I ran into an interesting problem today that warrants a blog post to hopefully help someone searching when they hit it themselves.
Last night, I turned on my phone only to be greeted with a helpful message informing me that my application gReadie had been revoked by Microsoft and that I should uninstall it.
I recently decided to switch gReadie away from JSON.Net to ServiceStack.Text for it’s heavy JSON processing of the Google Reader API.
While there was no WP7 dll available in the NuGet package the source was all on GitHub, so using my recently learned Git skills, I forked the project and added my own project file targeted at WP7.
One of the most useful new tools with the latest Windows Phone SDK is the Isolated Storage Explorer.
It is a command line tool used for downloading and uploading the contents of an application’s Isolated Storage folders to either the Emulator or a Device.
There are two times when this is invaluable.
I thought I would share two quick lessons today. Learnt while submitting the latest gReadie update to the marketplace.
Late last year when I implemented the unread count Live Tile in gReadie I found myself stunned at just how complicated it was. It seemed to me that it would make a lot more sense if I could just whack a [LiveTileUpdater] attribute on a static method in a class and the phone would run that method occasionally.
I was therefore delighted when details about Mango were released as this is basically what Microsoft implemented.
Over the last few weeks I have been doing a complete rewrite of gReadie, my Google Reader client for Windows Phone 7.
The original codebase for gReadie was really quite cluttered, and I wasn’t going to be able to take advantage of the new features Mango enables without pulling it all out and starting again.
With most of the rewrite behind me now, It is time to start putting together a few blog posts discussing the new features I am using and lessons learnt along the way.
This post is going to offer a few tips about changing your Windows Phone 7 push notification service from unauthenticated to authenticated.
Specifically it will focus on the challenges I ran into hosting a WCF service, in IIS7 on a cheap shared hosting account.
Now about that Image Control. I mentioned in my last post that it seems to download on the UI thread, or at least block the UI thread while downloading.
Personally I think this is going to be a major issue with v1 apps in the marketplace when used on 3G connections.
It is actually a difficult thing to test, so here is the methodology I have been using and the code I am using to get around the issue.
I am going to start putting together some posts on my experience writing our first Windows Phone 7 application, gReadie.
I have set up a quick WordPress site today to host information about our mobile development separately to our main software site. I will also use it to post future updates rather than polluting my otherwise coding focussed blog.
So for anyone interested in following the apps we create head over to www.quidsmobile.com
I promise I will make my next post about something I have learnt on the new platform and get back onto a technology focus.
I received notification this morning that gReadie will be accepted into the early access program for the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. So sometime Monday I will be logging in and submitting. Hopefully it also means the app will be in the marketplace from day 1.
I recorded one last video that takes a run right through the app. I already have a huge list of features to go into future releases but the last few days have involved making sure the app is well tested and running as nicely as I can manage on the emulator. I am very keen to get a real device and see how it goes on there.
I have posted another gReadie video to YouTube.
This video quickly shows off the services the app is now connected to.
Today I am showing off the first peek at a Windows Phone 7 application I have been working on recently.
The premise is simple, gReadie is a Google Reader client for the Windows Phone 7 platform. In this apparently Twitter and Facebook addicted world, I guess blogs are becoming out of date, but I still use Google Reader daily on my PC and iPhone, so I will have at least one user.