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

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

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

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

It’s friday and time for some fun, and having a look at the gesture and physics engine of WM 6.5 qualifies as such . Googling for developer references i found that on august 26th and september 2nd 2009 Microsoft through Alex Yakhnin and Ron Buckton hosted two developer webcasts (level 400) on the gesture and physics engine of Windows Mobile 6.5.

This was a really useful intro on how to implement this your own .netcf applications. Gestures are supported in the existing standard ListView, Listbox, WebView, TreeView and Tab controls. and you get this characteristics just by running the application on a WM 6.5 device. But to programmatically control the gestures you need to handle the Select, Scroll, Pan, Hold and DoubleSelect events.

A detailed guide on how for the gesture apithis can be found on MSDN here. To fully understand this you need to be familiar with P/Invoke and native calls. Continue Reading

EDIT: a step closer now: http://agilemobility.net/2009/10/15/getting-the-developer-community-up-and-running/

Norwegian? Want to help create a developer community? I need your help!

What I miss is having a developer community like i had when i did regular .net work. I miss seeing technology relevant sessions on MSDN Live or NDC and i want to do something about it. Maybe even a MSDN Mobile event?

Who am I? Continue Reading

Soon Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketplace will open and the power of fart and flashlight applications will be unleashed onto us, and windows mobile powered devices world wide. Windows  Mobile 6.5  will set us a blaze with gestures and multi touch, and we’ll have the coolest scrollable lists ever made for small screens. Still, while looking at the new glossy mobile UI features created with Eye Candy plug-ins for PhotoShop I wonder, how do you make money out of windows mobile as a software company or ISV? What level of enterprise support is planned into the future releases of the Windows Mobile?

As a developer and solution architect of enterprise industrial applications, mainly targeted for rugged windows mobile powered devices, I see several basic needs for improvement when it comes to support for industrialization of Windows Mobile, – Unless it’s planned life cycle is to be the OS of a fairly advanced MP3 player with phone capabilities. If so, please let us know so we can all go start our Android open source library projects sooner rather than later.

so, what’s needed? Continue Reading

Tired of your old windows mobile home screen? – not happy with the HTC overlay?

Russian company Spb Software has created what I think  must be one of the nicest looking shell replacements for Windows Mobile devices ever!  Features for version 3 is Widgets, Professional and lifestyle home screens, Facebook integration, 3D screen switcher, Kinetic scrolling  and Windows Mobile 6.5 support.  Mobile Shell 3.0 was announced at Mobile World Congress in February and “rumored” to be released in April/May.

Enjoy the short video demo for now. I’ll post an update with a review later.

After years, Jonathan Noble has had it. In a long letter to a dear friend and companion he had to lay out the reasons - trying to explain why it is necessary to part for both of them to grow as mobile users.

No matter how ironic written, it’s got quite a spike of truth to it. Is Windows Mobile 6.5 coming to late?  Are we as developers soooo stuck in the winform of stylus usage (kill the datagrid) ?  Are we unable see and think of new ways of developing software – mere copycats?

I hope not! I hope that with the release of 6.5 and the implementation of gestures and touch controls, we will get the toolbox we need to drive the innovation further beyond single process apps and copy/paste.