I caught up with Richard Campbell doing Telerik interviews and was able to sit down for a few minutes. It’s always fun learning and sharing new technology at conferences. Thank you Telerik for the time you’ve put into these recordings, and Thank you Richard for setting it all up!

There will be some confusion around this, and Video is worth 10,000 words so here it is. IE10 comes in two (or more) flavors. Desktop IE10, and Metro IE10.

This quick screencast will show the differences …

At http://BuildWindows.com we received a really Nice Samsung Slate with Windows 8 developer preview loaded. Playing around with the hard button combinations, I found that holding the Windows Home key, along with pressing the Power Button brings up a quick menu, with access to the Task Manager.

Saturday, September 11, 8am to 8pm. All day baby!

What a great event. I’m not really sure where to start, so I’ll just start rambling from the beginning and see where it takes us.

First, the setup. Microsoft was kind enough to supply the learning materials. Let’s face it, WinPhone7 isn’t released yet, and there are very few experts around the globe. I definitely don’t include myself in that list, and I think the other speakers (Joe and Chris) would also mark themselves as beginners. The famous Daniel Egan (Microsoft) gave us a bunch of material, and pre-event guidance. Without this guidance, I have a strong feeling that the event would have turned out much much different. So thank you Daniel, I’ll speak for all three of us, THANK YOU!

Next was food – nice and simple we catered from Ray’s Deli for convenience. I mean, you’re at a desk fro 12 hours, you need food and beverage. It was great having Rays right next door.

Facility: You can’t do this event on the street. GangPlank is a co-working space, that I’m at 4,5,or 6 days a week. Thank you @GangPlank for the amazing workspace. If you’re ever in Chandler, Arizona, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not checking the place out.

Ok, ok, enough of the logistics, what about the event?

We structured the event in 2 halves. First half was Lecture. Lab. Lecture. Lab. Lecture. Lab. (yes, 3 Lecture. Lab. back to back). This gave everyone a chance to get into the tools, start snooping around the Tools IDE, emulator, etc. We covered some basics of the application, the emulator, the application bar, the hardware foundation, web services, push notifications, and a bunch of other stuff. To make it as easy as possible, three of us speakers volunteered to do one Lecture. Lab. each.

• Scott Cate [Blog] [@ScottCate] did Lecture/Lab1 1
• Chris Coneybeer [Blog] [@ConeyBeer] did Lecture 2
• Joseph Guadagno [User Group] [@JGuadagno] did Lecture 3

I really think that having 3 speakers was a triple win/win/win. Attendees don’t get tired of the same person all day. Each of us have our own (weird) personalities, and I think the variety of speakers really contributed to the success of the day.

Here are a few take-a-ways that came up during the day.

• Zune software isn’t compatible – but is easy to migrate and redeploy for WinPhone Marketplace. If you wrote / published Zune software, you’ll have to port (which I’m told is VERY simple) that software to WP7, and release is in the new WP7 marketplace.
• The hardware foundation is great for future proofing API’s and applications. Everyone was really happy about this. Included in the audience were several developers for Droid mobile, and they were all complaining of the scattered hardware. While it’s nice to have hardware innovation and competition, but supporting all of them individually is painful for  the developer. Having a min spec to count on is a nice win.
• Hard or impossible to change image source. Maybe this was something simple (leave comments) if we missed it, but we couldn’t figure out any way to change the source to an <image /> in code. We resorted to multiple images, that toggled visibility. here is a tiny tiny example.

  In XAML <Image Source=”~images/home.jpg” Name=”HomeImage” />

  and in C#.  HomeImage.Source takes an instance of ImageSource – but a new ImageSource doesn’t have a URL.

  Like I said, maybe we’ll be embarrassed by the simplicity of what we missed here, but we missed it, or it’s can’t be done (easily).

