Wednesday, February 29, 2012
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This blog post is not to hurt any one, just a thought that I got in my mind when I was walking from an Apple Store to a Microsoft Store. I am not judging any one here but if you are from the DC area and been to Tysons Corner’s Apple and Microsoft Store you can see the change on how the migration happened from the Apple to the Microsoft Store.
Lets all do a time travel back to couple of centuries , we have sees lot of videos, documentaries & movies that showed us how and what people were doing back in the days. They didn’t have a lot to do except fighting for Water, Food and Shelter. As that trend got more and more popular, we introduced a new concept called “RELIGION”. Religion in my view is a set of rules that are written in a sequential order for the people to follow (same as what we do in programming these days). In the same way we have multiple ways of programming, there were multiple religions that are designed and followed by people themselves.
CASTS: Once the word religion got popular with the increase in the number of people on our mother planet Earth, we started dividing that into “CASTS” (Casts are more prominent in Asia). If Religion is a pattern that we use to write our code, Casts will be the platform like .NET, PHP, Python and so on. For example if you belong to a family of Kings then your caste will be “Kshathriya”, if you belong to a family of business then you are a “Vysya”.
There is a common pattern in my view that we are putting ourselves into, dividing ourselves into groups and living in our own world.
TECHNOLOGY: This is the most fashionable word these days. Everything and everyone is very hyped by this word. Technology cut through all the lines that we drew over centuries and made everyone belong to one big family. We all enjoyed being connected to our piers all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you are and what you do by profession, we are all connected to one big family called INTERNET.
I don’t think this is a happy ending for our story because, I think Technology is the new Religion. And what you use is the new Cast.
FUTURE: In my view, “CLOUD” is the one that is going to break the cycle and bring us together as one family. It doesn’t matter which technology or what device you are on but everyone talks to the CLOUD.
So, Build your APPS on CLOUD, and lets all get connected as one big family.
Thank you for your time, hope you got what I meant.
Let me know what you think in the comments section
Sunday, January 15, 2012
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TOMBSTONING (Application Lifecycle)
Today we are going to talk about “Application Lifecycle” of an application in Windows Phone. Before we write our first application it is good to have a good understating on how your application is going to be treated by the phone (OS) depending on any user action. Every stage of the application is critical to think before we create our first application. Our application is going to run with so many other things that are on the phone (apps, songs, radio, mail etc.). Since the “User Experience” is what users love about their phone is only possible by following the application life cycle. Even to get our application published to the Market place depends on how we are handling all the user actions and how we are following the application life cycle. Lets concentrate here a little bit.
Windows Phone provides the best user multi tasking experience, this is done by pausing, suspended without alerting the user about the application is being paused. But the system notifies the application when it is pausing it or when it is resuming. In the pause and resume state the application is given a chance to either save the data and reload the data back to the screen when the application is being resumed. Every application on a windows phone will have 5 states in its life time. This process is called Tombstoning. Below is a diagram that shows the 5 stages of an application in detail. If an user ignores the pause or resume states of an application then the OS considers it as an re-start of an application. The developer may ignore to add the pause and resume states to his/her application but it is useful for the user if we have this implemented. This gives the user a best user experience which Windows Phone users are found of. Please take a minute and understand the image (re-created from the book with colors for better understanding), below that show the 5 stages of an application.
THIS IMAGE IS VERY SELF EXPLANATORY, EVERY STATE OF AN APPLICATION IS EXPLAINED WITH THE REASON WHEY THE USER/OS PUTS YOUR APPLICATION IN THAT STATE AND WHAT HAPPENS WHEN OUR APPLICATION STATE CHANGES.
Thanks to our Author Shawn Wildermuth for a great illustration what happens to our application. This is going to be very helpful in the process of our application development. A good understanding of this tombstoning process makes our application stand out among other applications in the market place by giving the user the best user experience.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
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Hi Everyone,
By now you are very well aware of the Windows Phone and the development environment that you get after installing Windows Phone SDK on your computer. And if you have tested the tools you might have seen the Windows Phone Emulator which looks like the Test Phone Microsoft showed when they launched Windows Phone last year. Since the launch of the first Windows Phone, we have enough options to choose from on what type/size/memory/color/specs that we want in the phone that we use. Among all the phones out there the best Windows Phone I think is the Nokia Lumia 900.
