Tag: Windows Phone 7

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Visual Basic for Windows Phone!

"Surprise!" Rick Claus reels back in amazement from the flame-burst of a teppanyaki onion volcano

It Makes Sense…

It makes sense, after all:

  • You can develop Silverlight applications in Visual Basic.
  • You can developer Windows Phone 7 apps in Silverlight.
  • Why can’t you develop Windows Phone 7 Silverlight apps in Visual Basic?

That’s the question a number of developers have been asking, as Brandon Watson’s earlier tweet hinted:

Brandon Watson's tweet: "Anyone care to guess what the biggest request from the #wp7dev community has been for the #wp7 dev tools and platform?

Here’s What You Get

And we’re now one step closer to that becoming real. Today on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, Brandon announced the availability of Visual Basic CTP (that’s “Community Technology Preview”) for Windows Phone Developer Tools.

With it, you get:

  • Visual Basic application templates for Windows Phone 7 Silverlight apps
  • UI designer support for Visual Basic
  • Emulator and phone support for Visual Basic
  • and of course, Intellisense support for Visual Basic

In short, everything the Visual Basic developer needs to start writing Silverlight apps for WP7.

And Now, the Fine Print

"Warning" icon

Remember, unlike the C# tools, which have been Released to Manufacturing, Visual Basic for Windows Phone is CTP, and remember that the “P” stands for “Preview” and that CTP comes before Beta.

Be advised that:

  • As a Community Technology Preview, this is an early access program to a work in progress. It’s meant for you to try out and give us feedback about it. It is not a final implementation, and as such, you should expect to use it to write apps that are ready for Marketplace.
  • There’s no go-live license for this CTP. That means you can’t use this particular version to build apps for commercial release. It’s not ready for prime time yet!
  • You need Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium or Ultimate. Sorry, but Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone isn’t going to work with this version. If you’re really itching to try writing VB apps for WP7, Brandon suggests downloading a trial version of Visual Studio Pro.
  • Visual Basic for Windows Phone is for writing Silverlight apps only. If you want to write XNA-based games and apps, you have to do it in C#.

Why Visual Basic?

Cover of Rodney Dangerfield's "No Respect" albumVisual Basic takes a lot of heat from developers, both within and outside the Microsoft developer community. Perhaps it’s because it’s derived from BASIC, back when the name was an acronym and the “B” stood for Beginner’s. It could also be that there is a history of some really atrocious code being written in VB. I think it’s because it brought the power of programming to everyone, which annoys people who are deeply invested in keeping programming a sort of “high priesthood”, a club where not everyone can be a member.

That’s snobbery, and it’s also a shame. One of the purposes of languages like Visual Basic is that it opened the world of programming to “domain experts” – people who know the ins and outs of the fields or businesses for which applications are written. People who’ll actually have to use those applications. Languages like Visual Basic empower these people who have the domain knowledge take their ideas and turn them into apps without having to always “outsource” it to one of us. They capture the best parts of the “DIY” spirit, and we should be encouraging the people who use them, not denigrating them for using a “toy”.

I think of this as the antithesis of programming for the Esteemed Competition’s mobile platforms, whether you’ve opted for the wide open but fragmented one, or the more closed one where you have to chase pointers, write method declarations twice and are a barely-tolerated “fourth party developer”. Phone development with Visual Basic makes it easy for anyone with an idea and the will to work – but not the programming background – to dive in and start seeing results quickly.

I think that’s a good thing.

Download Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Windows Phone 7 Advanced Training Today!

Windows Phone 7 deviceI know that this is incredibly short notice, but I just heard about it myself:

Join us on September 21 2010 at 8.00 am PDT (11:00 EDT) for the first of two Office Live Meeting broadcasts.

The Microsoft Windows Phone 7 marketplace will open in October, and Microsoft wants to help you make your app the best that it can be. If you would like to ensure that you’ve considered key submission criteria and that your app is of the highest quality, this free live training is for you!

Join Rob S. Miles and Andy Wigley once again (both MS Press authors and MVP’s) for an engaging training on advanced topics for Windows Phone 7 application and game development.

