetups.

While you are waiting – download the Windows Phone 7 development tools from http://developer.windowsphone.com for free, and start developing your applications and you find out what you need to ask the experts about.

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As I´d written earlier; Per Ola and I was invited to participate on the spring 2010 MSDN Live tour of Norway.

We´d been looking forward to this for a while and I must say that we were quite disappointed when we saw the news about the volcano eruption on Iceland and it´s effect on air travel…

Never lost behind a wagon we decided to drive. This is  a 6 hour drive from Oslo if you drive smart, if  you drive stupid it´s a 14 hour drive… Guess witch one we picked?

Images from the trip, Car on board computer stats, Per Ola at the Microsoft stand and the snow blizzard we ran into triving over the mountain (twice)

We picked the stupid one.  All-in-all stats for the Stavanger MSDN Live road trip was leaving Oslo at 3 pm Thursday, going through 15 hrs effective driving to Stavanger, 1,5 hour of sleep at the hotel, 8 hours at the Windows Phone stand at Stavanger Forum and a 5,5 hour drive back to Oslo.  An intense 30 hour period and i was most pleased to hit the sack at midnight Friday after the 1469 km drive.

Couple of important lessions learned for future road trips:

• If your travel route involves ferries; check their timetables! Do not drive for 2 hours to find out you have to drive 2 hours back because there´s no ferries going after 6 pm.
• Passing mountains; Check if the roads are open and not closed for the winter…
• Also respect convoy signs!

At the Forum we met a lot of people eager to learn more about both Windows Phone and about Windows Phone Developer Community. We also had a talk with NNUG about doing some common sessions on the use of Silverlight. Looking forward to talk more about this in Bergen and Oslo.

Next weekend I´m going to Bergen and I hope air traffic is back up. Also looking forward to GeekBeer on thursday.

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This year big event for Norwegian developers; NDC 2010 (Norwegian Developer Conference)  has an almost complete agenda and I thought I’d share my schedule for the first day. This is the  best session I’ve found seen from a Windows Phone developer perspective.

Visit the NDC2010 website for a full agenda and to purchase your tickets before it gets sold out!

10:20 – 11:20: Strategies against architecture with Kevlin Henney

This session looks at the reality of how development process and practices interact with the grander vision of architecture, the pitfalls of “architect as cop” and how to employ speculation and uncertainty to a system’s advantage.

Good architecture requires good vision and good people, but there are times when actions and decisions taken with the best of intent begin to work against an architecture. Instead of helping a system achievea long life, speculation about reuse, flexibility and generality can bring a system to an early grave, weighing the codebase down with accidental complexity that invites workarounds and, ultimately, a new ad hoc architectural style. Documentation intended to be helpful becomes shelfware, ignored equally by its authors and its prospective readership. Dysfunctional memes in code and tests go unchecked because the detail of code is not considered a part of the architecture. Instead of stability and responsiveness, an architecture achieves stasis and loses reflex.

11:40 – 12:40: Architecture of the client tier for WPF & Silverlight with Billy Hollis

Stateful client–based technologies for user interfaces, such as WPF and Silverlight, require more sophisticated design and architecture for the client tier than typical web applications. This session discusses the construction of a client–based navigation shell that replaces server–based navigation for a cleaner, more responsive user experience in multi–page applications. Implementation of capabilities such as data validation, temporary caching of unsaved data to allow for network downtime, and graceful shutdown will all be discussed. The session features a working model that attendees can use as a starting point for their own projects.

13:40 – 14:40: Programming with GUTs (Good Unit Tests) with Kevlin Henney

These days testing is considered sexy for programmers. Who’d havethought it? But there is a lot more to effective programmer testing than the fashionable donning of a unit–testing framework: writing Good Unit Tests (GUTs) involves (a lot) more than knowledge of assertion syntax.

What style of test partitioning is most common, and yet scales poorly and is ineffective at properly expressing the behaviour of a class or component? What styles, tricks and tips can be used to make tests more specification–like and scalable? In answering these questions (and more), this session uses C# and NUnit to examine what it takes to program with GUTs.

15:00 – 16:00: Design, Don’t decorate with Billy Hollis

Putting the advanced capabilities of WPF and Silverlightto full use requires collaboration, experimentation, and iterativeprototyping. In this session, you’ll see all five sequential prototypes for the acclaimed StaffLynxapplication (as seen on .NET Rocks TV), and discuss practices that worked and didn’t work in real–world advanced UI development. We’ll also discuss the role of visual and interactivedesigners in creating new era user interfaces, give some tips on how to think about using WPF and Silverlight capabilities to make interfaces feel natural and less stressful to users, and cover the most valuable lessons learned from a real–world project using advanced, next generation user interface technology.