But as a developer, we want the same kind of experience on our computer when we develop applications for Windows Phone. There is good new for us. Telerik announced new Nokia Lumia skins for the Emulator that we use for the development purposes. Here is what you have to do to change your Windows Phone Emulator.
- First backup your default Emulator skins ( Navigate to “C:\ProgramFiles\Microsoft XDE\1.0” )
- Download the Telerik Skins for Windows Phone Emulator here (you have to login to Telerik to download this file, Register if you don’t have an account, it is going to be very useful)
- Extract them
- You can either change it to a Lumia 710 or a Lumia 800
- Copy the skin files from the extracted folder (WM7_Skin_Down.png, WM7_Skin_Mask.png, WM7_Skin_Up.png, WM7_SKin.xml) and replace with the files that you see in the folder that you opened in your first step.
- After the replace, open the Windows Phone Emulator by going to Start\Windows Phone SDK 7.1\Windows Phone Emulator
- You should see the new Lumia Skin. That’s it my friends, now you have a Lumia Skin.
Share your experiences in the commentsThank you Vijaya Malla.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
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Apart from the Introduction that I gave from my previous blog posts about the book and the Windows Phone 7.5 Development, I think we have to jump into the technology of it.
In this post we are going to talk about the Design Language, Real Estate, Input Patterns.
Design Language: Design Language in my view is something that first strikes to the user/developer when they think of the application usage/development. How you want to design your application or how they users react with the navigation screens/patters etc. And how as a developer you want to show the application on the startup screen etc. Once we have the idea of what we are going to present the user then it will be very easy to develop. Windows Phone provides multiple ways you can communicate with the user, most popular ones are Live Tiles, Toast Message, Alerts, Notifications, Updates etc. We are going to talk about what they are in specific and also do some sample programs. For more information on User Experience Design Guidelines for Windows Phone please visit this page from MSDN
 | This is how the Real Estate of Windows Phone is divided. System tray is managed by the phone Operating system, this is where you see the time, signal strength, alerts etc. I think it will be a good idea to have this area always visible to the user unless you are developing a game or something that you think it is really required to use it for your application.
Logical Client Area is where you show your application to the user, any application data and any other points of interaction.
Application Bar is a very interesting place where you can give the user more options about your application, this can be set as hidden and the user can access it by clicking on it and it will show the options.
As a developer we have to be very careful on what options you are going to show in here. They have to be relevant to the screen the user is on at that moment. we will talk more about this in the series.
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Input Patters this is where the real developer in us comes out and does some miracles. Since we are targeting on a mobile device we are limited with the resources that we have like the size of the screen, processing speeds and hardware/software input buttons to talk to your application. As a developer we have to consider the common Input Patterns that every user is familiar with like Touch, Hardware Buttons, Keyboards, sometimes Sensors etc.Direclty from the book that we are referring to has a wonderful pictorial representation of how the Touch should be thought in the design of our application, please check the following carefully. I think this is going to be a big help when we design our application. This image is very self explanatory.
Hardware Buttons, Luckily we have some hardware (on some phones) buttons on Windows Phone which the user can use to talk to the application. Every Windows phone has three buttons on the face, Back, Home and Search. Back button should take the user to the previous step they were on and if it is was the first screen of your application it should at least take them to the home screen. Home button at any point should take the user to the Home screen and it should change the status of your application from Running to Suspended state (we are going to discuss this soon), and finally Search button should let them do the search on the phone.
My main motto is to make the development process as simple as possible and make everyone capable of creating an application for yourselves, of course publish it to the market. Please continue reading my series.
Saturday, January 07, 2012
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If you are not following Shawn Wildermuth or haven't bought the Essential WP 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight I would highly recommend.
I am not going to talk about why we need a smartphone or how smartphone is taking over all the World, We all know how it started and where it took and where is going to take us in the future. Since we all know the future of the Mobile Eco systems I think it will be a good time to be a part of. lets jump into our series of blog posts of Windows Phone 7.5 Development.
