10 days to go and i am off. Tickets and hotel are booked and i am going to Las Vegas and the Mandalay Hotel & Casino for the MIX10 conference.

After the launch of Windows Phone 7 Series at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona i am really looking forward to get a deep dive into the development capabilities of the new OS.

With me I’ll bring along a Canon 5D Mark II camera for snapshots and i’ll post updates as soon as time permits. Continue Reading

I am happy to see that Microsoft are working on an updated version of their 70-540 exam for Windows Mobile 5.0 application development. -It’s given the certification number 70-580 and is named TS: Windows Mobile 6.5, Application Development. It currently ”in development” and due as i understand it for release March 18, 2010.  From the list of “Skills being measured” in this exam it looks like Microsoft has put a bit more thought into what you actually need to learn before you venture into compact framework development.  If they at the same time upgrade the Microsoft Mobile Developer Handbookboth the exam and book will be a great starting point for new mobile application developers.

I hope that there will be a certification upgrade possibility for those of us that already has the 70-540  certification.

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) Continue Reading

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! Continue Reading

If you are in Oslo, and you’re a developer that do Windows Phone software development, or are curious about what’s in it you should come to the December meetup for Windows Phone Developer Community.

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. Continue Reading

Friday and time to do some browsing for interesting news.

I´ve been browsing for a long time now, looking for a mocking or isolation framework  to aid me with my unit tests. So far, i have not found anything.

Both NUnit and MSTest work with the compact framework. but none of the available mocking/isolation frameworks does so we are stuck with manually creating stubs and mocks. This is very time consuming and in a larger project you ´re going to have a hard time convincing anyone that there is time and money enough to replicate everything as mocks.

So, what to do? for the better part of a year i have from time to time been “nagging” Typemock about this, unfortunately with no luck yet. Today i posted a feature request to their forum with a poll and i would like everyone that are interested in compact framework development to keep hitting that yes button

The reason for targeting Typemock is that i totally likes their full framework version, it is _the_ best mock/isolation framework available. Continue Reading

Today was a cool day!

Finally the Windows Phone Developer Community is announced and started. I was attending a developer presentation for Windows Mobile 6.5 and Microsoft Marketplace today and just before we broke for lunch i was called to stage to “tell the world” that on Thursday 3. December 2009 we´ll host the first meeting.

This first meetup will be mostly about getting to know each other, and find out who´s interested in becoming driving forces. It is not to be taken lightly that if this is to have any form of success it needs to have support and contribution from developers.

For the occasion we have set up a meetup.com group to handle “members” and announcement of meeting events, so check it out at http://www.meetup.com/Windows-Phone-Developer-Community/. Continue Reading

Finally! There is something on the move here. In May i was writing about that I was looking for a Norwegian Compact Framework User Group or something like a dedicated compact framework development forum for us .netcf developers here up north. With no luck finding one I have been brewing on the idea of trying to start a compact framework community, trying to gather some people that are willing to help promote and arrange.

Myself I am quite happy (and lucky) being able to work dedicated in a mobility department for mobile solutions. From designing enterprise back-end systems that can be used by mobile devices, to client applications interacting with existing business systems. Not to mention being a mobility consultant helping organizations streamline their work flow and processes to mobilize the workforce.  This has been both industrial applications running on dedicated ruggedized devices, one which is out running on 9000 windows mobile devices today and general business applications delivering back-end data to windows mobile devices within a company.

As i said, i am quite happy, but also I feel quite isolated. It’s no community feel to it, and there isn’t much buzz around it, for instance when was the last time you went to a Norwegian convention and anyone talked about mobility and development for devices? The closest thing is going to TechEd Europe. Continue Reading

Here´s a short how-to for getting started with gestures in your Windows Mobile applications. First how you set up your device project, and then i explain how it works using the managed gesture wrapper from MSDN.

First of all you need to consider if you would like to do it the “hardcore” way? by doing all the P/Invoke native calls yourself (then this documentation on MSDN is really useful) or if you just want to get gestures working and use the managed wrapper available in the MSDN code library, - You can also find the source code for the  wrapper there if you later need to find out how it really works. I haven´t  investigated the wrapper library yet, so I am not sure if it  encapsulates all the native functionality that is available.

First of all; Start Visual Studio 2008 and create a new device application solution. There is no specific Windows Mobile 6.5 application template so you just choose a Windows Mobile 6 project. Next you need to do is to add a reference to Microsoft.WindowsMobile.Gestures.dll (assuming now that you have downloaded the dll file) in your WYSIWYG in VS08.

1. Right click on the General tab in the toolbox and select “choose items…”
2. In the “Choose toolbox items” dialog select the browse button in the “.NET Framework Components” tab
3. Browse to where you extracted the Gestures dll file and select it.
4. A component called “GestureRecognizer” has it´s checkbox checked and selected.  Click the OK button.

Continue Reading

On Thursday, October 15. (09:00 – 14:30). Microsoft Norway invites developers to Lysaker for a day of  Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace development information. This is a free seminar aimed at developers. This is not only for those already working with mobile development, but also useful for anyone curious about what this is and how to get started.

The first part of the day will be about about WM 6.5, where Director for Windows Phones Norway, Camilla Viken Teigre gives a demo on the new UI and talks about what’s new and improved in this release.

From Finland Vesa-Matti Paananen will be walking us through Marketplace. What is Marketplace and why create Windows Phone applications. Continue Reading