This small app demonstrates (at a very simplistic level) how to keep a local SQLite database in sync with a hosted “big brother” database.

It is very much a proof of concept but does use some cool tech – the master database is hosted in Windows Azure and the phone app can asynchronously Push and Pull changes via a WebApi project which, internally, is using Entity Framework to talk to the database.

See the demo in action in the recorded session here. Note that the demo is used at the end of the session but it’s worth watching the whole thing – SQLite is very cool!

We are working on making the demo more bulletproof, So the actual code will appear sometime in the near future.

The only disadvantage to waning a yellow phone on release day was that the phone, although it was “sim free”, was locked to EE/Orange/T-Mobile.

Times have now changed and I wanted to move away from Orange and move over to giffgaff with their promises of goodybags full of unlimited data.

Being scared of screwing up, I visited a few phone shops around London to see if they could do it for me – the general answers I got back were along the lines of “no”, “impossible” and “why don’t you have an iPhone?”

Not very helpful.

After looking around online, I found cellphoneunlock who will provide an unlock code for $59.99.

After a bit of further searching, I found a discount code for 50% off codes for HTC models, but applying this code to the basket with just the Lumia seemed to work too.

The code is HTCretailmenot

This converted to £20.56 and the code took about 5 working days to come through. I have just entered it now and it works a treat.

Hope this helps

Here are some of my thoughts about general day to day usage of the phone, what’s good, what’s bad and hopefully some things in between.

I got my device “sim free” from Phones4U but I am using an Orange sim in the device without 4G.

On a normal day, I use the phone as a music player on my 30 minute cycle commute and then personal email, texts etc. while I am at work.

Over the holidays, It was my main device while I was back home for two weeks in Nottingham and while I was snowboarding in France for a week.

I would say I’m defiantly a “heavy user” and have well over 100 apps installed, about 20 of which get used on a daily basis.

The battery lasts about 16 hours with battery saver turned on

The Good

The OS looks awesome. It’s super slick, looks sharp and clean and it’s a real joy to use. It’s really easy to learn and stuff is generally where you would expect it to be.

The build quality is fantastic. Very sturdy and it can take a bashing. I dropped mine onto concrete and it did knock one of the corners but this would have been much worse on another device.

The large screen is amazing. Yeah people have said it’s too big but with one of these I haven’t found myself craving something like a Nexus. I have read a few EPUB format books on the device (with the free Nokia Reader app, which pulled them from my SkyDrive) and this has been really seamless.

Nokia Drive is quite possibly the best satnav app I have ever used, and this is free for all Nokia based WP devices – well worth a download.

The People hub is great and collects and groups my contacts from all the social networks. This works great across Windows 8 too.

The Camera is the best you will find on any device – period. I used it as my only camera while snowboarding in France and all the photos came out great. Here is a Panorama example.

I got a free wireless charging plate with my device and it works like a charm.

The Bad

Not every device is perfect, and the lumia 920 is no different

I have had the phone crash on me at least 3/4 times a week, and this results in a hard reset with the power and vol- buttons. My data remains fine but it resets itself to 01 Sept 2012 05:00 and I have to set this to the correct date/time manually – Very annoying! Especially if you don’t have a clock nearby.

From what I have read this problem can be caused by third party apps, but I have my suspicions. Hopefully a future update will fix this.

The syncing software on Windows has nothing on the Zune software, This needs a major update. It’s so bad I have just ditched it all together and do manual backups (the device appears as an external HDD when you jam it in, another plus).

No solid Podcast functionality – On my WP7 I could subscribe to podcasts using Zune and have them copy across. The phone would even remember where I was if I stopped listening. No such luck with WP8 yet.

Many apps you would expect on a phone are missing. This is a bit of a chicken/egg thing as the grown ups will only make apps if there are numbers, and a platform will only get numbers if there are apps. Personally i’m not a fan of uploading a photo of my lunch to the internet but Instagram is one of the platform defining apps and it’s absence is felt on WP8.

Some apps that I paid for on WP7 are missing from the WP8 store – I’m looking at you Tentacles.

For some reason my phone won’t set the date and time automatically, this is really annoying but could be my carrier.

The Voice stuff is no Siri.

Notable Apps

Here are some of the apps I use on a daily basis
OneNote (built in)
Facebook (say what you want, I worked with the team that created this app so I like it despite what people say )
Sky News (Same as above)
WhatsApp
Blueprints
WordPress
WeatherFlow
Fuse
Skype
Google Chat
4th & Mayor
Rowi
London Travel
Nokia Drive
Nokia Reader
Skydrive
Amazon
Astronomy Lock Screen (changed my lock screen wallpaper to the NASA photo of the day for the nerd in me)
Chrync
Flixter
Next Bus UK

Contre Jour
Star Wars Angry Birds
Cut The Rope
Final Fantasy
iStunt 2

This is all just off the top of my head so there are bound to be things I have forgotten.

