Jaime Rodriguez

Building Windows Games with the Unity game engine

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:13:00 GMT

This is not déjà vu(or a joke) -- we are finally executing on the training event we postponed last November
If you want to know why now, today Unity released their public beta of Unity 4.2, with support for Windows Store apps.

The event is on; below, you will find the highest level details. For hour by hour agenda, check the registration site.

It is a 2 day event at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, CA. April 9 and 10.
The event is optimized for existing Unity developers who want to get all the details on porting a Unity game to Windows Store or Windows Phone.

Agenda:

Pre-event (night before event) - Unity will do an in-person “jumpstart” into Unity game development for those of us that are not experts, but want to keep up on the next two days.
Main Event (April 9th, 9AM to 5 PM ) is mostly presentations from Unity, Microsoft and partners that have already ported their apps to both the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store. We will also have panels and Q&A time.
Game Jam (April 10th 9AM to 5 PM ) is all hands-on. Bring your game and port it, or bring a concept and write a new game. We will have Unity field engineers, Microsoft engineers and evangelists, all ready to assist you. We will also have production devices ( Windows Phones, Surface and other devices) for you to try your games on a myriad of hardware.

The event is free. If you can’t attend in person, you will be able to watch the presentations via live webcast at http://channel9.msdn.com.

Again, you should register here. It is first-come-first-serve.

Hope to see you there. Happy Coding!

Windows Store app development for iOS developers

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 23:30:00 GMT

On December 13 and 14th, Microsoft and the Big Nerd Ranch team are having a two day training on building Windows Store apps.

The event will be in Microsoft’s Mountain View (CA) campus.
To attend in person, register at http://aka.ms/iostoWindowscamp
Both days will also be streamed live at http://channel9.msdn.com

You can find a detailed agenda in the registration site.

My no-fluff description for the event follows:

The training is aimed at iOS developers who want to start building Windows Store apps.
It starts from the beginning with intros to the programming languages, the platform and the tools.
We will try to build a bridge from iOS concepts to Windows concepts so that you can reuse your existing iOS knowledge as much as possible.
Event will focus on building apps with XAML/C#, but devs looking to build on apps with HTML or DirectX will also get a useful overview of the platform.

If you are an iOS developer, we hope you can join us, it will be a beginning of a fun journey.. Bring your Mac Book (with enough space to install Windows using parallels or any other virtualization technology).

To learn more about Windows Store app development, check out the resources for iOS developers page on the Windows Dev Center and check out Aaron’s Hillegass’ Build 2012 session: “Top 10 things iOS developers need to know about Windows Store apps”.

Happy Windows coding!

Building Windows Store games with the Unity engine

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 20:15:00 GMT

This event has been post-poned to a soon to be announced date (it will be end of January).
Apologies for the inconvenience. Stay tuned for the new confirmed date details in the coming weeks.

Our Windows Evangelism team is partnering with Unity to put a great two-day workshop on building Windows Store games with Unity.

The two-day event will be on Nov 29th on Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View, CA.
To attend in person you will need to register at http://aka.ms/unitywindowscamp

If you can’t attend in person, we will also stream day 1 live at http://channel9.msdn.com

Day 1 will be instructor led content (again, streamed live) and day 2 is an installfest, hands-on, expert Q&A and coding.
You can find a detailed agenda for the event at the registration site. There will also be a social event on Thurs night, and some other fun activities on Friday.

Hope you can join us. If you want to learn more about building Windows Store games with Unity, check out their build 2012 session “Developing, deploying and monetizing Windows Store games with Unity”.

Free, online Windows 8 UX Training

jaime_rodriguez — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 18:41:58 GMT

This coming Thursday (6/14) members of the Windows User Experience team are delivering an all-day, free, virtual training on Windows 8 UX fundamentals.

You can register for the event here.

Below is a brief excerpt from the registration site ( sorry for blatant copy paste )..

Metro style apps are the focal point of the user experience on Windows 8 Release Preview, and great Metro style apps share an important set of traits that provide a consistent, elegant, and compelling user experience.
Join us for this free, virtual training presented by the Windows User Experience Team, which helps designers & developers learn how to design great apps that leverage the full extent of the platform and adhere to UX guidelines. After this training, attendees will understand the tenants of a great app, how to think about information architecture, best practices for designing flexible layouts, touch, how to leverage contracts in the platform, and much more.

Agenda:
· Metro style design
· Commanding, Information Architecture & Navigation
· Designing for Touch, Mouse & Keyboard
· Animations
· Designing for view states
· Designing apps with adaptive layouts
· Using Contracts
· Connected and Alive
· Anatomy of an App: Case Study
We look forward to seeing you there. If you have any questions please email WUXFT@microsoft.com

Happy Windows 8 Coding (and designing)!!

A free, early Windows 8 Store token plus a free Windows 8 slate..

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 15:51:05 GMT

I have blogged before about the process to get a Windows 8 developer token early so you can reserve your name and submit your app.

Now, a few colleagues in US DPE Central region are raising the bounty with a contest that gives free slates to the best apps that complete a lab by June 30th. Get all the details at Jennifer Marsman's blog.

By Microsoft’s definition, the states that comprise the Central Region of the United States are Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky)

Good luck & Happy Windows 8 Coding!

PS – Don’t forget, if you are not eligible to participate on the contest, you can still get the token by going to a lab around the world.

PPS – If you go to her blog post, leave a comment asking if JaimeR will be a judge at the contest. Let’s start the rumor and see if it sticks. I want to see the apps.

MSDN Webcast series on building Metro style apps

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 11 May 2012 06:50:00 GMT

A few colleague evangelists are doing a series on MSDN Webcasts on building Windows 8 Metro style apps..
Catch the whole series and get a very concise, yet comprehensive introduction to building Metro style apps..
See below for abstracts and presenter for each session, click on the title for each session to visit the registration page for that session
Each session is one hour.

Updated on 6/7 with new links to the off-line recordings since these are all in the past.

Monday May 14th, 2012 8:30 AM PST
Introduction to the Windows 8 platform and the Windows store
Jennifer Marsman
Windows 8 is Windows re-imagined! Join this session to learn about the new platform for building Metro-style applications. Get an understanding of the platform design tenets, the programming language choices, and the integration points with the operating system and across Metro-style apps. We will also discuss the enormous opportunity for developers to make crazy money with the Windows Store. You will walk away with the resources to begin writing Metro applications for Windows 8.