We’re also including a session on Windows Phone Design and Designing with Blend, taught by Microsoft SME’s Bryan Agnetta and Jon Harris. Bryan is a Senior User interface Program Manager in the design studio for Windows Phone 7 team. His responsibilities include managing the Design Integration team and Program Manager for Application development in the studio. His 9+ year tenure at Microsoft has all been with the Windows Phone User Experience team. Jon is the Senior Product Manager for Expression Blend and SketchFlow. He joined Microsoft as the first User Experience Evangelist! And now 4 years later, 4 releases of Blend, 4 releases of Silverlight and a new release of Blend 4 for Windows Phone… you get the benefit of his expertise in this session.

The last hour is dedicated to the questions you have. We’ve pulled together a panel of Microsoft SME’s in addition to Rob, Andy, Jon and Bryan. Through the Live Meeting Q&A function, you can get all your Windows Phone 7 development questions answered real time.

Sign up for both Part One and Part Two to get full coverage.

Here’s the agenda:

Part One: Tuesday, September 21, 2010, 11 a.m. – 2 p.m. EDT

Click here to register for Part One.

Time Subject
11:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. EDT Panorama and Pivots
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. XNA Deep Dive (includes a 10-minute break)

 

Part Two: September 21, 2010, 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. EDT

Click here to register for Part Two.

Time Subject
3:00 p.m. – 3:50 p.m. EDT Bing Maps
4:00 p.m. – 4:50 p.m. Planning and Optimizing for Performance
5:00 p.m. – 5:50 p.m. Windows Phone 7 Design and Design using Microsoft Blend
6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m. Live Q&A Panel with Microsoft SME’s

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Upcoming Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Codes / Deployment Clinics

coffee and code

Update (Sept. 21 @ 6:15 p.m. EDT): Made some corrections to the schedule.

We’re out there, and we want to help you with your Windows Phone 7 development by giving you a chance to deploy your apps to an advance-release Windows Phone 7 device for testing! We’ll be in the following cities on the following dates:

Wednesday, September 22 in Ottawa (Coffee and Code)

Colin Melia and Rick “Claus” Claus from Microsoft’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team will be at Bridgehead Cafe (224 Dalhousie Street) from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. to host a Coffee and Code there. Drop in, say hi, have a coffee, ask questions and if you’ve got an app, try deploying it to a real live Windows Phone 7 device!

Thursday, September 23 in Toronto (Coffee and Code)

Join Kate Gregory and me as we host a Coffee and Code at the Starbucks at King and Yonge (4 King Street West) from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., where we’ll merge with the Coffee and iOS group who are coming in at 4:00 p.m.. Want to find out more about WP7 or iOS development? This is the time and place!

See Kate’s blog entry about this Coffee and Code.

Wednesday, September 29 in Montreal (Coffee and Code)

Join “les bons gars”, Christian Beauclair and Guy Barrette, who’ll be holding a Coffee and Code at Le Café de la Cité on 75 Queen. They put on a professional appearance, but we all know qu’ils vont ecrire des «fart apps»! They’ll be doing it in both official languages: Silverlight and XNA!

Thursday, September 30 in Montreal (Deployment Clinic)

Deployment clinics are a little more formal than Coffee and Codes. You can book an exclusive timeslot to deploy and test apps to a Windows Phone 7 device, and there’s one taking place all day at Microsoft’s Montreal office (2000 Avenue McGill College, 4th floor) on the 30th. Email Christian Beauclair to reserve a time slot.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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FITC Mobile 2010

FITC Mobile 2010: The Windows Phone 7 booth

What is FITC?

What a week! On Thursday, I was in Vancouver at the Take 5 Cafe making an all-too-brief appearance at the Windows Phone 7 Coffee and Code, and on Friday I was at FITC Mobile 2010 in Toronto, minding the Windows Phone 7 booth.

FITC Mobile 2010 is part of a larger group of conferences called Mobile Innovation Week, which took place in Toronto last week and comprised:

FITC logoFITC (pronounced “Fit-See” by those in the know) is a descendant of the Toronto Flash user group FlashinTO, which I know from my old days as a Macromedia Director developer working at a little interactive shop called Mackerel. Local Flash/interactive media guru Shawn Pucknell started the group, and from it came a Toronto-based event in 2002 called “Flash in the Can”. Since then, the events have spread all over the world and expanded to cover more topics, so Flash in the Can became FITC. It’s great to see that Shawn’s still directing FITC, and it was good to chat with him – it’s been too long – and we’ve got to talk sometime about how Microsoft can participate in other FITC events.