This is how the first three best smart phones look like IPhone, Android and Windows Phone. Hopefully you can see the difference right away and what I meant by being special being a windows phone developer from my previous post.
The start screen is the killer for Windows Phone where you can see the live tiles instead of icons that does nothing but taking you the application. The live tiles on Windows Phone does more than just taking you to the application but also shows the notification or more information about the application. And in my view that is what a smartphone is all about. It should make our life easy with other things so that we can be more connected to our family and friends (people).
After you have installed all the necessary tools that we need to develop windows phone applications we can open the installed the Windows Phone Emulator by going to Start and type Windows Phone Emulator and you should see it in the list of items and when you open it is going to look like below
 | If you haven't installed the necessary tools for Windows Phone development, please see below
1. Need a PC or Windows on a MAC (obviously right?)
2. I have installed Visual Studio 2010 professional, you can download a version of Visual Studio Express good for just WP development. please follow the link for more installation instructions
This is going to be one installation for all your Windows phone 7.5 (Mango) development.
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Now we are ready to develop our first windows phone application.
My next post is going to introduce little basics on windows phone real estate and little bit on What and How ‘s of the Phone. See you there.
I wanted to introduce to you all to a wonderful book that I came across recently by, Shawn Wildermuth “Essential Windows Phone 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight”. I never bought a text book but I decided to buy this and start reading it, as I was going thru the book I decided that I made a good buy here.
This book is very easy to read and a very good place to start developing Applications for Window Phone 7.5 with Silverlight.
This series of blog posts are going to be on just Windows Phone Development using this book “Essential WP 7.5 Application Development with Silverlight”. More information about the author Shawn Wildermuth (click on the name).
I am not going to invent anything here just to be sure. I am one of you guys who wanted to start developing applications for Windows Phone and not sure where to start. I just started my journey to complete this book and by the end of the book hopefully we can all have at least one application on the Windows Market Place. My idea to extend this blog series is to develop a WP 7.5 application and then convert that application to a cloud based application with HTML 5, so that we deploy the same to all Eco-Systems.
All I am doing is to give you the bullet points from the book and also give you the sample projects that we create along this journey.
WHAT you need to know and WHY ?
1. It is a known fact that iOS and Android has a huge market and few 100K apps on their market place, think before you decide to write an app for those two or Windows Phone, coz those two markets are almost saturated unless you are going to invent the next Facebook, you are not going to win the market. As Windows Phone market place is not saturated and just recently expanding to the other parts of the world , I think it is right time to start writing your next Big thing on Windows Phone.
2. Since almost everyone on Earth user Microsoft solutions and with their step towards Windows Azure, I think it is the right time to do the next big thing on Windows and reach as many people are there on the Earth with a smartphone.
THINK BEFORE YOU DO.
Lets start our Journey to at least our next BIG thing.
---- Let me know what you think, my first Blog ever ----
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
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This is what I think about Microsoft Windows Phone. If Microsoft were in our shoes looking at various phones available their configurations, memory, front facing cameras etc. Microsoft disappointed the USA customer base again by not getting Nokia Lumia 800.
The Past: If we talk few years ago, few business people were on their Blackberry’s and few Gadget lovers were on crappy Windows OS devices. The world was all going right till Apple came with a revolutionary device iPhone, which completely changed our perception towards phone and how great a smartphone can be. It’s not just phone but the whole technology industry. The romantic appealing of the phone and smooth touch and feel of it made everyone to get one of those bad boys. The sales went up for not just Apple for AT&T too. Even though everyone complained about the signal strength of AT&T, everyone wanted to be on it because they have iPhones. All world wanted iPhone back then except Microsoft with few comments on how it is not going to be in market. But it did great and rocked the industry.