Overall, I really do love the hardware but the OS just needs a few fixes and a bit of time to mature, Then I think it will be ready for the masses.

How have you been getting on with your phone? Thinking of getting one? Answers in the usual place.

I’m not a massive fan of installing tools like this as this method requires you to have an internet connection and re-download it each time you install.

Usually there is an alternative ISO format file that is made available, but this hasn’t appeared and I’m now tired of waiting .

To create your own offline version, follow these steps

1. Download the web installer from here

2. Open a Command Prompt window and navigate to to the folder which contains the downloaded web installer.

3. Launch the web installer using the layout flag by typing vsupdate_KB2707250.exe /layout and hit enter.

4. You will now be presented with an alternative launch screen

5. Select a download location, hit Download and let the installer do it’s thing.

6. Go to the folder you specified in step 5, and you will find an EXE with a packages folder that contains all the update bits. You can now port this about as you please and simply launch the exe to do a download-less Install.

Hope this helps

We recently had some new grads join our team and this is also a momentous occasion for me personally as it is the first time  that I have had to work with people younger than me on a professional basis.

I like to think I have learnt quite a bit in the 4 years since I graduated (and I still have ALOT more to learn in the years in front of me) but this got me thinking – what would I say/do differently if I could jump in the delorean and have a chat with my younger, skinnier self?

What follows here is some stuff related to that. This is by no means anything you should take too seriously and these are just my opinions – go and talk to somebody else and they will probably tell you a different set of things. Of course, I also have to mention (and cover myself) by saying that these are purely my opinions and not that of current or previous employers.

Still at Uni?

If you have graduated, you might be best skipping to the next part. Still at uni? lucky you! Get out and have fun while it lasts. But also, this is probably one of the chances you are going to have lots of free time – so make it awesome.

Get in contact with local software / games companies, write a game / code up an Idea with your mates, contribute to one of the billions of open source projects out there, learn about the latest tech that university doesn’t teach you. The list is endless!

I can’t even begin to tell you how, knowing what I know now, I wish I could go back and get involved in some of this stuff.

The amount of ideas we had at uni and never did anything about is endless. Even if you think it sounds stupid or nothing comes of it the stuff you will learn you can just apply to the next crazy idea – remember Facebook and many other world dominating projects were born out of university halls (Just don’t tell the university what you are up to, as technically anything you do belongs to them).

While I was at uni I got involved with the Microsoft Student Partner programme and, If Microsoft float your boat, will give you a massive boost to your CV. The stuff I did here I still bring up in interviews now.

Oh, and go to as many gigs as you can. When you are working you will have no time to do them properly later.

Finding a job

Past doing all of that? Never mind, keep reading

Finding a job – This is quite a hard nut to crack. Especially in these dark days of crashing banks and places cutting back. But you might be surprised to know that most decent companies have recognised that investing in the youth of today is actually the thing to do. If anybody says “there are no jobs” I say its rubbish. I just did a quick Google around for “junior developer” and found at least 5 or 6 within 30 seconds.

The problem is that you have lots of people applying for these roles so the key is that you need to get yourself noticed.

Get on LinkedIn. Just about every technical job I have been offered has come through LinkedIn. Get a profile set up with the skills you have so you will be found in any search results.

Then its just a case of apply, apply apply.

Applying

Being a graduate puts you in quite a unique position. You have this qualification that says you know something – however it’s very easy to fall into the trap that makes you think you know everything (or nothing if you didn’t get the result you were expecting).

let me tell you now – when it comes down to the actual qualification, you have the same chance and opportunity as everybody else.

I don’t care what university you went to, what result you got, what your parents say, what your neighbour says – If you want something, you are the one who will get it if you want it.

some of the best developers I know today didn’t even go to university and just worked hard to get what they wanted.

Apply for everything. Don’t be disheartened if you get rejected. Keep in contact and chase your application, Get feedback and improve and just keep the train moving. Eventually you will get a break.

Now, I’m also not one of these advice givers that doesn’t live in the real word. When uni is over, the loan money stops so you are going to need something to keep you going. Do it, but if it’s not what you want, don’t let it take over.

If any employer asks why you are applying with the wrong CV etc. and all you want to say is “Because I need a job you idiot” just walk away, these people don’t really live in the real world IMO.

