Thursday, August 26, 2010

Windows Phone 7 Show Case Partner Deep Dive

This week (8/22/2010) I was fortunate enough to be invited to Building 20 (technology adoption center) out in Redmond.  I have to give a big shout-out and thanks to DevFish for helping make this happen.  My company Software Logistics, LLC is working on a product that we will be announcing in the coming weeks and needed a little extra help from the Windows Phone 7 team.

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While working on my application I had in my possession a Windows Phone 7 prototype device, it was the LG model and I was able to install a very fresh build of the operating system.  After having the privilege to play with the device for a week, all I can say is wow.  When they claim it’s really a different kind of phone, well they aren’t kidding.  You’ll just have to wait until you get one in your hands.  This is the sort of thing that needs to be experience, and can’t adequately be described.  I think the two words that would best describe the paradigm shift are “integrated experience”.  You don’t launch and application to deal with your “stuff”.  You find your “stuff” then have the opportunity to act upon it with applications.  This may sound like a subtle difference, but it really isn’t.

 

The number one tip I learned this week was to be aware of your “fill-rate” this is the amount of pixels that need to be acted upon by the device but aren’t actually being rendered on the 800x480 display.  To get live statistics about your fill rate, enable the following property in your application.

Application.Current.Host.Settings.EnableFrameRateCounter = true;

Once you do so, you can look at the fourth number on the right hand side of your screen.  This will tell you your fill rate < 2 is optimal > 3 or so is considered bad and will have a significant performance impact on your application.

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By the way, the screen shot above gives a sneak peak of a sliver of the application I’m building.  I really can’t wait to talk more about “Sea Wolf” that will be ready by the time Windows Phone launches later this year…stay tuned!

-twb

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