• Hard / Impossible to consume JSON from web services. The phone has a DataContractJsonSerializer (or something like that) that can easily deserialize Json, but you have to have mimicked classes already defined. And then, if the JSON service changes, the code would break. Everyone online says to use JSON.net on Codeplex. We were looking for a native solution. Silverlight 3 and 4, have System.JSon.dll – but that isn’t available to the Phone (Yet??)

We had several people that were volunteer floaters – wandering around from team to team, offering help. And we had 7 teams (some solo, some couples, and several 3 and 4 person teams) submit and present the applications. Then we gave everyone a 3×5 card and asked them to write their winning nomination. 1st place was Hang Man Classic, with a landslide of over 1/2 the votes. Second and Third was a close finish.

All the applications were great, and everyone in attendance left happy. What a great event, I can’t wait to do it again. The format was perfect. Even with the long day, it just flew by because we were all having so much fun.

And at the end of  the event, I was so amazed and impressed by what happened in 3 hours. Total success.

Here is a list of the final applications that were submitted. Each team jumped on the projector, and showed their application in the emulator. This was MUCH better than propping each application to the physical device, because no one could see it. (Side note, no one propped their app to the device – it was just nice to have in hand to get some “touch” time).

1st Place ($500): Hang Man Classic

The class guess a word game – complete with hand drawn scribbled graphics. The audience loved it. It was fun and interactive as we all tried to guess the two words. The first word “pickle” was inspired by a lunch time condiment. The second word was LYNX, which we didn’t get, and hung ourselves.

Winning Game in action …

Losing game …

 

2nd Place ($200): Games Inventory

The idea here is simple. You have a lot of XBOX games. So many that you can’t keep track. Now you’re at a garage sale you stopped by on your way home. Oh wait! What games do you have already? Maybe you want two copies. You know, one for your upstairs collection. Here are the screen shots. I’m not sure what web service they used, but some services that let’s you search games, and get complete details, including Game Box art.

3rd Place ($100): Read-It-Later

The popular http://Instapaper.com app let’s you add a bookmarklet to your favorite web browser, and and “save something for later”. It’s really a simple online bookmarking site, that has some goodies that make the copy on your target site, easier to read. I think it strips out graphics / ads / and most CSS, so just the copy is left to read.  So the “Read It Later” team said, it would be nice to see those “read later” links from your mobile. Using Instapaper API’s they logged in, and pulled a feed, bound that feed to a simple list, and clicked the item, to open the URL in the Windows Phone 7 IE Instance. This made for a great demo also, since it was using the API – they polled the audience for a URL, and added that “read it later” link. Then on the phone, refreshed, and it showed up. Simple but very useful!

 

Tic-Tac-Toe

As the name implies.

Mobile EZ Tax

Submit your 1040 EZ Tax form online. This is a simple questionnaire that walks you through several screens (not all pictured), and at the end let’s you pay by CC to submit your taxes electronically.

BitLinks Expand / Collapse

http://Bit.ly is a very popular URL shortening service for social network users. The idea here is … you shortened something a few hours / days / weeks / months ago, and you want to remember that link. Maybe even send it to someone else? This app uses the BitLy API’s to show you all your past links, along with the details around that shortened link. This app used the most of the graphics, with the custom Live Tile, and the styled application bar. Great Job on these graphics.

TanGram Game (Chinese Puzzle Game)

You know this game by it’s visual, not by it’s name. You start (in image 3 below) with a bunch of random shapes, and your goal is to make a perfect square (as in image 1). The UI supported (live on stage, only have 3 hours) drag and drop of the pieces, and rotation (with the two top buttons).

For the last few years, I’ve been using the free Google apps for my email and calendar solutions. I’ve been what I would call a power user on Google Mail – falling in love with the keyboard shortcuts, and the idea of archive over delete, and the conversation view of email. That really sums up my love for Google Mail. Let me dive a little deeper into each one.

