Me, Myself and My Blog.

Amit is now wearing a (slightly) different hat…

2010-07-13T21:14:01Z

If you were wondering that the Beta release of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools was announced yesterday and Amit’s blog has been quiet, it’s because I recently moved to another team.

I am now working with the Test and Lab Management Products, which enable QA Teams to efficiently work on test planning and execution, and a complete plan-test-track workflow for in-context collaboration between testers and developers, greatly increasing testers’ visibility to the overall project.

Microsoft Visual Studio Lab Management 2010 is an integrated development and testing platform that provides end-to-end support for virtual lab management. It helps reduce costs associated with setup, teardown, and restoration of complex virtual environments to a known state for build automation, build deployment and test execution

I am looking forward to this opportunity to not only work with developers but also with QA Teams in your enterprises and provide your team with the right set of ALM Tools for you to deliver high quality application !

Amit Chopra

Uninstall Issues with the MIX CTP Drop

2010-05-04T22:43:26Z

I was looking at few posts that surfaced by last week on windows phone developer forums around issues relating to the un-install of the CTP we shipped at MIX.

Based on some the information I gathered and the root cause analysis of these, here are some workarounds for the most common issues we saw.

1. When un-installing you are asked to install Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC

Cause for this: Users have installed the Sillverlight 4.0 RTM Runtime after installing Windows Phone Developer Tools - MIX CTP

Workaround: Install the SL 4.0 Developer Runtime and then uninstall the CTP.

2. When un-installing you get a prompt to Install the Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone Extensions.

Cause for this: Very likely you have un-installed the product using Add/Remove Programs

Workaround:

a. Proceed with install of all the listed components.

Then Select the No option in the install source page and click Install to all the listed components when you see this dialog

B. Repeat uninstall. This time the product should uninstall completely

3. A couple of people also noticed this block dialog.

Cause for this: Setup has detected there are some conditions that could get your machine in an bad state and hence prevents the install of CTP Refresh.

For example-

a. Some incompatible products/versions are installed as listed. (SL 4.0 SDK, Visual Studio 2010 RC or Beta version, etc)

b. Some process are running that can impact install. E.g. (devenv.exe)

c. or Disk space is not sufficient

Action: Follow the instructions specified in the dialog which will usually be quite explicit about what needs to happens. Like

a. Uninstall the incompatible version of SL 4.0 SDK/Dev10 RC

b. terminate the devenv process if that is running

c. or Free up required space on disk

and then Retry installation, hopefully this should get you unblocked.

You may also want to look at this post by Aaron that talks about setup issues and how to work around them.

Thanks

Amit

Update to the MIX Release of The Windows Phone Developer Tools is now available !

2010-04-29T18:12:54Z

Good Morning Windows Phone Developers !

Just wrapped up flipping the download bits to make a refreshed version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools available to our developers.

This version is now compatible with the final version of Visual Studio 2010.

You will need to uninstall the current bits and then install the new bits – please do read release notes in the download page link here for more details.

All the exciting changes and improvements are listed in this Blog Post.

We’ll look forward to your feedback.

Thanks

Amit Chopra

Yes we finally have Express version of Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone

2010-03-15T18:03:50Z

Last week as I took a nostalgic walk down the memory lane talking about the tooling features over the years targeting various Generations of Windows Mobile.

Today I am very pleased to share that we have brand new setup of (Free!) tools now available for download today. Yes this is the big announcement we made at MIX and something our team has been working very hard to deliver.

We are super excited and I am hoping you will really love the work we have done to take your Silverlight and XNA productivity to another level, by bringing together Visual Studio 2010, A new emulator, Windows Phone developer resources and XNA Game studio.

Why wait - download right now ! Yes a 1 click install for *everything* you need to get started today !

http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/

Send me your feedback,. If you read this post now and then download the tools, you should have your first app ready before Lunch :-)

Cheers !

Amit Chopra

A walk down the memory lane

2010-03-08T07:37:55Z

It was end of 2003 when I moved from the Office Developer Team to the Visual Studio for Devices Team. A team that was chartered to provide developer tools for Windows CE and Windows Mobile. Quite a change from writing code in Visual Basic/VBA to C++ for Smart Devices and even more interesting was having to grasp a dozen new code words ‘Cedar’, ‘Talisker’, ‘Ozone’,’Jameson’,’ McKendrik’ in the first week of starting.

My First Project in this team was to work on eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 SP3 (SP1 and SP2 were already released) and we had some challenges supporting CE 4.1 and 4.2 Side by Side with the same tools. The goal of SP3 was to ensure we can support multiple versions of CE development on the same machine. Quite a delight for a number of CE Developers facing this challenge. I recollect walking to my first MVP Summit, holding a 64MB USB Stick with SP3 on it, with a amazing sense of accomplishment :-)

eVC also came with the support for the Standard CE Emulator which was an X86 based emulator for helping debug the application.