(And now you know why the FITC logo features an old-school can opener.)

This was FITC Mobile’s second year. Its goal was to cover as wide an assortment of aspects of mobile development and content development as possible, with presentations, demonstration and panel discussions. The schedule was packed with all sorts of useful sessions, which covered:

  • Mobile operating systems: Android, BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone 7
  • Tools: Flash, HTML5, Unity and Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone
  • Ideas: Marketing, usability, design, Canada’s place in the mobile world and the current state of Canada’s mobile industry

What I Saw

I spent most of my time at the Windows Phone 7 booth, showing off the phone and the development tools to passers-by. I did manage to get away and take a peek at some of the presentations, including:

Here are the slides from Paul Trani’s Mobile Design That Doesn’t Suck session:

Here area couple of photos I snapped at Mark Arteaga’s Windows Phone 7 presentation:

View of Mark Arteaga's presentation from the back of the room

View of Mark Arteaga's presentation from the front of the room

The “Booth Brains”

Anthony Vranic and Sean Kearney hack away as Barranger Ridler and Cory Fowler demonstrate Windows Phone 7 to a visitor to the booth

On Friday, I minded the booth with my coworkers Mandy Kaur, Yue He, Paul Laberge and Anthony Bartolo, but I was the only one available on Saturday. I put out a call for “Booth Brains” and got a number of responses. In the end, these four local heroes came in for the whole day:

  • Cory Fowler
  • Sean Kearney
  • Barranger Ridler
  • Anthony Vranic

My thanks to you four (and Yue, who showed up for a couple of hours too!) I couldn’t have done Saturday without your help.

Barranger Ridler and Cory Fowler demonstrating Windows Phone 7 to a booth visitor

We had a great number of people show up to the booth, curious about Windows Phone 7. We showed them the development tools – Visual Studio Express for Phone, Expression Blend and the WP7 emulator – and they got to get their mitts on an actual Windows Phone 7 device. Everyone who came by was impressed by the look, feel and responsiveness of WP7; I think we changed more than a few minds there.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from TechDays Vancouver, Part 4: Go DevMENTAL

Go DevMental: Our event for students

What is Go DevMENTAL?

Since TechDays – Microsoft Canada’s cross-country developer and IT pro conference visiting 8 cities across Canada this fall – is a two-day event, we’ve got the venues for the entire 48-hour period, including evenings. Rather than have the session rooms (which are already set up for an audience, complete with A/V and seating) lie fallow, we decided to put them to good use and hold free community events in the evenings. One of these events is Go DevMENTAL, where we show college and university students what they can build using Microsoft’s tools and technologies and give them a lot of free stuff.

Go DevMENTAL is a two-track conference, with one track devoted to web design and development using WebMatrix, Expression Blend and Silverlight, while the other covers mobile development for Windows Phone 7 using Silverlight and XNA. At the end of the evening, we give the students a token for DreamSpark, our program that gives them free Microsoft development tools and operating systems and a DVD full of goodies so they can start coding right away.

If you’re a college or university student and would like to have an informative and entertaining evening where you learn cool new things, get free cool stuff, connect with industry people and get some help with your career, register for Go DevMental!

Where is Go DevMENTAL?

We’ll be hitting these cities on these dates:

City Where When
Edmonton Shaw Convention Centre October 5
Toronto Metro Toronto Convention Centre
South Building		 October 27
Halifax World Trade Centre November 2
Ottawa Hampton Inn Ottawa
(200 Coventry Road)		 November 9
Montreal Palais Des Congres November 23
Winnipeg Winnipeg Convention Centre December 7
Calgary Round-Up Centre
(Calgary Stampede Park)		 December 14

What Happened at Go DevMENTAL Vancouver?

Go DevMENTAL Vancouver took place on Tuesday, September 14th in the West Building of the Vancouver Convention Centre, a gorgeous venue (for more, see this entry).

