CodeClimber

I wanted to buy a Nokia Lumia 800 for a while now, but since I wanted to buy it for Daniela I wanted to buy the pink magenta version, and I couldn’t find it neither in Italy nor in Belgium. Since I’m now in Bellevue for the MVP Summit, I decided to take advantage of a promotion done by Microsoft Store and buy the Lumia 800 bundle, which includes the Lumia 800, the Purity Monster headphones, the Play 360 speaker and the Luna Bluetooth headset, all for 899USD + taxes (984USD in WA) which is 730€. If you consider the...

After the Node.js resource list and the list of book for Arduino, the third part of the 2011 summer book list is about Windows Phone 7. The platform is still pretty young, and there are no books that cover both the feature of the device together with some best practices and, something that is important in phone development, the developer/designer workflow. For that reason this list includes also books about Silverlight and WPF. Core skills Silverlight 4 Unleashed Even if not specific to Windows Phone 7, this book is one of the best (if not THE best)...

This August, if you are on holiday and are not in snorkeling in a lagoon in a tropical island, or if you are work but not many things to do due to the summer period, you could spend half an hour (or half a day, or a full day) getting up to speed with the latest cool technologies of the moment: HTML5 Windows Phone 7 “Mango” update Azure Visual Studio ALM (well, this is not as cool as the others, but as...

In this post I’m going to introduce a Mopapp, a mobile app sales analytics site I am using to track the downloads of my FeedTso WP7 app. It is a startup by an Italian developer, and it is competing as BizSpark European Summit Start-up for the year. If you think it is a cool idea, I’d really appreciate if you could vote for it. The problem it solves If you have developed a Windows Phone 7 application and put it online in the MarketPlace you might have found that the reporting capabilities of MarketPlace backoffice are not that...

Yesterday evening Daniela and I did a quick 10 minutes presentation during the third edition of Microsoft Belgium Web Café, at the Microsoft Innovation Center in Mons. The presentation was about the lessons we learned during the development of our Windows Phone 7 application, FeedTso. FeedTso, History of a WP7 FeedReader View more presentations from Simone Chiaretta The presentation is quite image intensive, with not many words, but if go to the presentation page on SlideShare you can read everything we said...

A few months I described how I handled the encoding bug of the WebBrowser control in WP7. Unfortunately it was not just a problem with the “smart quotes” but also with all non western characters, and the naïve solution to the problem caused a performance problem. Let’s see how I solved it. The problem I needed a more general purpose character replacing procedure, like the second one I mentioned in the previous post: foreach (char value in strText) { int decValue = int.Parse(string.Format("{0:x4}", (int)value), ...

In the last few months you have probably noticed a few posts about Windows Phone 7, about my experience using it and about some little problems I found using the web browser. The reason is that, together with Daniela, we were working on a news feed reader for Windows Phone 7, called FeedTso. Today I’m happy to announce that after a few months of coding nights, yesterday we released the first version of FeedTso on the Zune Marketplace. What is FeedTso? FeedTso is a news feed reader that works as Google Reader client. We call...

While finalizing the v1 of the news reader for WP7 I’m working on, I noticed that sometimes the text in the WebBrowser control contained some little squares. It was not an encoding problem because accented characters were displayed correctly. “Smart Quotes” are the problem After a while I understood that the squares were displayed when there was a “smart quote” (yes, that ones) that was not correctly escaped in the post (as in not using the correct HTML entity). And this is more common than you thing, because most Windows applications, like WLW and Word, automatically change the...

Exactly as the title says, remember to encode the url you want to open in the external browser via the WebBrowserTask, always. This is probably the first of a series of posts I’m going to write about some problems I found while developing FeedTso, a feed news reader application for WP7, of course with the solution. But let’s go back to the problem. How to open a url in the WP7 web browser from your application Well, this is easy: WebBrowserTask task = new WebBrowserTask(); task.URL = "http://feedtso.com/"; task.Show(); ...