October, 2010

Watch it via Live Broadcast at a Microsoft Office

PDC10 is sold out, but you can still join the excitement via the live stream on October 28. This year’s groundbreaking event will include live streaming of the keynotes, as well as concurrent live streaming of sessions. We’ll have a number of sessions presented live, in person by our local Microsoft Developer Tools team as well!

We invite you to attend the PDC10 Viewing Party hosted by Microsoft and Philly.NET on October 28, 2010 in Malvern, PA. This year’s content will focus on the next generation of Cloud Services, Client & Devices, and Framework & Tools.

Viewing Party Agenda

REGISTER HERE

Hope to see you there!

-Dave

Expression Studio for Developers

With the growing interest in Windows Phone 7 development Blend (now included free with the WP7 Dev Tools) interest has really started to peak.  A well known BlendFanBoy I jumped at the chance when asked if I could do an Expression Studio for Developers session for this falls Philly.Net CodeCamp.  The sessions intent was to cover what a normal .NET Developer could gain out of a beginning knowledge of Blend. 

We started off by covering the basics of XAML and Expression Studio.  We then jumped into Visual Studio 2010 and created a simple Silverlight 4 UI I think most developers would be familiar with.  But this is Expression Studio so its i time to let our inner creativity shine!  After firing up Sketchflow we created a working prototype of our new UI including navigation and animation.  Once our users had approved this prototype (including leaving feedback and a final design worddoc) we loaded up the same plain Silverlight UI we built in VS2010 into Blend.  We created a bunch of animation, embedded free web fonts, added some background brushes and ended up templating a few controls.  You can grab the slides and code here.

From Idea to Interactivity Design Guidelines for WP7

One of the biggest requests from developers is more information on creating a Windows Phone 7 application that takes full advantage of the Metro Design philosophy.  I covered a portion of this at our Windows Phone 7 Firestarters but for the National Developer Launches I created an entirely separate track dedicated to the design.  It is priceless seeing the smiles go across traditional .NET Developers faces when they first realize how easy it is to add animation to their apps.

We started off with the design philosophy behind metro, hitting on some of the official WP7 design guidelines, we worked our way into Blend and began going over how to create layout that will automatically scale for your user.  We then went over some of how to use the default phone templates to ensure a great experience regardless of the color themes a user has selected.  We used the new Device pallete inside Blend as well as the updated RTM WP7 Emulator.

We ended up by handling the Orientation Changed event and having our layout stretch based on being in a horizontal or vertical orientation.  Since this is metro and we want to delight our users with some smile moments increasing the pixel size was not enough.  We created some storyboards that had our UI literally bounce when the user rotates the phone and then we showed how easy it was to load this back into Visual Studio 2010 and debug.   You can grab the slides and code here.

Happy coding!

Almost 500 Developers showed up this past Saturday, October 9th, for the bi-annual Philly.Net CodeCamp.  As expected this years event was packed full of content, including a dedicated Windows Phone 7 track! 

Highlights included:

• 8 hours of learning and networking
• 63 sessions by 55 speakers
• 13 tracks
• 600 seats with tables (laptops welcome)
• Breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack
• Raffles and prizes at lunch and closing
• New Booster registration option for charity donations, parties, and prizes
• Easy parking
• Convenient hotels (Holiday Inn, 432 Pennsylvania Ave, Fort Washington, PA 215.643.3000)
• After hours party the Brick House, Willow Grove (network with speakers and attendees)

Be sure to check out the Philly.Net CodeCamp website for updates and slidedecks.  I brought my camera again and have a Flickr photo album you can check out.

What an exciting morning!  Today we unveil Windows Phone 7 to the world including launch devices.  Everything we have been talking about this past few weeks with developers comes down to this moment.  Here is where press will have a first hands on experience with the devices, the operating system and your apps.  In just a few weeks consumers will be able to walk into the store and begin buying devices and applications. 

From today’s Press Release:

Microsoft Corp. today joined its partners in revealing nine new Windows Phone 7 handsets that will be available this holiday season from leading mobile operators in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. With more than 60 mobile operators in over 30 countries worldwide committed to bringing Windows Phones to market, the millions of people around the world looking for a phone that plays as hard as it works will have a variety of phones from leading device-makers to choose from.

“We have a beautiful lineup in this first wave of Windows Phone 7 handsets,” said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft. “Microsoft and its partners are delivering a different kind of mobile phone and experience — one that makes everyday tasks faster by getting more done in fewer steps and providing timely information in a ‘glance and go’ format.”

What Devices will be available at launch?

Engadget has a great write-up of all the new phones you can checkout here.  Among them?

• HTC 7 Surround -- The 3.8-inch T8788 with slideout speaker for AT&T and Telus
• HTC HD7 -- Schubert comes of age as a 4.3-inch HD2 cousin for T-Mobile and beyond
• HTC 7 Trophy -- the 3.8-inch Spark headed to international carriers
• HTC 7 Mozart -- another heavily leaked int'l player with 3.7-inch display
• Dell Venue Pro -- 4.1-inch portrait QWERTY slider for T-Mobile we broke as Lightning
• Samsung Focus -- AT&T's 4-inch Super AMOLED slate we broke as Cetus
• Samsung Omnia 7 -- the i8700 is a 4-inch Super AMOLED jobbie for Europe
• LG Optimus 7 -- the E900 is the official 3.8-inch global workhorse
• LG Quantum -- AT&T's 3.5-inch landscape slider first seen as the C900

• HTC 7 Pro -- a 3.6-inch QWERTY slider for Sprint (2011)

AT&T has also updated their website with a list of devices they will have available.

We have also updated the official Windows Phone website with details on what devices are available on which carriers.

Be sure to check it all out here.

What are some of the  third party applications?

Engadget has more details on some of the applications we showed today.  Ebay? Yes. IMDB? Yes. Twitter? Yes. Netflix? Yes!

Check out more of the details here.

Anything I missed?

A few other things caught my eye during the announcements as well. 

• We are officially going to have Copy and Paste in early 2011.  This will be a FREE update to EVERY Windows Phone 7 device across EVERY carrier in the world.  Unlike some of the other platforms out there we control all updates to our operating system.  No more carrier lock in.
• Electronic Arts is officially supporting Windows Phone 7.  This means Sims 3, Monopoly, Need for Speed and Tetris are all there.
• The new Windows Phone 7 Ad Campaign is brilliant.  I truly want to congratulate the folks behind it.  You can check out our consumer Ad approach here and get a sneak peak of some of the Ads.
• Zune 4.7 is out (Windows Phone 7 support) and is available for download right now.

-Dave