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012 8:30 AM PST
Designing apps with Metro style principles and the Windows personality
Chris Bernard
Metro style design has a set of five guiding principles to help you make the best choices when designing your app. These principles are the foundation for building great Metro style apps. Consider these principles as you plan your app, and always ensure your design and development choices live up to these principles.

Monday, May 21, 2012 8:30 AM PSTJohn WieseMonday, May 21, 2012 8:30 AM PST Monday, May 21, 2012 8:30 AM PST
Building Metro style apps with XAML: What .NET developers need to know
John Wiese

If you are experienced with .NET or Silverlight and are already familiar with XAML, this session will teach you everything you need to know to create a Metro style app for Windows 8. This session will cover updates to familiar features and explore concepts that are new for Windows 8. We’ll talk about building reusable Windows Runtime Components in C#, Async programming in Windows 8 and both the Visual Studio and Expression designers. This session will show you how to turn your XAML skills into money-making Metro style apps.

Wednesday May 23, 2012 8:30 AM PST
What HTML developers need to know about coding Windows 8 Metro style apps
Michael Palermo
This session is perfect for any web developer wanting to leverage his/her skillset to develop Windows 8 Metro style apps. The session begins by proving how much web developers already know about building apps for Windows 8. The focus then turns to how to write JavaScript code with WinJS. Key points for Metro style app development will be highlighted by implementing popular feature requests using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Thursday, May 31, 2012 8:30 AM PST
Win as One: How Contracts in Windows 8 Help You Build a Killer Metro App
G. Andrew Duthie
Contracts are agreements between Windows and your Metro style app that allow you to integrate Windows 8 features into your app. For example, Windows 8 lets users share content from one application to another by using the Share contract.

In this session, you'll learn how contracts work and how to implement the built-in contracts such as Search, Share, Settings, and More. With Contracts, you can help users get more out of your app, and in a way that is consistent and intuitive, and they will reward you by coming back to your app again and again.

Monday, June 4th, 2012 8:30 AM PST
Bring Your Windows 8 Metro Style Apps to Life with Tiles and Notifications
Chris Bowen

Tiles and Notifications are important ways to draw attention to your app and improve your users' experiences. Tiles can draw users back into your app when your tile comes to life on Start screen. They can also let users personalize their Start screen by creating deep links to specific places within your app. Notifications, delivered through the Windows Push Notification Service, can inform and draw your users back into your app even when it's not running.
In this session, you will learn how to effectively implement Tiles and Notifications to help your apps shine.

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012 8:30:00 AM PST
Building Windows 8 Metro style casual games using HTML 5
David Isbitski

The intent of this session is to help HTML5/JavaScript developers with writing their first Metro Style App in a fun, immersive way. We will cover the basics of HTML5 Canvas gaming and how we can easily bring it to Windows 8. We will then add additional game functionality as we introduce HTML5 Audio, CSS3 styling and web fonts, implementing a game loop with JavaScript, 3rd party frameworks, touch, camera, accelerometer, and WInJS controls.

I will be watching. I hope you join us.

Happy WIndows 8 coding!

Building Metro style apps with C++ event is now a live webcast

jaime_rodriguez — Mon, 07 May 2012 09:09:00 GMT

Two weeks ago, we announced an all day training for those Building metro style apps with C++..

Event sold out within a few days, and we got a lot of requests for it to be recorded (or broadcasted live)..

I am happy to announce that the event will now be live. Please pencil us in in your calendar. Event will be live on Friday May 18th, from 9 AM PST to 5 PM PST.

We will share details (the link) and the agenda later this week.
We will aim to have two live Q&As (one around noon PST) and one around 4 PM PST, we will take your questions via twitter.. Just follow the #win8C++Camp (Updated on 5/10) #ch9live hash on the day of the event..

Please help us spread the word!! Hope you can join us on the 18th.

Happy Windows 8 coding!!

Announcing the Building Windows 8 apps with C++ Windows camp

jaime_rodriguez — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 19:13:00 GMT

Join the Microsoft Visual C++ and Windows teams in Redmond on May 18, 2012 for a free, all-day event focused on building Windows 8 Metro style apps with C++.

Whether you are a new C++ developer ready to learn about the writing Metro style apps, an intermediate developer who wants to hone your code and skills, or an experienced C++ developer eager to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your Metro style app and/or push the boundaries of Windows 8, then this event is for you. We will have pragmatic advice for every developer writing Metro style apps and games with XAML or DirectX and C++.

Agenda:

C++ for Windows 8, Keynote by Herb Sutter
Building Windows 8 apps with XAML and C++
Building Windows 8 games with DirectX and C++
Introduction to the Windows Runtime Library (WRL)
Writing Connected apps: Writing networking code with C++
Combining XAML & Direct X in a Metro style apps
Writing WinRT components to be consumed from any language
VC11 compiler flags for getting the most out of C++

Registration:
Register for this event here. If is first-come, first-serve, and we are limited in space, so register soon.
If you want to learn more about other Windows 8 camps check the camps site.

Details:
Location: Redmond WA, Microsoft campus, bldg 92.
Date: May 18th, 2012
Time: 9 AM to 5 PM for sessions, Q&A and a small social event afterwards.
Speakers: We will update the list of speakers early next week, we are still negotiating session times & speakers to cram as much as we can into a single day.
Rest assured most of them are from the product team and yes, Herb Sutter will do the opening keynote and the first session.
Meals: We will have some light breakfast, lunch, snacks and appetizers + drinks at the end of the day.

My personal pitch on this event:
Even if you are already coding your Metro style app, you don’t want to miss this event. All the speakers are product team people, and we will have a very strong pragmatic angle during our sessions; we are aiming to answer a lot of the questions and help you avoid the common pit-falls that we have seen our early partners building Metro style apps with C++ have ran into. There will also be ample Q&A time through out the day.

Happy Windows 8 coding. Please help us spread the word on this event we are really excited to connect with C++ community.

Wanted!! Great Windows 8 Metro style apps

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 05:46:00 GMT

Tuesday, the Windows Store blog announced that in the next significant Windows 8 preview release they will be expanding
their global coverage with 33 additional app submission locales for developers.

