PsiSpace by Simon Middlemiss

Skype for Windows Phone (beta) has shipped

2012-02-27T17:01:43Z

The product I’ve been working on for the past 6 months has shipped to beta on the Windows Phone Marketplace! It’s been a great project to work on and I am really proud of everything we’ve done. Working with the Skype team in Stockholm has been a fascinating experience and something I feel privileged to have been a part of!

You can install the beta by scanning the QR code on the left with your phone or by following the link below on your device (note this won’t work on your desktop and will give you an error saying the app isn’t available in your region).

zune://navigate/?appid=c3f8e570-68b3-4d6a-bdbb-c0a3f4360a51

So what can you do with it you’re asking? Well all the usual stuff

You can view your contacts and filter them by all, online and your device phonebook.
You can view all your recent group and individual conversations.
You can start new 1:1 chats and new group chats
Plus you can also make both audio and video calls to individuals.

There’s plenty more in the app, so go and grab it and have some fun. If you find a bug then please report it here. It would also be really great if you could ensure you have ‘Feedback’ enabled on your device so that we can respond to any crashes you may see effectively.

Enjoy!

Personal Kanban

2011-04-23T19:50:33Z

We’ve been getting serious about using Kanban recently so I thought I’d try and take the concept home. It’s been surprisingly successful actually.

I cleaned the front of the fridge up, separated it in to three vertical and two horizontal swim lanes using insulation tape and added some titles on with a Sharpie.

I then made a quick trip over to Xbox.com and pinched mine and my wife’s avatars*, printed them out and stuck them to some fridge magnets and we were up and running.

We’ve only got ‘Ready’, ‘In Progress’ and ‘Done’ states, mostly because there wasn’t enough room for a backlog column but there was also an element of not taking things too far.

We’ve both found it to be remarkably motivational. It’s been up for less than a week now and we’ve already filled the done column up twice. Something which would have been unheard of before. I still need to wait and see if the novelty wears off though, I’ll keep you posted!

*in case you are interested the url to get at your Xbox avatar is http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/<gamertag>/avatar-body.png

Eye On Earth update

2010-07-19T14:44:36Z

So, we’ve just released an update to Eye On Earth that adds in Birdseye support, the new style Bing Maps navigation controls and also moves the system to the latest release of the Windows Azure SDK. Check it out http://www.eyeonearth.eu

The new Bing Maps style navigation

Viewing an air station in Birdseye mode with more of the new navigation UI.

Thanks to Stuart McCarthy, Dave Thompson, Dom Green and Tom Eddings for all they did getting this done.

AmbiguousMatchException : Why extending Silverlight through sub-classing might result in this error.

2010-05-07T11:44:49Z

Earlier this week we spotted we had a problem with a Silverlight application that has been live for a while. We were only able to reproduce it with the Silverlight 4 runtime installed and not the Silverlight 3 runtime. The reason is actually quite interesting from an academic point of view, but also raises some factors that developers need to take into account when designing their applications.

Because of the way that the Silverlight runtime is deployed it is very possible that an application that you write is compiled against one runtime but is executing against another. In our case we have a Silverlight 3 compiled application running against the Silverlight 4 runtime. Now the product group do an awful lot to ensure backwards compatibility, so much so that SL4 includes a ‘Quirks Mode’ so that the where bug fixes introduce breaking changes existing applications will not be affected.

The particular case we discovered doesn’t seem to be included in this though. The exception we saw was

System.Reflection.AmbiguousMatchException: Ambiguous match found.

   at System.RuntimeType.GetPropertyImpl(String name, BindingFlags bindingAttr, Binder binder, Type returnType, Type[] types, ParameterModifier[] modifiers)

   at System.Type.GetProperty(String name, BindingFlags bindingAttr)

   at MS.Internal.FrameworkCallbacks.SetNonAttachedProperty(Object target, String propertyName, Object propertyValue, Int32 typeIndex)

   at MS.Internal.FrameworkCallbacks.SetValueToProperty(Object target, String propertyName, Object propertyValue, Int32 typeIndex, String attachedDPOwnerNamespace, String attachedDPOwnerAssembly)

at MS.Internal.FrameworkCallbacks.SetPropertyAttribute(IntPtr nativeTarget, String attrName, String attrValue, String attachedDPOwnerNamespace, String attachedDPOwnerAssembly) [Line: 0 Position: 0]

A particularly descriptive exception you’ll admit?

