WinRT

Build 2016 Keynote day 1

David Burela Microsoft tech, PDC, Windows Phone, WinRT

Highlights

Day 1 (today) will be about Win 10 and devices, like HoloLens, Xbox, and ‘conversations as a platform’ (NUI) and AI/bots
Day 2 will be about Azure, IoT, data platform with @scottgu. And Qi Lu will talk about O365 as a platform, Office/MS Graph

More below.

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Using Windows 10 iOS bridge to convert Canabalt to Windows 10 in under 5 minutes

David Burela WinRT ,

I have been playing around with the Windows 10 bridges that allow you to port applications from other platforms (iOS, WP Silverlight, Hosted web apps, etc) to the Windows 10 UWP platform.

Today I wanted to show you how easy it is to take an iOS game and port it straight to a Windows 10 UWP application.
I’m porting the classic game Canabalt which was originally an online flash game, which they then ported to an iPhone game.

The author of Canabalt released the source code on Github for others to play around with https://github.com/ericjohnson/canabalt-ios
The iOS bridge for Windows 10 is availabe from the website https://dev.windows.com/en-us/bridges/ios

Now sit back and watch how quickly you can port using the tools.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7Y6YlWuHQ8

Build 2014 – Day 1 keynote

David Burela Windows Phone, WinRT , , , , ,

For the last couple years it has been a tradition that I capture a stream of consciousness as I watch the big Microsoft keynote announcements at Build, PDC, TechEd North America. I enjoy doing it so that my work colleagues are able to catch up on the news as soon as they wake up in Australia, and for anyone else that wants an overview of the keynote without needing to dedicate hours watching it.

As I am live blogging it, the post is a stream of text and screen captures as they happened in real time. I have added additional links and a summary below as the highlights:

Highlights

The entire conference & screenshots are continued below

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Error when using HTTP Portable class library & compression

David Burela Windows Phone, WinRT, WPF

I was trying to use the new HTTP Portable class library with the new compression capabilities (as described in this MSDN post).

I created a portable class library that retrieved data, and then used that library in my app. However my app kept throwing this error:
Method not found: ‘Void System.Net.Http.HttpClientHandler.set_AutomaticDecompression(System.Net.DecompressionMethods)’.

After searching for hours, I discovered the issue is that you need to add the portable HTTP client to BOTH your portable class library AND any app that consumes that assembly. I resolved the issue simply by adding the portable HTTP client Nuget package to my app.

Build 2013–Day 1 Keynote summary

David Burela Azure, Windows Phone, WinRT

For those that weren’t able to watch the Build keynote live, I have provided a quick overview of the highlights as they happened.

Highlights

Summary of the Keynote

  • Today is about Windows 8 only. Tomorrow is Azure only
  • Showed the Windows 8.1 improvements that were in the blog post (multi-monitor support, resizable Metro apps, Start Button)
  • Windows 8.1 & IE11 support WebGL
  • Lots of talk about trying to embed Bing everywhere.
  • Support for your own protocols over USB/Wifi-Direct/etc
  • Support for 3D printers so it is as easy to use as 2D printers
  • Cool tech demos showing some interesting scenarios with new devices
  • However, not really any new information

(detailed breakdown and images continued in blog post)

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Community report: Australian Microsoft Bizspark Azure camps

David Burela Azure, Windows Phone, WinRT

Last week, I flew around Australia helping out with the Bizspark dev camps. I answered questions that the attendees had on development on Windows Azure as well as Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
I also got up front and did a mini presentation on development tips.

At the event we discussed ways that Windows Azure can help you quickly bootstrap your startup by providing a cheap way to deploy your web app to test the idea, and then scale it up once it starts to get popular. We also touched on how to build Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps that can be supported with Windows Azure Mobile services.

Below are some photos from the event
The Sydney Event:

WP_20130604_001

And the Melbourne event.

WP_20130608_001 (1)WP_20130608_002

I really enjoy participating with the developer camps & app fests. It is a great way to get a bunch of passionate people into a room and swap stories. It is always interesting to see what personal projects people have been working on and need help with.

By David Burela

Bizspark developer camps in Australia

David Burela Azure, Windows Phone, WinRT

Microsoft is again running developer camps around Australia to help train you in Windows Azure / Windows 8 / Windows Phone 8.

There are events happening in:

I will be attending the Sydney & Melbourne events next week! Helping out anyone that has questions, and also giving out a few Infragistics prizes.