As Antoine Leblond alluded to in the post, our store services are ramping up as planned--and of course the plan includes ramping up developer registrations to enable app submissions to the Windows store. Today, you need an invite “token” to register. This begs the question - How can YOU get a token?

It’s easy! If your app is ready and you want to be among those developers who get to submit to the store early, simply attend one of the 100s of free Application Excellence Labs that DPE and Windows are holding around the world.

Follow these steps to get invited to an App Excellence lab:

Create a really great Windows 8 Metro style app (or game) immediately. Get it as ready as if you were submitting to the store.
If you know your local DPE evangelists (maybe because you attended a Windows camp training), get in touch with them and ask them to nominate your app for a lab.
If you don’t know your local evangelist, then email the following information to win8aefb@microsoft.com:
1. Your name
2. City & country where you are located
3. Brief description for your app (no binary, screenshot is optional, but only send if the screenshot is public, non-confidential stuff )
4. Your pledge that you’ve spent at least 8 hours devouring all the great UX guidelines we have at the design section in the Windows Dev Center¹
5. Wait for our response letting you know where the closest app excellence lab will be and how to get in touch with the right evangelist to nominate you.

Hopefully, there will be a lab near you. Right now, we have labs in 40+ countries and we may be adding more.

Of course, coming to the lab is not all you have to do. I have to go back to step #1: You need to have a compelling, functional app that follows our UX guidelines, our performance best practices, and our store certification requirements²

The lab is a 4-hour engagement with a trained Microsoft Services Engineer. This person will run your app through a series of tests based on a quality checklist to ensure your app is (or will be) in top-notch shape when you submit. You will also get a chance discuss ways to make your app even better and you will get answers to any questions you might have.
If your app meets the criteria, then booyah! You get a token to register your developer account and (once you have been verified and all that) you will be able to submit your app to the Windows store.
If your app does not meet the criteria, nothing is lost. You will still end up with a much better app³ and you will be able to submit it when registration opens for all developers.

Good luck. We are looking forward to seeing your apps and helping you to make them great!
Happy Windows 8 coding!!

¹ Kidding about the pledge but not kidding about highly recommending you review the guidelines and get your app very polished.
² Note: The lab is not a replacement for certification process; that still happens when you submit to the store.
³ Really, the lab preparation will be worth it, you will have a survey with questions, useful advice, links to guidelines, etc. The survey is (by far) not the only criteria we will use at the labs, but if you follow the preparation from the survey, you will likely have a great app.

Installing .NET Framework 3.5 in Windows 8 Consumer Preview

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:29:09 GMT

[I am traveling today, so it might be a one-off due to low band-width at the hotel, but in case it helps others]

I was installing Live writer and got a prompt to install the .NET Framework 3.5, I agreed to do that and got a “following feature could not be installed. Error: 0x800F0906.

Fortunately, I still had the ISO from when I installed consumer preview , so I used the local sources.
If you see the error above, try this from an elevated command prompt.

dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /Source:h:\sources\sxs
where “h” is the drive where you have your win8 installation files (or where the iso is mounted, replace the path appropriately ).

Happy Windows 8 coding!

Ad SDK for Windows 8 Metro style apps

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 19:05:00 GMT

Yesterday, Microsoft released the Beta Ad SDK for Windows 8.

This is an update to the SDK released at build. It works with Windows 8 Consumer preview.

Here are the relevant links for the announcement:

Happy Windows 8 coding.

Getting started with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 09:48:00 GMT

it has been a long while since I last blogged. Why? I have immersed myself into the Windows 8 Metro style app development world.. :)

Now, it is time to report back and share some of my experiences building Metro style apps via some blog posts. I hope you come along for the ride.

Here is my list of "must know" links for anyone getting started with the Windows 8 consumer preview.

Download the recently released Windows 8 Consumer Preview and the Visual Studio 11 Beta tools for building Metro style apps.
The Windows 8 engineering team started a new Windows 8 App Developer blog where I am sure they will share insightful posts and spark some great conversations, like they have been doing in the Building Windows 8 blog and the Windows store for developers blog. You should subscribe to all these blogs and get ready to follow along and participate in the biggest developer opportunity, ever.
If you started prototyping with the build bits and have code to migrate, here is the white paper to help migrate code from //Build to Windows 8 Consumer Preview
If you need to immerse yourself into the Windows 8 UX Metro principles, you should check the brand new design center at http://design.windows.com
In particular, you should check out the new design assets for Metro style apps. The assets package includes psds for layout, common controls, and components such as contracts, tiles, keyboard, etc. You can download the assets from here
You should also download the "Consumer preview sample app pack" that contains over 200 samples for almost anything related to Metro style app development..
If you need some inspiration and want to check out great hardware, great apps, and the latest Windows 8 UX, watch the video from the Consumer Preview announcement

That should keep you busy through the weekend!

Happy Windows 8 coding!!

transcript from background agents Q&A..

jaime_rodriguez — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:05:00 GMT

Last week we did a video on background agents for the Inside Windows Phone show.. If you want to go deep into agents, you must watch the video. It is here.

To lure the super starPeter Torr into coming and doing yet another video on background agents, I had to prove to him the questions were deeper than what had already been covered in his knowledge chamber video and on his blog post series on agents. This is the email thread with the Qs and Answers that we covered in the video. The email thread on questions ended up being (imo) a good way to document the details, so sharing it below as a supplement to the video - again, go watch the video now.

Full disclaimer: these are implementation specific details that might change in the future; or might even change under specific circumstances in Mango. Use them (as a developer) to plan and design a great experience, but in the end it is still a phone, so code safely.

Q: How much memory does each agent get ?
Peak working set is 6MB for periodic and idle agents. Note that the runtime takes > 2MB of memory, so your agent really gets < 4MB.
When agents exceed the memory limit, even momentarily, they get terminated with or without an OOM exception (depending on whether OOM happened in managed or native memory).
For periodic and resource intensive agents, the scheduling service will auto-disable agents that crash or OOM twice in a row. Note that RI agents are also run in RR cycles.

Q: How much CPU does each agent get? what can people do to not exceed it..
t is a different story for audio and generic agents. For Audio: the OS ‘guarantees’ that the agent gets ~10% of CPU time every 5s. Depending on the foreground activity, the agent can use more – the average CPU is not limited in most cases).
Note that audio player and streaming agents share the same process and the resources (memory, CPU).

