Tools & Apps

Firefly for Windows Phone 7

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Tue, 11/22/2011 - 12:15

serentity logo square 173x173I am a brown coat – if you know what that means then you will be excited to see my new application for Windows Phone 7: a Firefly hub app which contains news, images, sounds & ringtones from the show and from the movie, Serenity.

This started as me wanting a sound board for the show, but grew larger Smile

This is the first app I have done since my UX training and I hope a lot of the tools and skills I learnt in that training comes through in the application.

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Windows Phone 7 Apps: SA ID Number Tools & AA Rates Calculator Updates

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Wed, 11/16/2011 - 10:42

I have a few Windows Phone 7 apps, and two of those are the SA ID Number Tools and the AA Rates Calculator ones. You may be familiar with the AA Rates one from my friend, Rudi Grobler, who used it in his TechEd talks to show a UI that did not follow the model correctly Disappointed smile

I took this and the Windows Phone UX training I attended to heart and put a lot of work into updating them and making them a lot more in line with the WP7 UI guidelines.

AA Rates Calculator

The first think is this application has dropped the yellow background, which made sense for an AA tool (being their colour is yellow), and now is black or white depending on your theme. All controls have been updated to reflect that too. I have also fixed the alignment things Rudi was so quick to point out.

I use the highlight colour now and larger typography to really make the key information stand out from the rest – this is something I learnt at the UX camp.

In addition I have some other new features:

  • About to share your rate via email or social networks (twitter, facebook etc…)
  • The yellow branding is used in a position bar to give you an idea of how much is in the app.
  • I also added a fuel price page so you can always have the latest fuel price information!
  • The information pickers have also had an update and the selection is much larger now, so easier for people with big hands like me.
  • Fuel price can be displayed on a live tile too!

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SA ID Number Tools

Once again I dropped the background green (which was a photo of my ID book cover) and that also meant being able to move to a pivot control rather than a (heavy) panorama control. The green/gold theme has been mostly lost, with gold being used in selective places in the application. Also a careful use of font sizes and colours in the application to make the information stand out more.

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Hopefully these changes make these apps feel faster, easier to use and more part of your phone than before!

The Arturo Grid for Windows Phone 7 in PNG & GIMP

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Wed, 10/26/2011 - 07:38

layoutArturo Toledo works at Microsoft on the Windows Phone Design Studio team, and last week I had the chance to attend phone training with him. In that training he showed a grid he used for layout so that his apps match the layout of Windows Phone 7 apps – I call this the Arturo Grid.

Yesterday he posted about it and released an Expression Design version of it, which is great if you have Expression Design… but if you don’t it can be a problem. So I recreated it using the free graphics tool, The GIMP, and produced a transparent PNG version so that it can work in just about anything!

Downloads

How I did it?

GIMP is a fantastic tool and I thought I would share how I created this layout. First I started with a new image, with the resolution of 480 x 800 and a transparent background.

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Next run FiltersRenderPatternGrid and set the parameters as in the screen shot below. Note the offset horizontal & vertical lines are not linked. What we are doing here are creating grids of 37x37 (25 + 12 based off the Arturo Grid) with line width of 12 (so the space that is left is 25x25). The offset is +6 so that it pushes out, because the line widths are based on the middle of the line and not the edge.

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Now add two layers, another transparent one and a white backed layer.

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Place the new transparent at the bottom and the white in second place.

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and now merge down the grid layer onto the white layer.

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Now drag on guides:

  • Vertical: 24px
  • Vertical: 456px
  • Horizontal: 56px
  • Horizontal: 784px

and select that region.

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Create a new

Then use Select ► Invert and press delete. This removes the area around the grid for the bleed (padding) area that your app shouldn’t use.

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Now use the Fuzzy Select Tool (aka the magic wand selector tool) and click on the black.

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Now hit delete to remove those black lines leaving just the white squares.

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You can tweak the colours using the colour exchange tool (Colors ► Map Color ► Exchange) and you can tweak the transparency using the Opacity option on the layer tool to make it more transparent.

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There you go, now you are done Smile

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Tech·Ed Africa: Slides, Scripts & Thoughts

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Wed, 10/19/2011 - 10:46

WP_000405WOW! I am sitting here under s a fake tree in a fake city that is Micropolis (also known as the Tech·Ed Africa 2011 expo, and it is AMAZING!). I have just finished my third and final presentation at Tech·Ed Africa 2011 and I just wanted to say THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to all the people who attended my talks!

This year not only has an amazing expo, but the audiences have been by far the BEST EVER! A special thanks to those who braved 8am to see my .NET 4 talk – 2min before I started I thought “I need sleep”, 2min after the energy from the audience was flowing and I never looked back at what I felt was a great talk, so thank you! Smile

what it looks like from the presenter at #techedafricaA special work of thanks to Suliman and DPE (it is their fake tree I am sitting under) for arranging this and the opportunity to present! I also want to say thanks to the technical team at the event, without who you would not see or hear me, and they were fantastic this year!

For those who attended my talks, or those who couldn’t below are the slides, scripts and misc files used in the talks!