 

More details on the event can be found at http://www.lalaninja.com.au/2013/05/09/bizspark-dev-camps-june-2013/

By David Burela

Creating the Sensis Showdown app

David Burela Community Report, WinRT

Recently I was at a developer camp. In attendance was a developer evangelist from Sensis who was encouraging devs to create an app for their search API http://developers.sensis.com.au/about. There was a cash prize for whoever wrote the best app by the end of the hackathon.

Long story short, I came in 1st place Nerd smile.

The API

Sensis are a directory services company (White Pages, Yellow Pages, Business directories, etc.). Their search API allows you to search for local businesses based on key words and locations. It was a REST based API and they provided some legacy .Net 4.5 sample code to interact with the service. However this didn’t work with the new asynchronous apis in WinRT. So I spent an hour trying to very roughly convert it over to a WinRT compatible sample which I then shared with the entire group in attendance, to help everyone else get a head start on entering this competition https://gist.github.com/DavidBurela/5069136. The interaction code could have been my “secret sauce”, but that is no fun. Everyone at the event was there to have fun hacking away at WinRT and WinPhone apps. I wanted to see what everyone else could come up with once they had the API access code out of the way.

The idea

After spending a few hours helping everyone else in attendance, I realised I only had 2 hours left to build something. I’d done a bunch of work with the Bing Maps control recently, so it made sense to start there. A generic “search for a term and display it” app seemed boring, and is the same functionality as their own website.

After a bunch of brain storming I realised I could increase it to two search terms and compare the two. This idea expanded into a competitive comparison for the ultimate argument decider. You always have random arguments when in a bar “Chinese food is more popular”, “No way pizza is”.

This led me to a “Red vs. Blue” comparison. Search for two terms, have it mapped as Red vs Blue push pins, and then display the final numbers

 Pizza Vs PastaSushi Vs Fries

Downloading the app:

Windows 8 marketplace

Within 72 hours of creating the app, it had already gone through marketplace certification. Microsoft is getting VERY speedy in the approval process now. You can download the app onto your Windows 8 machine at http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/sensis-showdown/5d96dec3-ce11-4164-8b2a-b6b97a59cce5

Source code

As I do with most apps I create for fun, I have thrown the full source code up onto BitBucket https://github.com/DavidBurela/SensisShowdown

By David Burela

Summary of Melbourne AppFest

David Burela Azure, Community Report, Windows Phone, WinRT

This month saw the first Melbourne AppFest, it all went without a hitch.
The facilities were perfect and the catering was the usual good Cliftons standard.

We had a lot of mentor support there on the day (Nick Hodge, Frank Arrigo, David Glover, Shane Morris, and a few members from the community).

There were a good number of developers there. Many of them had general development questions about Windows Phone & Windows 8, as well as a few people there interested in Windows Azure.

There was a competition on the day for the best app of the day. This was won by Lars Klint for his “Picture of the day” application. It allows you to connect to a feed (such as the National Geographic) and it will change your Window Phone’s lock screen each day.

Lars won a Xbox & Kinect package!

image

The app can be downloaded from the Windows Phone app store http://www.windowsphone.com/en-au/store/app/image-of-the-day/84848ebd-6ce3-4617-b89f-83ec4f093a54
There are more details about the winning app by Lars’ employer http://blog.kiandra.com.au/2013/03/image-of-the-day-wins-appfest/

By David Burela

Windows 8 development–Certification failed due to bytecode generation

David Burela WinRT

I was working on a WinJS application and added a 3rd party JavaScript library. However every time I tried to run the WACK certification tool I kept coming across this issue.

Performance test – FAILED Bytecode generation

  • Error Found: The bytecode generation test detected the following errors:

    • File … has JavaScript syntax or other problems.

  • Impact if not fixed: As a performance optimization to accelerate JavaScript execution time, JavaScript files ending in the ".js" extension generate bytecode when the app is deployed. This optimization significantly improves start-up and ongoing execution times for JavaScript.

  • How to fix: You may need consider one or more of these steps to fix the issue:
    – Ensure that event logging is enabled
    – All JavaScript files are syntactically valid; otherwise exclude the respective files from the package
    – Please note that you should uninstall all previous versions of the app before deploying
    Otherwise exclude the respective files from the package.

 

How to solve it

The issue I had was due to the encoding on the JavaScript file. This can be easily fixed by changing the encoding to Unicode UTF-8.

Do this by opening the JavaScript file, then select File –> Advanced Save Options. In the dialog, select Unicode (UTF-8 with signature) – Codepage 65001

image

By David Burela