For periodic agents, expect to get 10-20% CPU in real time use due to parallel execution: we run up to 5 agents in parallel when the phone is locked.
This means an agent that uses L2S and networking and finishes in 15s may take more than 25s when run with other agents.

The CPU ‘guarantee’ here is 10% every 15s (which is rarely useful unless you are dealing with a foreground CPU-heavy app like IE). Again no CPU limit.
When there is low CPU activity in the foreground, agents can use as much CPU as they need.

One way to present this is: agents and foreground experiences share the same priority but run with different thread quantum allocation that ensures that, in most cases, the foreground app gets at least 70% of the CPU time.

Q:. How often do generic agents run?
Around every 28 minutes. See details below.

Q: What is the algorithm for generic agents? what is the battery threshold? Do they still run in battery saver mode?
Periodic agents don’t run when battery saver mode is On. They also don’t run when the phone battery is low (<20%). RI agents can’t run until the battery is at least 91%.
The periodic schedule is a little fuzzy to align with other scheduled network activities (for example email sync and push client keep-alive signals). It is scheduled to run every 28 minutes but the schedule can be invoked earlier in some cases (delta can be up to 10min). Also agents don’t run immediately after boot – they are delayed for ~30min.

Q: What is limit on # of agents in a phone? What error do devs get when that limit is reached?
No limit for Resource Intensive. Max of one audio agent at a time. For Periodic the limit is phone memory dependent. On devices with limited RAM (under 384MB), it is 9 agents, otherwise it is 15. You get an exception when the limit is hit (you have to check the error string unfortunately).

FAQ on things you can or can’t do from background agent:
Q:Can I pin a new tile?
No.

Q: Can I update a pinned tile?
Yes, and you can delete pinned tiles

Q: Can I instantiate UIElements (even if not in a visual tree)? For example to create an image?
Yes, and you can probably also enable properties by adding controls to the ‘invisible’ RootVisual, e.g. with something like:((Panel)(Application.Current.RootVisual)).Children.Add(control);
You can use this for example to render user controls in the background (e.g. to create dynamic tiles). Watch out for the memory impact though always aim for <4.5MB peak.

Q: Can I create sockets, files, etc. open database, etc..
Yes, with one caveat: RI agents cannot go over cellular connection. This means RI agents will need a wifi connection to use sockets.
(The desktop connection is disabled when tethered for sockets in general, but that is more noticeable for RI agents).

Q: During debug, is it possible to run my agent more often than every 30 mins?
Yes, use the LaunhForTest APIs; Peter covered this in the video.

Happy Windows Phone coding. I will be back in full swing soon.

Useful Mango Developer Resources

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 23:49:00 GMT

With the Windows Phone (codenamed) Mango beta release, the Windows Phone team thrived to have great documentation and useful learning resources for WP7 developers.
I think they did a superb job and given it came after MIX (and we had lots of great video content) the docs have gone unnoticed a bit, so I want to highlight a couple of these resources to make sure developers are getting the most out of these. Today, I will cover the documentation improvements and the new “Mango” training kit.

<shortcut>
If you rather watch videos, here are two that summarize this post:
Luke Nyswonger, lead for Windows Phone online documentation does a video walk through of all the new stuff in the docs.
Yours truly does a walk-through of tidy, one of the apps in the training kit. It is a scenario that we use for five labs: sql ce, background agents, tiles, background transfer, and reminders.
</shortcut>

New Mango training kit:
With the new Windows Phone training kit for Mango release, we did a few things different:

The kit is aimed at intermediate level developers. It goes straight into Mango features and the labs are shorter because we skipped a lot of the intro stuff.. Most of the readers for this blog will feel very comfortable and new developers will pick it up quickly and still have the prior Windows Phone Training Kit for introductory material.
The kit takes a scenario approach where instead of having ten or twelve disaggregate/unrelated labs, you have a few hands-on labs that show how multiple features come together to fulfill a scenario.

Here are some of the new samples you will find in the training kit:

“Tidy” is a proof of concept to-do list application that takes advantages of Mango features to do smarter tasking.
Again, you can see Tidy in action in this video walk-through. If you do Mango presentations or demos, Tidy is a good demonstrator of how new Mango features make an existing application much better.
The hands-on labs map quite well to the features it showcases
- Local database hands-on-Lab. Tidy uses SQL CE as its data store and the hands-on lab will show you how to attribute the object model to create LINQ to SQL mappings. How to create databases at run-time, and how to query the database.
- Alerts and Reminders hands-on-lab. Tidy allows you to create reminders for a task. The hands-on lab shows you how to query it a reminder exists, how to create and delete a reminder.
- Start Tile pinning hands-On-Lab. Tidy allows you to pin every project so you can deep-link into a project. This way if your tasks are organized you can deep-link into project specific views and get the tasks for that specific project.
- Background Transfer hands-On-Lab shows you how to use the new background transfer APIs to upload and download a backup of the database to your local machine.
- Background agents hands-on-lab shows you how to create background agents in Mango. The background agents check your location every 30 minutes and if you are nearby a location where tasks are due, it will prompt you a shell toast notification to remind you to complete the task while you are at that location.
  The background agent also demonstrates how to update the tiles from an agent – it checks tasks that are overdue and it updates the tile for the project with the count-.
The “Photofun” hands-on lab demonstrates the new live camera stream APIs. It captures the live camera stream and applies effects to it; it integrates with the camera hardware button to capture images when the button is pressed.
The XNA 3D Model Viewer hands-on-lab shows you how to use the new shared graphics model so you can visualize XNA-based 3D models in a Silverlight application. It also demonstrates using the new background transfer APIs to download the models from an Azure store.
The new device capabilities hands-on lab shows you how to use the new Mango APIs (and some 7.0 APIs) to query device capabilities. With the new APIs you can detect if compass and gyro are supported, you can detect the type of network connection the device is using, and other generic device information.

Great improvements and additions to the documentation

The documentation team also did a few things different.

