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

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

It had to come and competition is great. We are seeing more of 3rd party application stores for mobile solutions. Freeware Pocket PC has opened up an alternative application store for Windows Phones promising instant free downloads for your Windows Mobile phone.  OpnMarket is compatible with most of the Windows Mobile Professional devices with touch-screens, once installed it lets you browse, download and install FREE applications directly on your device. OpnMarket will use your mobile network connection or a WiFi connection to download software to your phone. It’s simple, instant and FREE  with access to more than 6,700 free windows mobile games, tools and themes.

The installer cab can be downloaded from here.

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.

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

When it comes to application development on the Windows Phone platform things are on the move. Lessons are being learned from the iPhone and its usability experience, from the Android platform etc. The lesson learned is that you need to pay extra attention to how your application looks and feel.

You should not under estimate the possibility of usability and design being the selling point in a purchase decisions before feature richness in a case  where two  similar featured apps are compared, where one looks and feels good, and the other has an extra amount of features beyond the core functionality it should handle.

As i am on the look out for a UI toolkit to standardize our enterprise development at work  on I´ll compile a list of libraries that could do the job as i find them. The criteria for the search is ease of use and finger friendliness. Hopeful others also find this list useful. 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

To help spawn some better facebook apps and services on the Windows Phone platform someone has proposed support for compact framework as a new feature to the Facebook developer kit. 

Visit the proposition site and sign in with your CodPlex or create an account and vote for this.

It’s needed

A bit late, but i was planning to comment on an article (in Norwegian) from beginning of November  that refere to a statement from the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2009 conference.

Made by Gartner analyst Monica Basso that muses that the Windows Mobile OS doesn´t have a future, that Microsoft is working to slow, and that they’re not able to renew the OS according to whims and wishes of the consumers. That they will not be able to regain any market share because of that.

Basis for this is according to Gartner that the Windows Mobile platform is to big and not dynamic enough to be scaled down to function on the less powerful and not so advanced phones, aka the regular cellphones(?) that dominates today’s mobile market. 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