While many developers were writing hardcode native applications, a part of my team was also working to enable ‘Winforms’ support on Windows Mobile and CE using Compact Framework.

Our first incarnation of the managed tooling for Visual Studio was called as the ‘Smart Device Extensions’. A name that stuck on for years even after we become an integral part of the Visual Studio .NET 2003 product. An interesting introductory article from Jim Wilson (One of our MVPs) around this technology published almost 8 years ago.

And yes even Visual Studio .NET 2003 came with the Pocket PC Emulator which was still and X86 based emulator

So at this point we had 2 development tools, eVC for Native Development and Visual Studio .NET 2003 for doing Managed Development. I guess we knew what was coming next.

Visual Studio 2005 was the first IDE that now supported both Managed and Native Development. Here was my first article on the new features in VS 2005.

and this was one of the richest IDE we did so far. very cool design time experiene - WYSIWYG for both Pocket PC and Smartphone.

And how could we not give you high fidelity emulator. Barry Bond from my team was working a very high fidelity emulator (internally we called it “Barry’s Emulator”). It was an ARM based emulator to provide high fidelity for Native Apps and very powerful simulation for Managed Applications.

Fast forward another 2 years, and Visual Studio 2008 was around the corner. With a huge spike in the adoption of our tools and growth in developers using our the tools, we put a lot more focus on the developer productivity. Unit testing support was added as one of the core enhancements.

So now, what’s next ? Well all I can say is Stay tuned. The exciting stuff is only a few days away ! Come meet me and MIX and we would love to talk about it ! Also follow the blogs of Charlie and Christian to learn more about Windows Phone Development.

03.15.2010 – I am waiting for MIX, I hope you are too !

AMIT CHOPRA

PS:Pictures are from various articles I wrote and/or MSDN articles on Smart Devices across the years.

It’s been a long time…

2010-03-08T06:03:09Z

This blog goes live again. Stay tuned for exiting stuff. 03.15.2010 ! See you @ MIX 2010.

Getting some reports of IE8 Beta with Smart Device Projects

2008-06-10T23:38:00Z

A couple of customer pinged me recently that when they create a new Smart Device Native Project in VS 2008, the dialog comes and goes away and nothing really happens. On futher investigation it appears that installing IE8 Beta cause this.

I don't have a work around to share at this point (other than un-installing IE8) but as soon as I have something additional to share, I'll update this post with a workaround.

Amit Chopra

Jan 29, 2008 ** Verified that the Release Candidate of IE 8 does not cause any issues **

March 26th 2009 - Hmm not good. THis is back again, please give us some time to get this taken care of. Working with desktop C++ and IE Team to get a fix/workaround out asap.

A good list of mobile optimised websites

2008-05-02T21:17:00Z

Last night I was browsing around the web when I saw very handy collection of Web Sites that are optimised for mobile devices. I thought I should share