There is a great “What’s new” page that you can use to get to all the feature overviews, code-samples, etc..
The samples and how-to walkthroughs are now a bit more scenario oriented. For example, their sockets demo is a full blown tic-tac-toe game.
They have a lot of comprehensive how-tos on the new APIs. Including the profiler, camera APIs, Background APIs, etc. If it’s new, you will find a how to!
They have moved the User experience Design guidelines from a PDF to an HTML format and they literally doubled the amount of content that went into the UX guidelines.
They have moved the certification requirements from a PDF to an HTML format, and they have included the test steps so you can ensure you test ahead of time (or if you fail certification you have repro steps.
They have a very nice “developer resources page” in the apphub that aggregates all the content that Windows phone developers will need

Again, if you want to see a brief video of these changes, Luke will give you a walk through in this video

With all the above changes, developers can find every thing easily, they get a very comprehensive (and deep) view into the features, and they can even have fun while doing it.
Thanks to the doc teams (and the PMs that reviewed it ) for all this goodness; I am sure I missed some; if you find it, comment on it please (or write your own blog post about it ).

Happy Windows Phone coding! Don’t forget to read the docs.

Windows Phone emulator software input panel and orientation

jaime_rodriguez — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 07:16:25 GMT

I hope I am not the only person who did not know this (apologies if that is the case).

<context>
A few weeks ago while at an event in Finland, my emulator did not detect an orientation change during a demo. Some one suggested I restart the emulator, I did, and it worked (against my instinct). Today, I found out what’s going on.
</context>

<answer>
When you use the Page Up/Page down button, the emulator let’s you toggle the Software Input Panel (SIP) on and off. Also when you use the Pause/Break button the emulator disables the SIP and let’s you enter text via your keyboard. All that works neatly as expected. I use that all the time. The part I did not know is that the emulator does not support orientation changes when the keyboard is enabled. This is all well documented in the keyboard mapping page: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff754352(v=VS.92).aspx but I did not know.
Not sure if it has always been documented and I missed it or it is new; either way, fooled me once.. but not again..
</answer>

Happy Windows Phone coding (and don’t forget to read the manual now and then !!)

System Tray Progress Indicator

jaime_rodriguez — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 18:18:42 GMT

In my last post, I teased that system tray in Mango is now customizable and data binding friendly
On top of that, the SystemTray now has a ProgressIndicator that you can use to replace your PerformantProgressBar and display progress on async operations.

Here is everything you need to know (or everything I know) about ProgressIndicator.

It is a DependencyObject so you can data bind to it..
You can use these properties to customize and manage the indicator:

IsVisible (type boolean) to show/hide it. This is separate from SystemTray.IsVisible. The SystemTray must be visible for the progress indicator to be visible too.
IsIndeterminate (type boolean) property. When this property is set, you will see the infamous ‘dancing dots’ that we show for indeterminate progress every where on the phone.
Value property (type double) that you can use to show value (normalized 0 to 1) when your indicator is not indeterminate.
It also
Text property is used to display a message in the progress indicator.

A few small quirks and tips :

The Text has a margin that you can’t control. Not a huge deal, I assume consistent with OS.
The progress indicator’s text does pickup the Foreground color you are using for the SystemTray, but the indeterminate dancing dots (or the progress bar) do not pickup the color though. They are using PhoneAccentBrush.
I found out that I could not access (programmatically) the SystemTray.ProgressIndicator property until page is loaded. I got an InvalidOperationException saying “To get SystemTray ProgressIndicator the RootVisual must be a PhoneApplicationFrame and its Content must be a PhoneApplicationPage”. Not a huge deal, you can listen to loaded and check if you have initialized it before (since Loaded can fire multiple times in a page instance).
Use BindingOperations.SetBinding () to bind to DependencyObjects (where you normally use FrameworkElement.SetBinding).

The screenshot to the right shows you all of SystemTray’s properties in action. It has a white foreground and green background with 60% opacity, indeterminate progress indicator and (obviously) custom text in the indicator.
You can turn everything on and off to see the impact as you tweak each property.
It is all data bound; there is no manual setting of any properties. I am running on light theme with orange highlight.

You can get the source from my skydrive.

Happy Windows Phone “Mango” coding.

Customizing SystemTray’s Background in Mango

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 07:38:37 GMT

A missing feature from Windows phone 7.0 was the ability to set the Background and Foreground color in the SystemTray.
For branded apps (like Facebook) this was a problem cause the tray looked ugly, so most of these apps had to hide it, hiding important notifications (like clock, battery indicator ) from the user..

In Mango, you can finally set Foreground (of type System.Windows.Media.Color ), and Background (type Color too) on SystemTray.
I hope that going forward, all apps start setting IsVisible=”true” on the system tray. There is no excuse now for hiding it any more.

I just looked at the API and found two other nice surprises:

SystemTray has an Opacity property. The reason this is nice is because PhoneApplicationFrame applies the same logic to SystemTray than it does to ApplicationBar:
If your SystemTray is not 100% opaque (that means if Opacity < 1.0) , the space for the tray is not reserved in layout, so you can get a few pixels back… Your page gets full height and it is up to you to reserve space for the tray).
If your SystemTray is opaque (Opacity = 1.0) and visible, then frame reserves the space, and your page loses 32 pixels at the top when in portrait and
SystemTray is a DependencyObject and since we are now running on SL4, DependencyObject can be data bound; hooray for SL4 on phone.

Of course, there is one more nicety in SystemTray (ProgressIndicator). I will share my code on that in the next post (hopefully tomorrow)..

Happy Windows Phone “Mango” coding!!

Where is RichTextBox in the Mango beta?

jaime_rodriguez — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 08:06:49 GMT

if you try using RichTextBox in the recently released Mango Beta tools, you might notice the control does not have a default control template applied to it. [That means when you try to use it, you will see nothing but not get an error either].

This is a known issue for the beta. To get around it, simply apply this current Style to the page (or the App.xaml) for your project .