The more flexible you are the more chance you will get at landing a role. If you can, try to apply to more places than just your home town – generally, the bigger and busier the city the more opportunities you will come across.

It is also very easy to start comparing yourself to others. You know, you see someone who was in your year go off and land some amazing job and you are left thinking what the hell. Don’t let this bother you. Just believe in yourself, ignore everybody else and concentrate on number one (that’s you).

My first job out of university was in Bristol (with my home town being Nottingham). The job and company were great for what I wanted to do, but I really didn’t like living there. But I stuck it out and it helped me move on up the ladder. At the time I really hated it, but looking back it’s probably one of the better decisions I have ever made.

learn the basics

A quick scan of a job spec will describe the technologies the role requires, ASP.NET, C#, HTML5, Java and the list goes on. Don’t know any/some of these? Go out, get some free tools and tutorials and just play around. Get an app up and running and maybe even put your code up on a site like github.

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I can guarantee that most grad applicant’s do not do stuff like this, so if you can and can put a link on a CV that will immediately put you in the top 1%.

Doing tutorials and building simple apps will also make you more knowledgeable about a technology and you will find the answers just flow during an interview.

Stuck on something and have nobody to get help from? If you have a specific tech question (and not “Please write me an app to do xyz” then check out Stack Overflow. Most questions I have asked on this site have been answered with either the answer or something as lead me to the answer. Often in less than a few hours.

Technology (especially now) is a very emotional subject. How many times have you had an argument with your friends over which phone is better, why Microsoft sucks and why Apple rules the world? You will get this even more once you are in with a group of developers.

What I have found is to focus on one thing that interests you but be open to learning other things. For example, I like to focus on UI development on the Microsoft platform, so my bread and butter has been C# with WPF but I do know a thing or two about other technologies and other platforms – this has made me more rounded and I have found I can give more honest opinions to questions about this.

build a website / blog

There are so many tools and resources out there to help with this that there is no reason why you shouldn’t  have a place on the web to call your own

portfolio sites are great as you can keep your paper CV short and sweet with a link to your more expanded site. Free services like about.me will even create a site for you in minutes.

Also, setting up and maintaining a blog is an awesome move. Blog about stuff you are working on, fixes for problems you encounter and your general interest in tech.

give your sites a personal touch by registering a domain name. I know emerging from university can leave you in negative equity, but £3 for a .co.uk address isn’t a hard stretch.

get on twitter and join the conversation

pretty much 95% of all my geek news, conversation and know how comes from twitter. It’s instant, I get to see what all the developer “rock stars” are up to and join in myself. It’s a lot quicker and more convenient (and a lot more relevant) than any other news medium I have ever used.

It can take a while to get into it but it’s worth it. Find out names of other link minded individuals, add them and then find out who they are talking to and add them as well. Been to a conference? Most conference speakers will share their twitter handles to add them too and then join in the conversation through hash tags and other such stuff.

attend events

if you can, get yourself out and about every once and a while to a technical event. Most major cities have them. They are great to go and learn about new stuff and, more importantly, network with other like minded individuals.

these tend to be in the evenings or at weekends, so you do tend to get the more passionate and serious people in attendance who are willing to take time out of their free time to go.

Many employers have cottoned on to this, and they actively look for potential staff at this sort of thing so get your name out.

Also, most of these events tend to be sponsored by the larger technical companies, so drinks and pizza is usually involved. So it’s not all bad hey?

an Important thing to remember though is to not spend all of your free time going to these events – you still need time to do some development and have a life away from it).

To close

To close, Just remember to be proactive, get out there, get involved and just do what you love doing. Be “professional”, be honest, be down to earth but mot importantly be yourself and don’t try to be something you aren’t.

Also, if you are a young graduate, go out and have some fun as it’s all downhill from here.

I will do another post later on what to do once you get in somewhere.

Got anything to add to this? Have I got it wrong? Comments below

As a developer and enthusiast who focuses primarily on Microsoft technologies, it has not been hard to realise that we are right in the middle of an important time for both companies. Windows 8 is a massive leap forward, Windows Phone 8 has the opportunity to go mainstream and Nokia has put it’s faith in this OS to try and save them from completely hitting the ground.

To structure this letter, I’m going to run through my thoughts and feelings in relation to the chain of events that started with the Windows Phone 8 summit in June to where we are today.

Please forgive me if any of the details here are out of place – I’m writing this from memory and to be honest, I’m still feeling totally lost with all the mixed messages that have been coming out.

I am in no way getting at the hard work both companies have put in to getting the platform and phone design to where they are – this is purely aimed at device/SDK availability.