http://www.windowsmobiletraining.com/connection/forums/p/14/21.aspx#21

Business
Ameritrade	Trade and Watch Stocks
Bloomberg	Track your portfolio
Business Week	Mobile Business Week
Fidelity	Trade and Watch Stocks
Forbes	Mobile Forbes
StockPoint	Can't create a portfolio, but other tools such as charts are awesome
Schwab	Trade and Watch Stocks
Entertainment
Billboard	Music industry weekly that tracks record and song popularity in dozens of "charts", the best known of which is the Billboard Hot 100. All the charts are available on this new mobile site along with album cover art and chart history by artist.
Broadway Mobile	Mobile guide to Broadway plays, pls synopses, cast list and curtain times for current on-Broadway shows.
ClubFone	Nightlife guide for 30 US cities. Lists the major venues and headliners for various categories of music and comedy. Also a good selection of neighborhood bars, brewpubs and dance clubs.
Fandango	Buy those tickets on your way to the theater. Theatre show times and movies as well.
Radio Online	Steam that radio to your device using Tuned.mobi's service.
News - International
AllAfrica	Good to see Africa represented in the mobility space.
BBC News	This is BBC's PDA website. The graphics are awesome and are optimized for the PDA form factor. For WAP website, go here.
CanWest	CanWest's take on the news is also non-wap based. Mobile continues to go mainstream.
ChannelNewsAsia	Based in Singapore, here's a non-wap news site for APAC.
CNN International	If you're a CNN junkie, here's your fix.
DW - Deutsche Welle	German broadcaster but you can get content in 29 different languages from this site.
India Times	I usually don't like wap but India Times is a really rich site.
International Herald Tribune	117-yo Paris based English language daily. Solid graphics and very fast.
Malaysian News	Here's a site in English, Malay and Chinese
SwissInfo	Can't get enough of EMEA, here's another great broadcaster taking it to mobile
News - United States
ABC News	WAP based
CBS News	HTML based
Chicago Tribune	Get the latest from the Windy City's best daily newspaper.
Christian Science Monitor	Popular and html based.
KING5	Seatttle area folks can get the latest news, weather, and traffic.
LA Times	Arguably one of the top papers in the country mobilized!
MSNBC	Uses browser detection to serve you the best content for your device.
New York Business	Gotta get your business news from the Big Apple.
Orlando Sentinel	Going to MGX or CTIA? Here's your news, plus you can email articles.
Salon	Popular Online News magazine is mobile.
SF - KTVU	Fox's KTVU uses intelligent browser detection to help send content for your screen size.
Washington Post	One of the most prestigious papers in the US has fixed it's mobile site.
USA Today	WAP based version of a popular American Daily - Great Sports.
News - Humor/Satire
The Onion	Humorous, made up news stories.
Package Tracking
FedEx	Track a package, get rates, or find a FedEx store.
People Search
InfoSpace	White Pages, Yellow Pages and Reverse Phone directory.
Switchboard	White and Yellow pages. Reverse phone number lookup. Driving directions
YP	Yellow Pages, While Pages Reverse Phone Lookup, Reverse Address Lookup, Neighbor Look-up, and MapQuest Maps and Driving Directions
Reference
Answers.com
Dictionary.com	Dictionary
LangtoLang	Medical Questions
Pocket Doctor
Wapedia (Wikipedia)
Search - Local
10Best	Find the 10 Best of anything in 3,500 cities around the world. Very nice HTML based site.
MSN Live Local	Web site for Live Search.
Starbucks Locator	Get your fix anywhere in the US or Canada.....sorry EMEA
Search - Web
Google	Pretty good site but results are an amalgam of mobile and non-mobile optimized sites which makes the usability of web searches questionable.
Live Search	Microsoft's Web Search
Yahoo oneSearch	Yahoo's Web Search
Shopping
Amazon	Amazon.com Shopping Site - Books/Music/DVDs/Toys/etc.
Craigslist	Free Classified Ads
Century 21 - House Shopping	Drive a new neighborhood and search fort available houses while you're at it. Brilliant!
Ebay	Worlds Largest Auction site / Garage Sale
Overstock.com	Supposedly overstock items being blown out at low prices.
NY Book Review	Books
Social Networking
Flickr	Yahoo's Photo Sharing Site
Live Spaces	Your personal web page with blogs, photos, etc. By Microsoft
Sports
BBC Sports
CBS Sportsline
ESPN	ESPN Sports
Travel - Airline
Air Canada
America West
American Air
Alaska Air
Austrian Air
Continental Air
Delta Air
El Al
Jetblue
KLM
Lufthansa
Northwest Air
Qantas
SAS
Southwest
United Airlines
US Airways
Travel - Destinations
Disney	Visitor's Guide to Disney parks - Superfast!
Travel - General / Tools
Cabbies.mobi	Get a cab in the US, Canada, or the UK
CarRentals.com
Concierge
FlightStats	Simple Flight Status Website. Great for checking on airport status, security wait times, and flight delays.
Fodors	Travel Guide
Travel - Hotels
Hotels.com
Travel - Rail
DB European Travel	Plan trips between any town in Europe.
Travel - Booking
CheapTickets	Can't book, but you can view your itineraries.
Kayak.com	Travel Meta-Search engine is really cool.
Orbitz	Flight status, itineraries, hotel finder, and contact info.
Travel - Trip Planning
Hop Stop	Public Transportation in DC, NYC, SF, Boston, and Chicago
NextBus	Satellite tracking tells you when the next bus will arrive.
Portland Transit Tracker
WebWatch
Worldwide Travel Info
Weather
Animated Weather	PDA Animated Weather - Not only can you get the weather, but the satellite images are animated and zoomable.
WeatherBug
Weather Channel	Get your US weather here by zip, or city/state.
Weather Network	Get your international forecasts here.

I will be @ Mix 08

2008-01-31T02:03:55Z

Will you ? Also I am told that the Early Birds Discount Ends soon. So act fast !

Amit Chopra

Looking for an easy way to try VS 2008?

2008-01-08T22:13:05Z

While we do have trial editions available for download, but if you don't want the hassle of installing this on your main machine, I noticed that there are VPC Images with Visual Studio 2008 [Trial] pre-installed also available for download.

More details available here.

Amit Chopra