Basically this comes down to us having sub-classed the TextBox control in order to make a WatermarkedTextBox by adding a dependency property called Watermark. This is an issue because the Silverlight 4 Textbox class now has it’s own Watermark property. This would obviously result in a compile time error when building against the SL4 toolkit, but because we are running SL3 compiled code against the SL4 runtime, when the XAML parse happens for this control it throws an exception!

The quickest and easiest solution is to rename the offending property, possibly adding a custom descriptor to the beginning like ‘contosoWatermark’, although this isn’t ideal. Another alternative is to encapsulate rather than subclass by creating a new class which inherits from control, an example of which is given in my post on creating a localizable TextBlock. Unfortunately both of these solutions require code changes and a redeployment.

Thinking about the general case of a 3^rd party having extended a base class to add a new property and then that same property being added to the base class in a newer version of Silverlight. If Quirks Mode or some other backwards compatibility mechanism doesn’t handle this, then there are design repercussions when extending a Silverlight base class.

Food for thought.

Technorati Tags: Simon Middlemiss,Silverlight,AmbiguousMatchException

Microsoft Consulting Services Solutions Development Blog

2010-05-07T11:41:53Z

The practice I belong to in MCS, Solutions Development, has started its own blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/mcsuksoldev (rss).

I’ve written several posts for that blog already and thought I’d list them here so as to help drive traffic!

Keep your Eye On Earth – Talks about the Eye on Earth project that I led last year

The Extreme Retrospective – Discusses one of the practices we adopted during Eye On Earth and has already garnered quite a lot of comments.

Dynamically Changing the Display Language in Silverlight – This talks about the development of a custom control to allow dynamic switching of language in a Silverlight application

I’ve got a few more in the pipeline, so make sure you go back for more!

Technorati Tags: mcsuksoldev,mcs,Solutions Development,Microsoft Consulting Services

Installing Visual Studio 2010 RC1 on XP SP3

2010-03-02T11:26:00Z

I came across an interesting issue with VS2010 RC1 on XP SP3 the other day. I'm on a customer site and it affects all of their machines. When you tried to install Visual Studio the installed would just crash and exit. I narrowed this down to Data Execution Prevention (DEP) causing the installer to exit.

The solution ended up being to disable DEP by changing the boot.ini to

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS

[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /NoExecute=AlwaysOff

Hope this is useful to someone

Access denied to TFSTemp during a TeamBuild TFS Get operation

2010-01-07T23:33:10Z

If you ever see something like the below

Done executing task "Get" -- FAILED.
Done building target "CoreGet" in project "TFSBuild.proj" -- FAILED.
Done Building Project "d:\builds\BuildType\TFSBuild.proj" (EndToEndIteration target(s)) -- FAILED.
Build FAILED.
"d:\builds\BuildType\TFSBuild.proj" (EndToEndIteration target) (1) ->
(CoreGet target) ->
C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets(737,5,737,5): error : d:\builds\Sources\MyBuild\MyProject\MyClass.cs: Access to the path 'C:\Users\BuildUser\AppData\Local\Temp\TFSTemp\2812{#$@;._}3184' is denied.
0 Warning(s)
1 Error(s)

Then you’ve probably got something like a virus scanner or some other generic application or service that operates on files or areas of the disc (like an indexer, defragger, etc) keeping a lock. In my case it was a virus scanner.

I excluded the path and all is now fine.

Took me a good few hours though :(

Technorati Tags: TeamBuild,TFS,Forefront

Team Build and Azure

2009-05-23T12:46:48Z

I’m a big fan of Team Build, it keeps the project rhythm going and without it there is no real way of knowing that the code people are checking in works. It was therefore an easy choice to decide to use it on my current project.

Normally it does take a bit of time to get the build up and running properly (hopefully something that will be easier in Rosario), but I was a little surprised to see that we were hitting issues with Azure projects. Whilst an IDE build worked, a Team Build of the same source tree didn’t. It kept complaining about the source path being to long. This error kept our build manager struggling for a while as Team Build is notorious for falling over due to the Windows max path length of 260 characters.

However we were seeing something really weird. We were getting recursive copying of our worker role binaries folder.

In our release folder we had this structure.


\Release\CloudService.csx\roles\worker\CloudService.csx\roles\worker\CloudService.csx\roles\worker…

This carries on until the path length exceeds 260 characters.

We eventually tracked it down to an issue with ‘CSPack’, a build task that the Azure project type uses to build itself.

We fired an email off to some people in the Azure product team and got an answer fairly quickly.

