Windows Phone in the Cloud
Letzte Woche wurde Fussball im FreeTV für Windows Phone aktualisiert: Die App lädt die Daten nun nicht mehr vom Webservice unseres lokalen Servers sondern aus der Cloud! Auf Buddy.com sind die Kalenderdaten nun auch verfügbar. Der lokale Server lief (mit Ausnahme eines nachmittags letzten Monat) bisher sehr stabil, dennoch wird die Ausfallsicherheit und die Zugriffsgeschwindigkeit durch die Auslagerung in die Cloud verbessert. Bei inzwischen über 15.000 Downloads war dieser Schritt nun notwendig. Die Apps für iOS und Android werden bei Gelegenheit auch entsprechend aktualisiert.
Download images and store them in isolated storage (Windows Phone 7 and 8)
For my windows phone app I need to retrieve some images from the internet. Windows Phone automatically caches them as long as the application is alive, but as soon as the application is stopped and restarted the cache is gone and images need to be retrieved again. I’ve found several proposals (e.g. One-time Cached Images in Windows Phone 7 or the extended version “Intelligent” Image Caching for WP 7) next to Image Tips for Windows Phone 7 and App performance considerations for Windows Phone but in the end I setup a solution based on Displaying an Image from Isolated Storage and Off-thread decoding of images on Mango The solution below is in vb.net for Windows Phone 7.1 (and Windows Phone 8 of course) and processes like this: Continue reading…
5000 Android Downloads FussballimFreeTV
Android hat inzwischen nachgezogen: Vor 2 Monaten wurde die 5000er Download-Grenze bei Windows Phone geknackt, nun ist es auch bei Android soweit. Und mit einer durchschnittlichen Bewertung von 4,6 von 5 Sternen sind die meisten wohl auch sehr zufrieden mit der Anwendung. Vielen Dank, und wenn ihr Verbesserungsvorschläge habt: Immer her damit!
How to use Microsoft Exchange WebServices (EWS) with vb.net
If you use Microsoft Exchange 2007 SP1 or later you use Microsoft Exchange WebServices (aka EWS) to access users data, e.g. all appointments from Calendar. If the user is already logged in using Windows Credentials and these are passed in the browser, no additionall login is required. That’s convenient for the user, compared to e.g. IMAP where you always have to supply your windows password.
So here are some details which might help you if you want to use Microsofts Exchange Webservices: Continue reading…
5000 Downloads FussballimFreeTV für Windows Phone
Nach 3 Monaten hat die Windows Phone App “Fussball im FreeTV” über 5000 Downloads mit einer durchschnittlichen Bewertung von mehr als 4,5 Sternen und taucht auf bei der Suche nach “Fussball” im WindowsPhone Store http://www.windowsphone.com/de-de/search?q=fussball auf Platz 1 auf! Und wer die App noch nicht hat: http://FussballimFreeTV.kalabo.de/ ! Auch für iPad, iPhone und Android! Continue reading…
IIS asp.net application returns old user name after account change
A user married and so her lastname (and more important from technical point of view: accountname) changed. On her windows PC she logs in with her new accountname and everything works fine. Now she needs to access our intranet asp.net applications. To our surprise, IIS identified her with her old account name… So she does not have access to some applications because her old account name is not known in our application anymore.
Authentication mode of our intranet sites is set to ‘Windows’ for automatic login. We then use HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name to identify the current user so there is no option to manually sign in, it just takes the windows credentials.
Searching around I’ve found Microsofts Knowledge Base article 946358 at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/946358/en-us which proposed to create a new registry entry: Create a new DWORD Value called ‘LsaLookupCacheMaxSize’ with value 0 in ‘HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa’ so that the cache is cleared. We did this, but it did not help.
Then she tried to logon at another machine and there it worked fine, so it’s for sure a problem of the local client instead of the IIS or the AD or anything else network-related.
We’ve deleted her profiles, her name from any registry entry…. but were not successful. In the end, the only thing that helped: Completely reinstall the machine…
How to become a Windows Phone Developer
If you want to publish a Windows Phone app, the best place to start is of course the official Dev Center for Windows Phone Development from Microsoft. You need to join Microsofts Dev Center which has an annual subscription fee of currently $99 USD. But before joining at Microsofts page you might also have a look at some other programs which include the Windows Phone Developer membership:
Nokia Premium Developer Program
A tip for Nokia users: Nokia has a “Nokia Premium Developer Program” for just $99 USD. It contains one year of Windows Phone Developer membership which is already worth $99 USD. As you cannot deploy any apps without this Windows Phone Developer membership this is really a good deal, because you get all other goodies on top FOR FREE:
- Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone (worth $99 USD) with more than 40 custom controls for Windows Phone development.
- 1 million API calls per month at Buddy.com (worth $100 USD per month)
- 2 free tickets for Nokia technical support service (worth $198 USD)
So you pay $99 USD and get values worth around $1500 USD. Even if you don’t need them, you definitely need the Windows Phone developer membership which is worth $99 USD so you get all other things on top for free. Therefore I’ve registered at the Nokia Premium Developer Program. Maybe I need the Telerik Controls some when, or the tech support.
Microsoft DreamSpark
Microsoft DreamSpark is a program for students with lots of benefits, like Visual Studio Professional, Windows Server, SQL Server etc. And for Windows Phone development, the Windows Phone developer membership is also included for 1 year! So if you are a student you could easily save the $99 USD for Windows Phone Developer membership.
Microsoft BizSpark
If you are not a student but a startup, Microsoft has another program which might help you: Microsoft BizSpark. It contains lots of software, e.g. Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN Subscription, MS SQL Server, Windows 8 etc. And similar to DreamSpark, it also contains the Windows Phone Developer Membership for 1 year!
Microsoft Special Offer
On release of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft decreased the license fee from $99 USD to just $8 USD! Unfortunately only for 8 days, so that period is over. Maybe the have special offers somewhen again?
Example how to use Selenium with Visual Studio and Visual Basic.NET
(The code in this example is Visual Basic.net but could of course be easily transferred into C#). So we have set up Selenium (as described here) and followed some general tips (as described here). Now it’s time to write our first unit test in Visual Studio using Visual Basic.net and Selenium. We will do a rather simple test but it covers several aspects of web testing. We will write a test to check whether a link to our current domain dotnet-developer.de is returned as first result from bing when we search for “dotnet-developer.de”. So we have to write a webtest with these steps: Continue reading…