16:20 – 17:20: TDD/BDD & functional programming with Amanda Laucher

We’ve all been hearing about how important functional programming is going to be when dealing with multicore development and advanced logic programming. If we are not already, we will be introducing some sort of functional code into our current systems. We’vespent years looking at how agile techniques help us to develop better software. We use TDD and BDD to drive abstractions in object oriented languages, but can the same be done with functional abstractions? It has become invaluable to have the regression suite available for updates to our software. Do we need such a suite with functional languages that encourage no side effects? In this session we’ll look at what practices will be necessary to effectively introduce functional languages into our systems.

17:40 – 18:40: Windows Azure AppFabric? with Clemens Vasters

As one of the key platform providers for enterprise solutions today, Microsoft realizes that there are very many assets in corporate datacenters that are not easily moved to the cloud. A lot of data is subject to government or corporate regulation about data protection that does not allow for the data to be hosted off–site and over the past decade, companies have made enormous investments in streamlining and integrating their applications in ways that make it not particularly attractive to break out parts of that integration chain and move them off into the cloud as insular solutions. The Windows Azure AppFabric’s Service Bus and Access Control services which Clemens will introduce in this session are about bridging these gaps and to provide application–to–application connectivity and access control federation across network and trust scopes.

This is what I think i´ll get the most out of listening to on day one. I´ve also posted my plans for day two of NDC.

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In a couple of week it´s kick-off for his year technology spring tour MSDN & TechNet Live. Anyone interested in Learning the latest news on Asure, SharePoint 2010, Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010.  On the tour it´ll also be a showcase stand for Windows Phone 7 Series and I´ll be there at the stand answering whatever question you might have about wPhone7 in Stavanger (16.4), Bergen (23.4) and Oslo (26.4).

Don’t be shy, come and say hi!

Buy your tickets here. You can view the full track program for MSDN Live here, and for TechNet Live here.

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The MSDN Live tour is open for registration with a great program this year! The tour will be going to Stavanger on April 16th, Trondheim on April 20th, Bergen April 23rd and Oslo April 26th.

If you attend, come visit the the Windows Phone stand! My colleague Per Ola and I will be there answering mobile development questions in all city’s.

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Windows Phone Developer Community meetup has been scheduled for Thursday March 4th. It will be held at The Scotsman downtown Oslo.

Speakers for the evening is Frank Dahle, usability expert and designer. He’s “mantra” of “Mobile design is to mobilize – not to miniaturize” is something i strongly believe in and are looking forward to help spread. keywords for Frank’s talk will be; Design is how it works -not how it looks, understanding the user, design for flow and the next generation of mobile apps.

The second speaker(s) for the evening is Ronny Gydar and Trine Nesland of Gydar Industries and developers of the norwegian windows mobile program series “TrineSeries”.  They will be talking about their applications, how and why they started and about the technology behind their applications.

We are also lucky enough to have Kristine Bjørnstad who is the acting Windows Phone Lead at Microsoft Norway to come tell us more about the Microsoft headlines announced at MWC (Mobile World Congress)

Sign up and read more on the WPDC meetup page.  This info is also available in my norwegian blog.

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Planning has started for the second Windows Phone Developer Community meetup. The meetup topic wil be usability and UX on small screen devices. We have contacted a highly skilled UX professional and he’ll be giving a 45-60 minutes speak on the topic.

We would also like to have an application showcase that shows the use of good UX and are open for suggestions from users and developers. If you are a developer and would like to show off you app at the meetup, don’t hesitate, get in touch with us.

The meetup will take place in Oslo in the beginning of March.

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Does the blogging activity of the Microsoft compact framework development team reflect it’s development activity?

I sure hope not because then they haven’t been up to much since august 2009.  The .NET compact framework team blog should have been a driving force for information about windows phone development, but is just quite anoyingly “dead”. Another blog hosted by blog.msdn.com called “The team blog for the mobile developer group“  shows the last posting from December 2008 as it’s last post. 

With all the hammering MS is getting from everywhere about it’s mobility strategy and development, are they giving up? is the battle lost?

Does anyone know of other official blog channels from Microsoft on the compact framework or Windows Phone? please let me know!

[EDIT]
And just as i posted this, i found two blogs that looks very good, is updated and seems to post info in regular intervals; the Windows Phone blog and the Windows Mobile Developer blog. The mobile developer blog could easily contain more development with compact framework related stuff, but for now it looks like a good source for widget development and marketplace information.

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WPDC has it’s first meetup next Thursday on December 3rd.  at 6 pm. The meeting will be held at NITH, located in Grønland.

View Schweigaards gate 14 in a larger map

In this first meetup we want to use more as a “constitutional” meeting. Getting to know those who are interested in Windows Phone development and most importantly find others who are interested in being “driving forces” and help build the community.

We are also hosting a demo of a large scale industrial mobility solution created for the Norwegian postal service Bring. It is a logistics application helping terminal workers and drivers manage packaged goods through the value chain. Currently this solution is out running on about 9 000 Motorola Symbol MC70 rugged pda’s in Scandinavia.

We have set up a meetup.com account for those interested in becoming members, get information about meetups and to help us get an overview of how many is coming.

Pizza will be served for those hungry.

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