“Team Build flattens the output from each project into the binaries folder, because we build into a sub folder (the .csx one), Team Build recursively copies and flattens the output.”

We also got a fix.

By setting the following flag in our tfsbuild.proj file

<PropertyGroup>
  <CustomizableOutDir>true</CustomizableOutDir>
</PropertyGroup>

our project-specific OutputPath properties are preserved, the flattening doesn’t happen, and we get a successful Team Build. A side effect of setting that flag is that nothing ends up in the ‘Binaries’ folder, so nothing ends up in your drops folder. You can solve this using the following target, again in your tfsbuild.proj file.

<Target Name="BeforeDropBuild" Condition=" '$(IsDesktopBuild)'!='true' ">
  <ItemGroup>
    <BuildOutputFilesToCopy Include="$(SolutionRoot)\My.CloudService\bin\Release\**\*.*" />
  </ItemGroup>

  <Copy
    SourceFiles="@(BuildOutputFilesToCopy)"
    DestinationFiles="@(BuildOutputFilesToCopy ->'$(BinariesRoot)\%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension)')" />
</Target>

Hope this helps. Thanks to Hani Atassi and Stuart McCarthy.

Please sponsor me for a walk I didn't know I was doing!

2009-05-05T19:19:35Z

So,

My wife sent me an email about 6 weeks ago about the sponsored walk she’s doing next weekend to raise awareness / cash for the charity which she is the founder and chairperson of. Since she’s my wife and I’m already sponsoring her and helping organize it, I briefly scanned it and sent it to the deleted items folder with nary a second thought. However, following a recent conversation with said wife, it actually turns out that I should have read that email in a little more detail as apparently, and this came as a shock to me too, I’m doing the walk as well! What was even more of a shock was that I already knew about this and had agreed to it.

So if you like to help me regain a modicum of self-respect, would you please visit this link and donate / sponsor what you can!

<serious stuff>

Fibromyalgia is a debilitating condition that affects at least 1-in-50 people in the UK. It is characterized by chronic widespread pain, hypersensitivity to pain (and other stimuli), chronic fatigue and sleep disturbances. Worst of all many clinicians believe - despite the ever increasing research, double blind clinical trials and medications licensed specifically for the condition - that it either doesn’t exist or there is no treatment. The opposite in fact is the case. “Fibromyalgia is eminently treatable” and an increasing body of evidence shows that it is a Central Nervous System disorder.

On a personal note this condition has defined much of the last 8 years of mine and my wife’s life. When I met her she was training for the 2005/06 Volvo Ocean Race; one of the toughest round the world yacht races there is. By the end of 2003 she had had to give up work, and at her worst was unable to walk. She spent 5 years being told by both doctors and charities a like that either that she was making it up or that nothing could be done. In the end, through a private consultant and a good grasp of the science behind the condition, she found her own help and is now attempting to help the many others who are in the position she was.

FibroAction has been running for a year and a day today. In that time they have achieved a significant amount; including getting the NHS to update their information to accurately reflect current medical thinking and getting a debate in Westminster Hall at Parliament. I encourage you to visit www.fibroaction.org - please forgive any idiosyncrasies with the website, I developed it in my spare time – if you want to find out more.

</serious stuff>

Anyhoo. Thanks for reading.

Unify for Expression Blend 2

2008-12-05T20:59:00Z

Since the Blend Add-In framework came to light I’ve written a couple of utilities that are useful when using Blend, however I found it annoying that I had to close down Blend and re-open it from the command line with different arguments.

To get around that I’ve written an Add-In manager for Blend that I'm calling ‘Unify’ that allows you to load and configure multiple 3^rd party add-ins without having to mess around with the command line.

You can install it from here (thanks to the help I got with WiX from Andy Burns) and I’d be interested in feedback.

Hopefully something like this will promote the creation of more 3^rd party and community add-ins (like Colorful and Blend Intellisense).

After you’ve installed it there will be a new shortcut in the Microsoft Expression folder underneath ‘All Programs’.

To use it, launch the new shortcut and then, once Blend has loaded, click Tools and select ‘Unify!’ from the menu.

This will show a very dull dialog with the list of add-ins you’ve configured. The checkbox indicates whether the add-in will load when Blend launches. To add a new add-in select “Create new AddIn” and navigate to where the add-in assembly is installed. Click ‘Open’ and the add-in will be added to the list and will be loaded.

Technorati Tags: Unify,Blend,Expression,Add in,add-in,addin,kuler,colorful