Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
So today marks another day in my Windows Phone 7 development journey: the release of “InTheKnow – Google Analytics on the go!” This app allows you to view your website’s traffic stats anywhere with mobile data coverage or Wi-Fi connection in an easy to read and digest form. No longer do you need to be near a PC to check how that last blog post was received or daily product special is fairing.
Some people love them, others absolutely hate them, but if you ask me one of the coolest features in ASP.Net MVC is the Data Annotations that you use to decorate your ASP.Net MVC classes for validation. But one of the coolest things that came along in .Net 4.0 was support for this across the whole framework – even outside of ASP.Net MVC!
Having forms with checkboxes that require users to check them to be valid is a pretty common phenomenon on the internet today, however when thinking about this in terms of ASP.Net MVC it can not always be obvious what the best approach to take is. Thankfully the ASP.Net MVC team gave us the support to create a really simple solution when they added inheritable validation classes to the framework.
So after submitting applications a few times for both myself and a few friends, i have learnt a few a few do’s and don’ts that can make the difference between it taking 2 weeks to get your application in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace, and only a day or two including registration. With the help of the tips below, hopefully i can help some of you avoid any of the frustrations that can come from starting development on a new platform.
Last year i started on a project that allows easy tracking of page views, events and transactions to your Google Analytics account without using JavaScript or a Browser simply using a .Net wrapper. This became GaDotNet. Over the Past 6 months i have had well over 2,000 downloads and many thank you emails so obviously people are finding a use for my code – this can only be a good thing. Now it is time for the project to grow up – so I've moved it to a remotely hosted source repository – CodePlex.
Over the past few weeks i have spent a fair bit of time creating Silverlight charts for a few Windows Phone apps I've been writing. The Silverlight charting toolkit’s documentation for advanced scenarios is pretty sparse to say the least. My experience in finding information on working with the DateTimeAxis that you can use on these charts was nothing short of frustrating. This post’s purpose is to hopefully serve to better educate others in my situation.
Over Christmas and New Year i had a little fun with the free time i had, i did what i do most years and started a spelunking exercise into something new and exciting, this time it was: Windows Phone development. After purchasing a Samsung Omnia 7 and getting a feel for the OS and UI design, i set out to create a simple app to try my luck at the lucrative (… we’ll see) world of Windows Phone 7 development. My first Release, BurnStats - a simple app that allows you to view your FeedBurner statistics natively on the device, has finally hit the app store – in true festive spirit, there was much rejoicing to be had.
In my early testing of Windows Phone 7 apps, it has become apparent that a lot of developers are simply not checking for network connectivity before attempting to access the internet – this gives a bad user experience as the user is left to wait until the connection times out. Checking to see if the device is connected to a network will improve this user experience dramatically.
Having a good Continuous Integration setup is the gift that keeps on giving, but what about your database? For most web applications these days, your database is a large part of your application – so why is versioning it such an uncommon thing? Because it’s time consuming and complicated – two requirements that Continuous Integration love conquering with a one-two punch.
Working with Stored Procedures and functions on a database tier can be time consuming, hard to debug and sometimes just difficult to get clarity on what is “happening”. A rarely discussed feature of Microsoft SQL Management Studio is its inbuilt debugging features. These allow you to see exactly what is going on, and step through your logic in a similar fashion to working in Visual Studio.