I was helping out with the Phone track, so I only managed to get photos for its sessions. My colleages in Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, Christian Beauclair and John Bristowe, took care of the Web track, while Mark Arteaga of Redbit Development and I ran the Phone track.

Here’s Mark setting up for his presentation, as the students and a number of professors milled into the room. We had some drinks and snacks set up in the back; that’s what the line at the back of the room is all about:

Photo of the session room, with Mark Arteaga setting up his computer in the foreground

And we’re off! Mark did the first presentation, which focused on app development with Silverlight.

The audience in the Phone track at Go DevMENTAL Vancouver

By the end of his session, he had a working, skinnable Magic 8-Ball app that responded to the user shaking the phone. The app was flexible enough so that it would be really easy to repurpose it as a fortune cookie app, the Wisdom of Master Yoda app and so on, without having to touch any code.

Mark Arteaga makes his presentation

Mark’s session was followed by a break, which concluded with a quick accordion performance by Yours Truly:

Joey deVilla plays accordion at Go DevMENTAL

Followed by a quick word from Andrew Gottlieb, a Microsoft recruiter who works the UBC campus looking for the next great Microsofties. If you’re looking for a job at Microsoft and you’re a student in the Vancouver area, you’re going to want to drop him a line.

Joey deVilla plays his accordion at Go DevMENTAL as Andrew Gottlieb stands beside him

Then came my presentation, a live-coding exercise in which we start with “File –> New Project…” and in 45 minutes, put together a game in which you get to smack Justin Bieber around. Let it never be said that I let professionalism stand in the way of a good coding presentation‘

Joey deVilla makes his presentation, holding up a piece of paper

Live coding in front of an audience is not for the weak of heart, and you’d better really know your stuff. But when you do it right, it’s fun for both you and the audience.

In these photos, I’m holding up two pieces of paper as a way of explaining collision detection using bounding boxes. It’s not every day you see some goof in an ironic hipster trucker cap talking about videogame fundamentals!

Joey deVilla makes his presentation at Go DevMENTAL holding up two pieces of paper

After the student sessions, I made my way to the faculty roundtable where we chatted with the professors about what Microsoft could do for them.

It was great meeting the students and faculty – I had a great time, and also learned a lot from them. I’m looking forward to the upcoming Go DevMENTAL cities. See you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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I Need “Booth Brains”!

you could be here

I need “booth brains” at the Windows Phone 7 booth at FITC Mobile 2010 tomorrow (Saturday). “Booth brains” are like “booth bunnies”, but smarter (and of either gender).

If you’re technically inclined and curious about Windows Phone 7 or a Windows Phone 7 developer who’d like some deployment time with a real Windows Phone 7 device, this is your opportunity! I need to maintain the Windows Phone 7 booth at the FITC Mobile 2010 conference at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre tomorrow from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.. Right now, I’m the only person available to take care of the booth and I need help! You don’t need to know everything about Windows Phone 7 – I can brief you. I need enthusiastic people who can help me run things, and I’ll feed you, too!

(And yes, helping me gets you into FITC 2010, and we can take turns minding the booth so you can catch a session or two.)

Interested in helping me out? Drop me a line – and as soon as possible, please!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Scenes from TechDays Vancouver, Part 2

phone1

One of the hot topics at this year’s TechDays conference is Windows Phone 7. With a new user interface featuring a design that isn’t all “me too”, a “glance and go” approach that doesn’t have you riffling through pages of apps and not one but two programming models that meet specific (and very different) needs, it’s a very promising mobile platform. No wonder a lot of developers want to get in on the ground floor with WP7.

phone2

The buzz about Windows Phone 7 translated into a packed room for Mark Arteaga’s session, the first of a two-part series on WP7 development with Silverlight.

phone3

Here’s the room about a minute or so into his session, with all seats taken and the people still filtering in and starting to take “standing room only” spots in the back. The packed room got an intro to WP7 development with Silverlight, input goodies like the virtual keyboard, accelerometer and microphone and APIs to take advantage of internal features like email, phone dialer, contacts and more.

phone4

Later this morning (Pacific time), Mark will continue with Part 2 of his session, where he’ll cover the life cycle of apps on Windows Phone, control templates, themes and web services available to Windows Phone.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.