<Style TargetType="RichTextBox">
      <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}" />
      <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}" />
      <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent" />
      <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Transparent" />
      <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="0"/>
      <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch" />
      <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center" />
      <Setter Property="Padding" Value="0" />
      <Setter Property="Template">
        <Setter.Value>
          <ControlTemplate TargetType="RichTextBox">
            <Grid Background="Transparent">
              <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" 
            BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}"
            BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}"
            Margin="{StaticResource PhoneHorizontalMargin}">
                <ContentControl x:Name="ContentElement"
              HorizontalContentAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}"
              VerticalContentAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}"
              Padding="{TemplateBinding Padding}"/>
              </Border>
            </Grid>
          </ControlTemplate>
        </Setter.Value>
      </Setter>
    </Style>

Notice we are using an implicit style (yay for Silverlight 4 on the phone!! )

Another known issue with the current beta build is that images are not showing up in the rich textbox (they show up in the designer in Visual Studio/Blend )but not at run-time. This is also fixed in later builds. Still, the template above should be enough to get you rolling with RichTextBox.

Happy Windows Phone coding!!

Slides and samples for the Helsinki mobile day event..

jaime_rodriguez — Mon, 30 May 2011 07:14:25 GMT

Thanks to those that attended our all-day Mobile Day event in Helsinki.
As promised, the content follows.

The decks are here.
The sample code is here.

Thanks again for attending.

Happy Windows Phone coding!

Inside Windows Phone show is back

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 27 May 2011 23:40:57 GMT

With all the new coming features in Mango, I had to bring the show back.. Every Friday expect an episode or two between now and Mango’s RTM].

This week, we have two new episodes

Please help me get the word out on the show’s comeback. We have lots of good, deep!! content coming..

An update from Windows Phone developers themselves

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 21:57:00 GMT

The past few days have been very exciting for Windows Phone developers:

The Microsoft partnership with Nokia promises great synergy for delivering on our platform and fueling the ecosystem, thereby creating a huge opportunity for developers.
Steve Ballmer and Joe Belfiore disclosed just a few (not all!) of the new features in the platform release planned for later this year, including multi-tasking and fast app switching, and hardware-accelerated IE9 with HTML5 support, not to mention cool new operating system features like Twitter integration in the people hub

I am very excited about the roadmap, but I am also jazzed about our success to date, so I thought I would let developers in the marketplace tell you about their successes today.

Two weeks ago, a few developers participating in LG’s hAPPiness program were here in Redmond and I was invited to join them for an hour of “tips and tricks.”
[Sideline, the hAPPiness program is a great offer that allows LG phone owners to download and keep 10 great free apps from their marketplace. It is a wonderful promotion for apps, and as a value-add to LG phone owners, apps will rotate over time, so you will be able to pick from far more than the original twenty selected to-date].

I was able to meet most of the developers, and was impressed with their excitement, passion, and eagerness to write new apps or improve their current ones. It was so cool that I asked if I could record them to show to our internal platform teams, who always get a rise out of seeing cool apps and hearing from developers.

Here are my personal conclusions from meeting the group¹:

Developers are making good money! None of them are retiring tomorrow or ordering a Ferrari (yet), but the money is adding up nicely. Even free applications with ads are making money. You don’t have to take only my word for this; check out this article from Inside Mobile Apps for download comparisons between Android and Windows Phone.²
Developers are having a lot of fun! The platform is easy to use and it is very RAD, the tools are free, we have great phones that users love, and a growing user base--not a bad playground for developers.
The Silverlight and Windows Phone community rocks. I don’t get to say this often, so I will use this chance to shout out to the Insiders, MVPs, early adopting partners, and all the other community folks who are on the forums, sharing their stories and their feedback (both good and bad)³.

Those were my conclusions; but you don’t take my word for it. Take time to watch the interviews below.
[Disclaimer: We were focused on the developer’s stories. Though they all demo their apps, the crappy recording (me), the room (improvised), and our goal of keeping the chat to just a few minutes, did not do the apps justice.
Check out the apps in the marketplace links below, and don’t forget, if you are an LG user, these are free for a limited time.

Balint Orosz is one of the folks from Cocktail Flow. You can watch his interview here.
In just a month he created a very successful app leveraging the skills he had (.NET, Silverlight); he might take it to other platforms now that the concept is vetted and much better funded.
My summary from his story:“It is OK to get started on Windows Phone, leverage your skills if you are .NET or Silverlight developer”.
Emad Ibrahim is the creator of Envision, Notesly+, QuoteZen, Picasa Viewer (and possibly others since he codes faster than I blog). You can watch his interview here.
Emad is super fast at creating apps, and is getting great ROI from his apps. My take away on his story: “Get started now, while the competition is low.”
Andy Beaulieu (creator of Talking Rag Doll) and Jeff Weber creator of Krashlander. You can watch their video here.
Jeff is one of the original creators of the open source farseer physics engine on codeplex . Andy was the first person to wrap it in Blend, contributing some cool Blend behaviors for it.
I thought it was great to see community contributors meet and finally get financial benefits from their community efforts. They seem happy that other developers are cashing and using their library/behaviors. My take away for their video, “have fun!!”
[Sideline, according to Inside Mobile Apps, KrashLander has had 15,900 $.99 downloads in January]

Thanks to all of the devs for playing along on such short notice and letting me share their recordings. Check out their apps--and good luck creating your own!

Foot-notes:

¹ I have to emphasize these are my personal conclusions. Don’t over-generalize it to my employer or folks in the Windows Phone team.
² I don’t want to spin the numbers and compare to Android (you can ignore that part or not, your call). I only refer to the article because they have independent numbers on how well apps some are selling.
³ Again, the platform and phone have been rock-solid. The area where we have been less than stellar is the marketplace. I can assure you that the right people are listening; there have been a huge number of improvements, and there are more on the way. There are 8,000+ apps in the marketplace, so clearly it ain’t all broken; be persistent and keep pushing us. I will come back to the marketplace topic in a future post (hold me to this).

FAQ about copy paste functionality in upcoming release

jaime_rodriguez — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 21:01:09 GMT

I received a few questions about this post, and the nodo bits that were released last week, some of the answers are worth sharing broadly.

About the UI guideline comment
[this is the one worth the clarification]

What is the UI guideline about not using TextBox in pivot/pano? Where is it documented?
This is mostly a recommendation (similar to keeping panorama UIs simple and clean).

It is not a formal guideline since it varies by app layout/scenario. As you know, panoramas and pivots do listen for touch gestures, and the guidelines have always said you should avoid controls that fight for touch (such as sliders, map, etc.); a textbox is a bit more dependent on the scenario: copy/paste is not the primary function of a textbox; it should come down to what the textbox does; if the app is filling a form and you have lots of textboxes, then I too would avoid putting them inside a panorama or pivot. On the other hand, if you have a scenario that mostly presents data and really shines in a panorama or a pivot but you need a textbox that fits well into the scenario (such as a search box), it should be OK to use. The new controls mitigate touch conflict a little, and as long as you position your textbox and the usage is appropriate, my early preview testing says it is OK.