(for those in an RSS reader or on the home page, click read more)



Power features in .NET 4: Investigating the features of .NET 4 which you don’t know about

File downloads

Extend Visual Studio 2010

File downloads

Building Business Applications with Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch

File downloads

Tech·Ed Africa 2011 for Windows Phone 7

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Fri, 09/30/2011 - 11:35
Update: Check out the info on the 1.1 version
Update: This application has been retired - it was for TechEd 2011 and used the website a lot, the moment the site changes the app will break. It's goal & use are done, so I am happy to retire it.

iconI am passionate about Microsoft Tech·Ed Africa, not because I’m a speaker there (and have been many times in the past) but because it is an awesome event. Now in this mobile world every awesome event needs an equally awesome mobile app. Since Microsoft isn’t releasing one for Tech·Ed, I decided to put my skills to use and build a Windows Phone 7 app for the event Smile

This app is a little different from my other apps as I didn’t have the data, and it is a constantly moving target so I am doing some very smart (and maybe a little sneaky) things to get the content from the www.teched.co.za website!

Version 1 allows you to browse sessions, speakers, get pro tips, see who the awesome MVP’s are, and get official news!

I am working on version 1.1 which include community tweets, proper speaker & session pages and will update with more info as it is released so keep an eye on those updates!

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App.Config Transformations: The community shines where Microsoft drops the ball

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Fri, 08/26/2011 - 08:03

Last year May, I spoke at DevDays Durban about what is new in ASP.NET 4? One of the highlights of that talk is a feature called Web.Config transforms. In short you have a base web.config and then a file per compiler target (i.e. RELEASE, DEBUG). These extra files contain rules on how to transform your web.config when it is published.

In a way of an example you have might your web.config to use your local SQL Server when in Visual Studio, but when you publish a DEBUG build to testing it changes the config to use the test SQL Server. Or when you publish to production it turns off a bunch of logging and shows friendly error messages.

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There is TWO caveats in this process:

  1. ONLY works for ASP.NET* projects as this is something the ASP.NET team built into their publishing tool support.
  2. ONLY works for publish, if you have an ASP.NET* project and hit F5, nothing happens Sad smile

*ASP.NET = ASP.NET Core, and thus systems that build on top of it (WebForms, MVC & WebPages) all get it.

This is something we need in EVERY project type and we need with F5. Thankfully some bright people did just that for us, with the VS add-in Slow Cheetah.

So now you get the full experience on any project type, PLUS you get a brilliant feature missing in the ASP.NET one – PREVIEW. You can see what the resulting config will look like!

Cricket Run Rate Tools for Windows Phone 7

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 11:17

icon-200In my ever growing list of Windows Phone 7 apps I introduce you to the latest one, a cricket run rate toolset!

This is another calculator type that allows you to work out cricket run rates, projected scores at the current run rate and also projected scores if the run rate changes to 4, 5 or 6 runs per over!

The second screen is the compete screen which allows you to put in the score of the first batting side and then see if the chasing team is at, above or below the run rate needed to catch them and what run rate is needed!

It’s a very nice and simple tool to have in your toolbox for cricket fans!

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Community night in September 2011 - IMPORTANT INFO

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Mon, 08/22/2011 - 10:26

Community Night, the best way to meet, mingle and learn (if you don’t know about it – read here) happens on the second Tuesday of the month… except in September due to an event at the venue on the Tuesday which can’t be moved.

So for September it will take place the Monday before, in other words Monday the 12th September. Please help get the word out to the various user groups and communities!

See you there!

Codename: Roslyn - the next generation of the C# & VB.NET compilers

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Mon, 08/15/2011 - 13:55

277341190_3f098a08a4_oThis past weekend I had the opportunity to present at a fantastic event, Dev4Devs which is a free event where anyone can present on anything (software developer related) for 20min. It is a lot of fun, because of the variety of talks, the variety of people (some new speakers and some experiences speakers) and the HORRID 20min timeline.

This time I presented on a topic I am very interested in, Codename: Roslyn which is the next version of the C# & VB.NET compilers which are fully managed code (C# one written in C# and the VB.NET one written in VB.NET).

Since there is no public bits available I made use of the compiler from Project Mono – which has had similar things (the REPL environment and hosted compiler) for years.

As with all presentations here (or at the end of the post) are my slides, demo notes, demo files and other info!

During my research and prep, I found a bunch of interesting posts and information about it so here is the info I found. I’ve bolded the ones I think are especially interesting.

Image from Ezu

South African ID Number Tools for Windows Phone 7

Submitted by Robert MacLean on Thu, 08/11/2011 - 11:19
16 November 2011: This application has had a major update, see the details in this post

app tileFollowing the same idea as my AA Rate WP7 app, another very popular spreadsheet I built is one that verifies South African ID Numbers so I also decided to build a Windows Phone 7 app to do that.

This does a little more than the spreadsheet could, so it has lots of info about what in an ID number does not verify which is very useful.

In addition it includes a awesome new feature a South African ID Number GENERATOR! With this you put in a few required details, hit a button and BOOM! An ID number that will validate.

Important to remember that validation of a number doesn’t mean it actually exists, just the math works. So please don’t use this for anything except interest or development!

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(btw screenshots are from 1.1, which is soon to be out – so if you download and it looks different then give it a day or two)

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