Summit

So, June 2012 and off we go with the Windows Phone 8 summit. As a proud WP7 user, I was super interested in learning what was to come.

I wasn’t disappointed for the most part. It looked awesome except for one tiny detail – current windows phone handsets would not be upgradable to the new OS.

Now, I totally get the reasons why this is, WP7 is based on Windows CE, WP8 has a shared core with Win8 blah blah blah, but I’m a developer, so that’s an easy sell to me. But to the rest of the world that is a very difficult thing to do – this will be a relevant point later.

I was a bit concerned, but like everybody else I accepted it and moved on. I could see this decision was for the greater good.

I also had concerns about the lack of an SDK, but I got over this and that was that.

Nokia Announcement

Move on a few months, and we get to the Nokia announcement that happened in early September, nicely timed to occur just before Apple announced the iPhone 5.

The phones looked nice, the demos were all good, and then that was it. The one thing I was really hoping for was a release date or at the very least a hint at something – but nope, we got nothing.

Again, there was also no developer tools, only an announcement that anybody with an app could apply for early access at some point in the future. The criteria for getting access to this still baffles me today as just about every developer I know that applied got rejected.

iPhone5

Days later, we have the iPhone5 announcement. I won’t dwell on this for long but I just want to point out that the new phone (regardless of what it looks like, what the features are etc.) was announced & dated on the 12th of September and it was in peoples hands on the 19th of September. Just to spell out what I am getting at here, that’s shown to the world for the first time and then in customers hands in 7 days.

Windows Phone 8 Announcement

Roll on October 29th and we have the Windows Phone 8 launch event that took place in San Francisco with another smaller event in London.

The Event in SF was all good, slides and content all referring to a global launch with some demos of the new features. From memory, I don’t think any launch dates were announced (or if they were, they were for the US) but I definitely remember that there was still no SDK. Not cool but hey, we were getting somewhere.

At around the same time as this event, there was a press event held in London where UK specific announcements were made.

EE

C’mon Nokia, are you guys actually for real?

EE, one of the most expensive networks I have ever seen (with the only USP being 4G, which nobody wants yet) and you go and give your flagship device to that carrier.

This is supposed to be the phone that redefines you as a company, puts the platform on the map, and saves you from certain doom, and you go and offer it way off the radar to most of the phone buying public.

Companies like Apple can make moves like that as they are one of the major players with a large, established market share.

The Windows Phone 7 user base is only 3% of the market (and that’s 3% you have shut out by rebooting the platform) and you honestly think that by doing what you have done is going to bring the punters in?

Now, I’m in a lucky position of being able to buy the phone I want up front and sim free, so this is not a real issue for me (or is it?) but no sim free details were given – not very helpful.

Release Date

Even at this conference no solid release date was given. Only that it would be “this week”.

First thing the next day, I went on a round trip of the Phones4U & EE stores around Oxford Street in London.

They all had the POS and dummy models of all the phones, but nobody had any stock. I was told by the stores that they were expecting them by the 2nd at the latest (I blogged about this here)

It was also later announced that the release date for the phone would be on the 2nd of November, and I even tweeted @Phones4U asking if, on Saturday the 3rd, I could walk into a Phones4U store and walk out with a sim free device – the reply I was given was yes.

Adverts

The weekend rolled around, adverts for the device were running on national TV but STILL there was no stock to be seen, anywhere. I called pretty much all of the stores in London and visited a few stores in Peterborough but not even a peep of a physical phone.

Nokia, I have to ask – are you actively trying to put people off getting this phone? If there is any positive to the EE deal, it’s that you only have two firms to communicate with, so why were they left so in the dark?

Today

Every store I talk to and everywhere I look I am seeing different dates and hearing different things. Where and when can I get this phone?

I feel that you managed to shoot yourself in the foot at the launch event, and then even managed to reload and shoot yourself in the face by screwing up the launch of the phone.

And so, here I am today on the Monday evening completely baffled that I even have to write this. As an enthusiast of the Microsoft platform who has actively been looking to get one of these phones, even I am totally lost – I dread to think what the larger, device seeking public may be thinking.

My current information suggests that I may get a device on Wednesday the 7th or Friday the 9th, but I’m not holding my breath.

Sort it out

Kris and the rest of the WP/Nokia loving UK public

p.s I have focused on Phones4U as it is the Yellow 920 I am after, I get the idea of offering different colours to different places but IMO this is not helpful to anybody.

First, we know that the Lumia 920 is exclusive to EE and Phones4U in the UK, so these are the stores I targeted.

Phones4U

I went in to about three of the Phones4U stores along Oxford Street.

All stores had POS and “dummy” models of of the two Lumia and HTC phones and these were pretty well advertised .

