7 Deadly Sins for … Windows Phone Developers!

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December 19, 2011. It’s Holiday Party time at the Central Ohio Windows Phone User Group (http://cowpug.org/). With BBQ food, custom shirts & cakes, it’s time to celebrate the first 6 months of our user group – a wonderful group of passionate Windows Phone developers.

However, despite the Holiday spirit, it is our single monthly meetup .. so something productive was called for before we started the good times. Just for kicks, I did a 30 minute talk titled “7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers!”. Nope, nothing religious or biblical about it :). This was a short talk built by simply drawing pointers from past Windows Phone development experiences .. some common sense Do’s & Dont’s. I believe it was well-received or may be the folks at COWPUG are way too lenient with me. Anyways, I had some fun mapping the 7 Deadly Sins to what we developers should stay away from while developing for the Windows Phone ecosystem. Accordingly, I thought it might be a curious exercise to take the 7 slides for each of the “cardinal sins” for WPDevs and make a short article series out of it.

So, here goes. This post is the introduction to the series & will serve as the indexed home for the article series posts. Today, we begin with what the 7 Deadly Sins are. During each of the next 7 days, you’ll see a post each day which takes one sin & translates it to some no-no’s for Windows Phone developers. I might make a few pointed comments, which I hope you would not take personally .. I am in violation of several principles we will talk about in my own Apps, which I am trying to fix. This is barely an attempt to summarize some best practices & great tools at our disposal as Windows Phone developers. These posts would not have any code to show; rather tons to links to point you to awesome resources. Would really appreciate if you point out resources I may be missing out.

So, what are the 7 Deadly Sins ?

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From Wiki:

The 7 Deadly Sins, also known as the Capital Vices or Cardinal Sins, is a classification of objectionable vices that have been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct followers concerning fallen humanity’s tendency to sin. The currently recognized version of the sins are usually given as pride, envy, sloth, wrath, greed, gluttony and lust.

In each of the next seven posts, we will pick up one of these cardinal sins & see how it relates to Windows Phone Development:

Again, at the end of the series, all posts would be indexed here. Hope this would be a fun exercise. Thank you very much for reading.

Adios!

[Roadsign Courtesy: http://salary.com/%5D

CodeMash V2.0.1.2

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1200 tickets sold in under 20 minutes! That’s the kind of excitement & passion the CodeMash conference generates during the 3 days of geekdom every January. Where else would you be in shorts in the middle of a blizzard in frigid northern Ohio! Where else would you find so many stars under one roof! This year was simply bigger & better at the newly-expanded Kalahari resort in Sandusky OH. CodeMash 2012 was an enormous success, thanks to the untiring work of a small group of volunteers .. kudos geeks & geekettes.

While there were the usual stellar sessions & world-changing conversations, here are some of my personal high points:

  • For folks heading up to CodeMash from Columbus OH, there just isn’t an easy way to get to Sandusky without stepping off the highways onto small country/rural roads. The last couple of trips have always been in the middle of snowstorms, making the drive tricky. This year, we had a little respite with unusually warm weather & no snow. So, the drive up wasn’t bad; the drive back — not so much, with a few inches of snow! Guess it’s part of the Codemash culture!
  • The renovated Kalahari looked quite nice, with the expanded Convention Center easily offering more room for close to 1400 folks to stretch legs.
  • I know we are supposed to create & give back, rather than consume. However, I wasn’t speaking .. so why not throw repentance away for a few days, eat/drink & take it all in. Have some fun!
  • First evening: Sat in a corner bar with the two flamboyant Azure MVPs Michael Collier (@MichaelCollier) & Brent Stineman (@brentcodemonkey), and we just chatted for hours over unending beer. Good times!
  • I was staying at an offsite hotel (yeah, don’t ask) and really liked the Shuttle setup, so we didn’t have to drive & dash across the cold parking lot. Thanks organizers.
  • Bacon — plenty of it everywhere, breakfast or other times.
  • I thought Ted Neward’s (@tedneward) keynote was entertaining. Yes, some folks didn’t like the profanity; but c’mon, we’re adults & sometimes you know what you getting into. It was interesting.
  • Really enjoyed the fact that so many Microsofties made the trip across to attend CodeMash. Pretty darn AWESOME to meet & talk to Scott Hanselmann (@shanselman) .. what a smooth operator. The other time, almost bumped into a skinny guy .. ahem, Jon Skeet (@jonskeet).
  • Always nice to meet fellow Windows Phone developers & share war stories. And there was plenty of WPDev love .. sign of times changing. Also, you may have noticed using mobility with Azure makes me a happy camper .. so specially nice to meet THE Wade Wegner (@wadewegner).
  • The Breakfast, Lunch & Dinners served were quite nice .. thanks to Kalahari’s catering. They mostly managed to keep up with hundreds of hungry geeks. And the dessert bar on Day 1 — awesome! It’s ok steak-loving gents; ok to like some sugar once in a while.
  • The WiFi — yes it worked, unbelievable.
  • The Pecha Kucha — had my reservations at first, but it turned out great. Between Scott Hanselman’s coordination & sheer brilliance from Leon Gersing (@rubybuddha) and Mel Grubb (@melgrubb), it was quite entertaining. Reminded us of humility, passion, fun & enthusiasm that keeps us on the path of software craftsmanship.
  • Lock-picking training from Gabrielle Sempf (@gabriellesempf). Yeah, she showed us how we live in our little bubble of safety called locks in our homes.
  • Hanging out with fellow Sogetians, especially Nihar Shah (@niharshah), Susan Yount (@susaninfj) & Mike Yotive (@myotive), who somehow know how to make me laugh.
  • Seeing the usual rockstars — David Giard, Bill Sempf, Sarah Dutkiewicz, Chris Woodruff, Keith Elder, Jeff Blankenburg, Clark Sell, Mike Lutton, Rich Dudley, Brian Prince etc. Always lots to learn from them, as well as scores of friends that I got to catch up with.
  • Favorite session: SignalR talk by Brady Gaster (@bradygaster).
  • Drinks & plenty of it .. let’s not go there ok?

Now, my one little contribution to this year’s CodeMash was a small article in the conference magazine, called the Mashed Code Magazine (@mashedcodemag). Cheers to Nick Watts (@thewonggei) and the editorial team for pulling off a polished magazine for 2012. I wrote a rather fanboyish Windows Phone Mango article for your reading pleasure .. you owe it to yourself to try a Windows Phone, if you haven’t already :). Link below .. download as pdf or in eBook format & enjoy!

In all, another GREAT CodeMash. Cheers to all & we shall meet again next year!

Adios.

SkyDrive usage through Live SDK on Windows Phone

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Another day .. another article for SilverlightShow (@silverlightshow)! You can find all the other great SilverlightShow content @ http://silverlightshow.net.

I have been a long-time SkyDrive user. So, it was a lot of fun playing with the Live Connect API:

Guess how many people use Live Services? 500 million plus! And when our applications connect to the same services, they start feeling right at home with what our users are already used to. Microsoft recently opened the Live Connect APIs, along with some SDKs for 3rd party applications on desktop/web/mobile platforms to leverage the cloud offerings from Live Services. In this short article, we take a look at how we could get started using the Live Connect API from our Windows Phone applications and interact with SkyDrive storage through the new Live SDK.

Full article with screenshots, code samples & downloadable source code can be found HERE.

What’s special about this one? Last article of the year .. done with writing in 2011! See you on the other side 🙂

Adios!