• Keyboard Shortcuts. I’m sure other web applications have this, but for me, Google Mail was the first application that I could really fully utilize with the keyboard, making my email life fast and efficient.
• Archive over delete. 100 years ago (in internet years) I used a hosted exchange account where my maximum account storage was in the meg, not gigs. This meant I had to move email out of my Exchange account, so Google Mail of 6 Gig was attractive. Keep everything, and search for what you need when you need it.
• Conversation View. Without a doubt this was the KILLER FEATURE for Google Mail for me. It made life so easy, that the conversation always let you quickly and painlessly see the entire email thread. And not just a buck full of message, the actual conversation. So when Email 2 replies to Email 1, even though the body of Email 1 was included in Email 2, Google Happily hid that for me, so I could just see/read the additive parts of Email 2. This to me is true conversation view.
• Life is GOOD GOOD Google.

And here we are today, years and years later. My Google Apps email account is 92% full. Whoa, that’s full. Delete all spam and all trash, and it dropped to 72%. That’s a lot of spam 🙂 that thankfully I never had to see. So my account is almost full. Recently I have started missing Email (from lists and colleagues that have shown me the email sent from their outbox) and meeting Requests have started giving me headaches. Not sure if this is my fault or Google Mail, but the point is, I’m having a pain, and I don’t have a resolution. I can upgrade to Google Pro (or whatever it’s called) for $50/year or look around to see what others have to offer. Let’s have a look. (this was a couple of weeks ago for me, and this post is an update of what I’ve done since).

So I started looking at Office 365. All my devices connect to Google apps as an Exchange account. Google mail acting like exchange so the folders (errrm labels) and contacts and calendars and push email all just work because every device (that I know of) has Exchange built in. So why not just use Exchange? maybe that’s an option, so I start looking at Office 365.

On a regular basis I also use GoToMeeting for screen sharing and conference calls, which I pay $49/mo for. That’s $600/year for screen sharing. Not a lot month to month, but it ads up, and has no added value, other than it’s a great screen sharing platform.

But wait … as I’m looking at Office365 I see that it includes Lync. Lync is probably a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me it’s a GoToMeeting Killer. Meaning I’m canceling my GoToMeeting account, because Lync does everything I need it to. Conference calling, VOIP, and Screen Sharing. I’m sure there are edge cases that I don’t know about, but FOR ME, Lync is magical, and just works. I’ve used it for a dozen or so meetings and it’s perfect.

Office365 also has 25 gig of email. WooHoo, my 5991Meg of email is barely a dent in this new plan.

Oh wait … Snap … Office365 also includes hosted Shapepoint. I’m not sure if we’re going to use it, but it’s there if we need it.

So ….. I’ve done it. I decided, I Signed up, and I switched DNS and as of now …. all our Mail / Calendars / Contacts are hosted on Office365. My 3 main killer Google Mail features are now included as basic features in Outlook.

• Keyboard Shortcuts: outlook has them. I can fully navigate the UI with keyboard over mouse.
• Archive over Delete. I created a “All Mail” (actually this was imported from my Google Apps and I kept it) folder, and mapped the “Done” button (CTRL+SHIFT+1 is the KB Shortcut) to mark mail as Done, and move it to this “All Mail” folder.
• Conversation View: is built into outlook. I can see Sent, All Mail, Inbox, and Even deleted messages as part of a common thread.

So I’m a week into Office365, and online (twitter) I made a joke today that Office365 is to be renamed Office364, because there is a system wide outage. What does this mean for me? Well, with no time to work on Email – I can write a blog post 🙂 in my trusty Live Writer application. Email goes down. The good part about this is I’m not frantically scouring about trying to fix servers. I know that there are very smart people, and probably a lot of them trying to get the email back up and running. And who knows … maybe this is part of a larger outage because internet just went out our office from the local Cable Internet Provider. And FWIW I had plenty of outages when hosting with Google Mail as well. So this is a minor hiccup that I’m not worried about.

In the end, this is a very long blog post saying I’m happy to be trying something new, Office 365 is (so far) doing great …. and hey what do you know. Office365 is back up and running and my inbox just filled up, so I have to get back to work.

Try Office365, I think you’ll like it.

@scottcate