They are stocking all the colours of all the devices.

I was quoted that to buy the Lumia 920 Sim free and unlocked, it would be £470
*Edit* @mrcfield pointed out a tweet from phones4u that said the sim-free handset is still locked to EE

Phones4U are running a promotion to get a free Wireless charger with either of the Lumia devices.

If you want to pay monthly with the Lumia 920, Phones4U are selling the phone on a contract with EE.

The Phones4U twitter account confirmed that the 920 would only be sold sim free depending on stock availability with priority going to contracts. I was advised to call before making a trip.

The stores I visited were expecting stock on Wednesday the 31st and Friday the 2nd.

EE

I went to two EE stores on Oxford Street.

They had no dummy models of any of the phones, but they did have empty placeholders.

The larger of the two EE stores has a real 920 phone for demo purposes (and it’s awesome )

EE are only stocking Black and White and didn’t have any prices for a sim free handset (and the guy who I was talking to seemed to think that they wouldn’t be selling it sim free full stop)

EE are also doing the free wireless charger promotion.

The stores I visited were expecting stock on Wednesday the 31st and Friday the 2nd.

who wins?

EE were awesome for having an actual phone to play with but as I’m chasing down the Yellow phone it looks like I will be paying another trip to Phones4U over the coming days.

Do I have any of this wrong or do you know different? Comments on a post card.

This event is really something special as it brings together the developers who really take technology seriously and, being on a weekend, means developers are there on their own time.

I was lucky enough to present once again (thank you to those that voted!) to make it my third consecutive talking spot at the event.

The topic this year was Windows 8 and how to write apps using XAML and C#. The talk covered the basics such as Views & Navigation before looking at some more interesting things such as Sharing and the Notification System.

I have put links to the slides and content in the content section of my main site. Note that the deck theme on the downloadable slides is different to the theme I used in the actual presentation.

Thank you to all those who showed up and especially to Jon Skeet who kept me on the ball with his questions

Also, Check out Craig Murphy’s photos from the event here.

This really cool function is available from the drop down menu next to the play button on the main menu bar.

I went to use it for the first time on my dev laptop this evening (a Dell XPS 15z) and found that it would not start.

I had errors such as “Unable to start the Simulator. Simulator closed or crashed” or “crashed because process xx stopped responding”.

Not very helpful.

It turns out that this error was being caused by my display drivers, and it took a lot less time to type that then it did to work it all out

This laptop has a NVidia GeForce GT 525M in its guts and when I first installed Windows 8 RTM I updated the drivers from the NVidia site – the “official” driver is labelled up as v302.80 for my device.

A quick update (well, 207MB) to the latest beta drivers via the NVidia site, which are in a different place to the production drivers and everything seems to work.

For reference, the driver I installed was the Verde 306.02 Driver Beta which appears to have been released a few days ago on 27/08/2012.

Jolly good.

As I’ve been moving along I’ve come across a few quirks so I’m outlining them here to help anybody else who may have hit similar problems. The “solutions” I have here are just ways I have come up with to get around them and they shouldn’t be taken as a definite fix. They worked for me so hopefully they will work for you.

defining an async method in an interface

Here is how to define an async method in an interface

public interface IServiceDefinition
{
    Task<string> GetSomething();
}

public class ServiceImplementation : IServiceDefinition
{
    public Task<string> GetSomething()
    {
        throw new NotImplementedException();
    }
}

You will need to edit the method signature to include the async keyword as follows

public async Task<string> GetSomething()

and when you use the await keyword on whatever it is you are waiting for you will notice that the code builds and runs with no errors or warnings.

calling async methods from the constructor of a ViewModel

Take a look at the following code:

public class MainViewModel
    {
        private IServiceDefinition _serviceDefinition;
        private string myString;

        public MainViewModel(IServiceDefinition serviceDefinition)
        {
            _serviceDefinition = serviceDefinition;
            this.myString = await _serviceDefinition.GetSomething();
        }
    }

Nothing exciting, but this is how you might expect to call an async method in a ViewModel (or any) constructor.

public class MainViewModel
    {
        private IServiceDefinition _serviceDefinition;
        private string myString;

        public MainViewModel(IServiceDefinition serviceDefinition)
        {
            _serviceDefinition = serviceDefinition;
            this.Construct();
        }

        private async void Construct()
        {
            this.myString = await _serviceDefinition.GetSomething();
        }
    }

This does feel a bit wrong but you will notice that the code will now play nice.

comments

I hope this helps. I will add more stuff as and when I come across things and please to add comments IF you have found any quirks or know any better solutions