A few years later with iPhone and Android taking over the smartphone market Microsoft realized that it should be in the game too. Worked on the design of it, and gave us the best Mobile OS ever. Everyone thinks that iOS is a great OS for phones but if you have touched a Windows Phone and use it for real then you will realize the strengths of it. so last year we welcomed Windows Phone 7
The Present : Windows Phone 7 has the fastest growing market. The phones are cheap, you can buy from any carrier out there. The phone became smarter and smarter with the recent update “Mango (7.5)” and with the collaboration with Nokia, Microsoft created a new eco-system for smartphones with the best smartphone hardware and best smartphone software. Everyone in the world was excited about the collaboration. As we fly over cloud 9 imagining about Nokia made Windows Phones we all heard a good news from Nokia “Nokia World”. Nokia showed the world what a best hardware making company can do with Windows Phone 7.5 OS. Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 took the spotlight. Everyone here in USA and all over the world wanted to own a Nokia Lumia 800 because of the design, software, proprietary apps from Nokia (maps, ESPN, drive and music).
If USA market had Nokia Lumia 800, then it would have been the best step Microsoft and Nokia had ever made in their history of smartphone market. With all the numbers going to Android and IPhone, its not clear on why Microsoft/Nokia did not release Lumia 800 here in USA.
Its unclear if Microsoft had learnt the lesson or not. if it had learnt the lesson I guess Microsoft needs to get the Nokia Lumia 800 to the USA.
The Future: This is where we hope we get the best form Microsoft. I was an iPhone user, I used 2G, 3G, 3GS, 4 and then moved to Windows Phone and never felt so happy with my iPhones’. From the day when Nokia announced the partnership with Microsoft and said that they going to come up with a new Nokia windows phone, I was dreaming for my Nokia Phone. but looks like it is not going to happen any time soon.
My thoughts about the Market : Nokia has the biggest market base in the world. Even though people moved to Android or iPhone over the years in other parts of the world like India and China, people still love to use Nokia. Everyone who uses a Windows Phone now will wait for that day when Nokia Lumia comes to the USA but what either or both of the companies should do for a better market share is to make a very aggressive move with the hardware and bet on the devices. I am pretty sure that it will work. everyone here in the USA will like to have a dual core windows phone with front facing camera and all other crazy things that android/apple phones offer.
I think we just have to wait for that day and hope that day comes soon.
Love Microsoft and Nokia
Thank you for reading.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
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Hi Everyone,
This is a place for .NET lovers like us can go and learn more about all Microsoft Cloud technologies. This website makes it more easy, simple and actually fun to know what the technologies are, how they work and what we can do for it in the perception of both business and personal entities.
Here is what you have to do (to make it much easier, follow the steps)
1. Go to http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/Home.aspx this website
2. Login with your Windows Live ID (Create one if you dont have one, you are going to need it more than you think @ https://signup.live.com/?lic=1)
3. Select any course you want, ex: Windows Azure, SQL Azure etc
4. Read through the course and get points which you can see grow in a wonderful animation starting from "Bronze Medal" to "Silver Medal" and finally to "Platinum Medal"
You will also be given a RANK on where you stand in the whole World and also in your country. I completed SQL Azure and Windows Azure myself and i am that Silver Medal with 280 Rank in USA and 33,262 Rank in the whole World.
You will love it.
Share your thoughts too with our pre-Beginner Community.
Thank you
Vijaya Malla
Hi Everyone,
The only and main purpose of this blog is to educate all .NET pre-Beginners, who love to do .NET Programming but don't know where, what and how to do. Now you have a place to share and ask for that little thing that is holding you to move on your development.
I was in your place 2 years ago, dont know anything about it, doesnt know where to start. I did googled(Bing'd) a lot, found so may articles, blogs about .NET and got very excited about it. Now I wanted to get all that information in one place so you dont have to do the Bing'ing.
Lately Microsoft is rocking the Business and Personal markets with Visual Studio 2010, Expression Studio, Silverlight, SQL Server, ofcourse WindowsPhone with Mango and last but not least all the work they have been doing on Windows Azure and other cloud services.
With the combination of these we can build any kind of application that works on Web, Desktop and on the WindowsPhone aswell.
This is where you will get to experience the power of .NET and the ease of creating applications.
Please leave your comments and help me share my beginning experience with you all.
Thank you
Vijaya Malla.