Will my app fail if I have a textbox in a pano?
Again, no. This is not a requirement.

What you should know and maybe act/upon:

My app does not have a pivot/panorama. Do I need to recompile and resubmit?
For the most part, you should not have to resubmit (if you don’t have textbox inside pivot/pano). The exception are people that were manipulating TextBox’s focus and selection. If you manipulate these, it is safe to test to make sure it all works.

if I don’t recompile, will I get copy/paste in my app?
Yes. Without recompile and resubmit, your app will get copy/paste in updated phones, and the performance improvements will also be there.

Will I get the performance improvements?
Yes, these are also coming for free.

Details on the API
Can I get programmatic access to the clipboard?
Not in this release.

Can I disable copy/paste?
No. That would be awkward to the user.

What controls get copy/paste?
TextBox, PasswordBox. WebBrowser control includes support c/p too (if you have textboxes in the HTML).
TextBlock does not get it, but you can re-template a TextBox to look like a TextBlock (do make sure to set it read-only).

Will new features be added to the API in future releases (e.g. programmatic access or clipboard access)?
Of course. This current update is mostly an OS release, that is why the Copy/Paste is not very platform focused; but expect improvements in future platform releases.

Of course I have also heard the question:
When does the release go live? Unfortunately, I don’t know the exact date (and I am bad at guessing). You can leverage the developer tools today and recompile your app with the new pivot/pano and submit to the marketplace any time. You do not have to wait for the release. Don’t wait until date is announced and end up fighting the certification queues.

Communication between HTML in WebBrowser and Silverlight app

jaime_rodriguez — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 23:22:00 GMT

Two people asked on this post about communication between HTML and Silverlight, so I thought I would share broadly about the more 'advanced' techniques.
[Don't be misled, advanced is still easy, just explaining all you can do].

Silverlight on Windows Phone allows you to host HTML content in a WebBrowser control. You get bi-directional communication between the control and the HTML content:

For HTML to host comunication, the WebBrowser control injects script into the page, and your javascript can call window.external.notify (<param>) to communicate with Silverlight.
There is nothing you need to do (like include a js file). You just call the function in HTML and calling it will trigger the WebBrowser.ScriptNotify event on the Silverlight side.

For host to HTML, webbrowser control calls the WebBrowser.InvokeScript method, passing a string with the function name, and an array of string params ).

If you own the HTML page you are hosting, the infrastructure above is all you need to get anything done (since you can just add the javascript to communicate).
If you don’t own the page you are calling things are slightly more interesting but still very doable – these are the scenarios that fuel this post –.
These are the communication mechanisms I use when talking to HTML on a page that comes from a server that I can’t control or influence.

Use the execScript javascript function to call arbitrary javascript. execScript does not return a value, but you can call methods that don’t need to return one, for example:
```
webBrowser.InvokeScript("execScript", "history.go(-1)"); 
```
Use the eval javascript function to call arbitray javascript, and return a value from that javascript. The return must be a string, but you can easily solve it by doing a toString() on any type (or using JSON if you need to return some thing complex). For example:
```
// this will fail, it returns null 
// object height = webBrowser.InvokeScript ( "eval", "document.body.offsetHeight" );  
// this works
string height = (string) webBrowser.InvokeScript ( "eval", "document.body.offsetHeight.toString()" );
```
You can even take these techniques to the next level and inject scripts into the DOM, listen for events, and call back to your host. All of this without owning the page you are hosting.
For example: this snippet below is C# on the host WebBrowser control that inserts a function into the DOM, and then wires a listener for the click on a button in the page, the event handler that we are wiring up calls window.external.notify () to let our host know the event was clicked. Without owning the page, we can listen to events in the HTML. What more can we ask for?
Here is the code:
```
StringBuilder bldr = new StringBuilder();
bldr.Append("var script = document.createElement('script');");
bldr.Append("script.text = 'function cb () { "); 
bldr.Append("window.external.notify (\"this text was injected on the fly\");}';");
bldr.Append("var headNode = document.getElementsByTagName('HEAD'); "); 
bldr.Append( "if (headNode[0] != null);headNode[0].appendChild(script); ;");
bldr.Append("var element= document.getElementById('btn'); "); 
bldr.Append("if ( element != null ) element.onclick = cb;");
webBrowser.InvokeScript("execScript", bldr.ToString());
```

I am sure there are more techniques, but the combination of the 3 above has gotten me pretty far in communicating between JS and Silverlight.

If you want to see the code above in action, download this sample.

Happy Windows Phone coding!

If you want to keep up with Windows Phone on a more frequent basis, subscribe to my Windows Phone question of the day RSS feed.

Back button press when using webbrowser control in WP7

jaime_rodriguez — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:52:31 GMT

If you have a Windows Phone application that hosts the WebBrowser control and allows or encourages the users to navigate within the WebBrowser control’s space, you are going to run into the 5.2.4.b certification requirement:

“Pressing the Back button must return the application to the previous page”

This requirement is easy to understand for PhoneApplicationPages; but for HTML, I am still undecided on how intuitive it would be to a user that is navigating inside a WebBrowser control.
Most of the apps I have been involved with that use the WebBrowser control, do not encourage navigation ( they show small HTML inline) or show HTML it in a popup that only has a close button on the top right, so I have never worried about integration between WebBrowser and back button. It was always a “Back” closes the transient popup.
That said, I saw a news reader app last week that had a full screen WebBrowser, and a back and forward button in the appbar, this felt weird ( to see a back button in the appbar) I thought the hardware back button should integrate with this “perceived” navigation stack . This got me thinking about 1) how hard it is to code and 2) how error prone it would be.

Yesterday, I quickly threw in an HTML page that I felt would cover most linking scenarios. It has regular navigations (A HREF) , shortened URLs (that lead to redirects), navigates using script, and has fragment navigations. I then created a project with WebBrowser to integrate with back button.

Here is my one-hour exploration:

1) Listen to WebBrowser.Navigated event; keep track of the pages that have been visited.

Stack<Uri> history= new Stack<Uri>();
Uri current = null; 
private void WebBrowser_Navigated(object sender, System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    Uri previous = null;           
    if (history.Count > 0)
        previous = history.Peek();

    // This assumption is NOT always right. 
    // if the page had a forward reference that creates a loop (e.g. A->B->A ), 
    // we would not detect it, we assume it is an A -> B -> back () 
    if (e.Uri == previous)
    {
        history.Pop();                     
    }
    else
    {
        if (current != null)
            history.Push(current);                          
    }
    current = e.Uri; 
}

2) Listen to OnBackKeyPress on the page. If the WebBrowser has a navigation stack, cancel the backkeypress and navigate within the webbrowser control’s stack.

protected override void OnBackKeyPress(System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e)
{
    base.OnBackKeyPress(e);

    if (!isPerformingCloseOperation) 
    {
        if (history.Count > 0)
        {                        
                Uri destination = history.Peek();
                webBrowser.Navigate(destination);
                // What about using script and going history.back? 
                // you can do it, but 
                // I rather use that to keep ‘track’ consistently with our stack 
            e.Cancel = true;
        }
    } 
}


As you can see, code is trivial, but it has an issue I did not solve.  I can’t tell the difference between:

Navigate(a) –> Navigate ( b) –> back ();
Navigate(a) –> Navigate ( b) –> Navigate ( a ) ;

I tried letting the browser do the work, and peeking at history.length (you can see the code in the sample, commented out), but that does not help since the sequence #1 above leads to a length of 2, instead of a length of 0. Since that does not solve it (and I don’t see a different way, is this good enough? I think it is, because:

I believe scenario #2 above does not happen a lot. So, I optimized for #1, it does the trick because worst case it gets user out quicker.
If you are concern on #2, you can add an ‘escape valve’. I put a close button on the top right hand of the page, so the user can close the browser page if they want to; you could also use appbar if your page has one.

Unless I missed another major gotcha, I think this does nicely. It is intuitive to the user in most typical navigations. It lets them out of the browser page (history.length was getting stuck since it never decreased to 0). I also asked internally to the Microsoft folks building apps, and the ones that integrate back button and webbrowser navigation are using the same pattern, and have not had any complaints from users.

To conclude, here is my personal advise/summary:

Not all apps need this integration. If you are just showing a single page, and don’t want to encourage navigation, use a UX pattern that hints the user that the UI is transient – make it look like a popup, put a close button on the popup’
If you have an app that does encourage navigation in the browser, consider the pattern above. Don’t do it because of the certification requirement, do it because it is intuitive to the user. That is why the requirement exists.
If you feel that your app does not fall under one of the above, then do ask for an exception to the certification team. That said, I emphasize you should thrive to create an intuitive experience for your user. I think the two options do that best so I recommend them –as opposed to the excuse/exception route-.

Sample code is here.

Happy Windows Phone coding!

If you want to keep up with Windows Phone on a more frequent basis, subscribe to my Windows Phone question of the day RSS feed.

Details on the Push Notification app limits

jaime_rodriguez — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:37:04 GMT

Yesterday, Kevin Marshall wrote a blog post with a good developer tip: to code defensively for the 15 application limit in push notification.

I know the post was well intended (as a developer tip) and fair criticism (to platform limit); but a few people got confused or misinterpreted and we ended up with tweets or posts that said “Windows phone allows only 15 live tiles”, or “you must uninstall apps to free tiles”, etc..

Here are a few details you might care to know, so you can plan your app and be a good citizen:

Yes, the limit is fifteen third party applications can be concurrently subscribed to receive push notifications (whether that is a live tile or toast). Parsing it out, the applications that come out of the box (like outlook, people hub, etc.) will not count towards this limit. So there is no limit on 15 live tiles. You can have 20+ if you add it up (that is about 2.5 screens worth of tiles on star menu)
An application is only counted if it has push notification or tiles push enabled and is subscribed to a channel. If you install an application but you do not enable push, it would not count towards the limit.
You should not have to go uninstall an application in order to free a slot. If an application is coded well, it should be prompting users and giving them the option on whether they want to use push notifications and/or live tiles (since there is potential bandwidth charges from the operator when these are pushed). if the user never agrees or it unchecks the box to subscribe, the application should free the channel; there fore uninstall should not be required.
Applications that use just scheduled tiles updates do not count towards the limit. If that is all you need be a good citizen and
If an application subscribes for tile updates, and is never pinned it unfortunately does count. Again, we count the channels.

To handle the error, as Kevin pointed out it is just a matter of listening for the exception, and right error message. Then prompt user to turn-off push notifications in another app. There is no API to list the applications using it – and I have not heard of a plan for this API –.

Is the limit too low, Kevin wonders. Obviously there is no perfect answer as it varies by user. I do know that the product team did research on types of apps, categories, how many a typical user would pin, enable push, etc. and they went with 15 for v1, so it is not an arbitrarily low number. I saw the data and it made good sense to me. I also hear that the limit can increase later, as we get more apps and better data. Full clarification, “can increase” only means we are constantly evaluation. it does not mean the next update will have this limit increased. Nothing to announce.

Again, the key there is the planning was done for typical users. As developers, we tend to install more apps, and often enable the features just to try them out, but we are also power users that know when and how to turn these off. On the rest, we will have to trust (and hope) that the data the researchers and planners had for typical users holds us until the limit is increased.

Why is there a limit? The usual thrive to ensure there is a great user experience, good battery life, quality of service on back-end and front-end, bandwidth (cost) , etc. Limit will increase as we get right data on how people use push, impact, etc. Kevin’s feedback on there not being an API to enumerate all push apps is still valid. I know the product team has heard it (from Kevin, me and others) so I hope that gets addressed or the limits go high enough that the problem becomes a moot point.

Hope that helps.

My take, when it comes to push,

Don’t panic, code your app to take advantage of the platform. Tiles and push can be a nice differentiator for an app. Let the user decide (15 is still a good number for average users).
Code defensively against this limit. it is not hard (though mitigation prompt to the user is not perfect, but it does leave them in control )
Prompt your users and ask if they want to use push, and if you are using live tiles give them the option to turn tiles off too.. If user opts out of both, free the channel.

Happy Windows Phone coding!