Software Logistics, LLC – New Web Site

I guess it was time to retire my companies web site.  When we started Software Logistics in 2001, we built a Classic ASP web site that reflected my companies vision and goals at that time.  Over the years that site has been sadly neglected.  I guess something like the cobblers kids have no shoes.

After attending Mix11 this month, I saw some great demos of the open source Orchard CMS released by Microsoft earlier this year and decided it was time for an upgrade.

I’d like to welcome you to the new Software Logistics, LLC site with a new fresh look.  Along with the new web site, Software Logistics is continuing to sharpen it’s focus.  We are going to providing consulting and development services for organizations wishing to create or evolve their mobile strategy. We also kicked off a strong internal mobile app research and design effort for all three major platforms: iPhone, Android and Windows Phone.  We have a number of apps that we have built in the pipeline to be released in the coming months.

As part of this renewal, the first 25 organizations to contact us at Strategists.FreeOffer@Software-Logistics.com will get a free consultation on their unique mobile strategy.

Be sure to let us know what you think!

-twb

Providing Different Page Layouts for Orchard

Perhaps everyone else and their brother realizes it, but after about 4 hours of searching the web, doing trial and error, I finally figured out how to create different page layouts within Orchard.  Pretty sure this only works with version 1.1+.

Anyway, I’m redoing me website and on my home page, I want my big banner, on the rest of the pages, I just want to jump straight into the content.  This documentation within orchard pointed me in the right direction.

It’s actually pretty easy, simply use the naming convention
     Layout-url-[PAGERELATIVEURL].cshtml

and provide your new template for a completely different page layout.

In my cases, I wanted to keep the pages consistent, but I wanted have have my logo and primary image on the home page, and leave it empty on the second page.  The solution was to provide an alternate layout for the BannerZone.cshtml file.

BannerZone.cshtml is the default one and will be included on all the pages.  The contents of this file is empty so no image will be displayed.

BannerZone-url-homepage.cshtml will only be displayed when the user is on the home page, the content of this files contains an image tag that will render the main image and logo.

This seems like a very powerful technique to create small tweaks on different pages.  So far, even though it is a very early release. I’m really encouraged what I’m seeing from this platform.  Seems to be very extensible and puts a layer of abstraction for all the blocking-and-tackling stuff you need to build for a custom web site.  I’m hopeful that with these modules and building blocks, we can focus more time on implementing the business needs of our site and less on the ho-hum functionality.

-twb

RSS Feed from Florida App Developers Site

I’m excited to announce a new feature on the Florida Windows Phone 7 Developers App Site.  You can now subscribe to RSS feeds for individual developer or for all the application that have been published and added to this site.

If you are developer this might be a nice way for you to publish a URL on your site or business card so folks can see what you’ve published.  In addition each feed item has a deep link that will open the application in the marketplace on your phone or in Zune on the desktop.

To activate your link, you need to make sure you have a valid twitter handle added, you also need to have your name, email address and web site.  Once those are added you can access your apps feed with the simple URL

http://www.flwp7.com/[TWITTER].rss for your apps and http://www.flwp7.com/all.rss for all the apps.

For example my apps would be at http://www.flwp7.com/bytemaster.rss

Enjoy!

-twb

Presentation Materials - ONETUG

On April 21, 2010, I had (or will have since I’m writing this before the presentation) the privilege to discuss Windows Phone 7 at the Orlando .NET User Group or ONETUG.

My talk is/was broken into tree parts:

Part 1) Code/Quick Tips:

1. Create a Theme-able Image and an overview of how to use it from DevFish
2. Lock in your colors for a Windows Phone 7 App
3. Do a work-around for a Data Binding Bug
4. Walk through on concepts surrounding Tombstone-ing

Part 2) Overview of new Mango Features, power point presentation.

• Link to ALL the Windows Phone 7 sessions at Mix.

Part 3) Check out the Florida Windows Phone 7 Developer site and subscribe to the Live Group for upcoming releases and announcements.

Also be sure to check out DevFish’s Windows Phone Garage II Events

-twb

Rock, Paper, Scissors & Azure!

Check out this interesting and super cool contest post by DevFish…

http://www.devfish.net/fullblogitemview.aspx?blogid=809

Round #1 kicks off April 4 and the Contest Ends May 10th.

See you out there under TheWolfBytes_FL

-twb

Windows Phone 7 – Quick Tip #26 – Detect Connection to Zune

If you are building an application that needs to access any of the media libraries, you know you can’t do so when your Windows Phone 7 device is connected to the Zune Desktop application.  This is a real bummer when you are developing you application.  If you’ve done this a lot you know you can get around this with WPConnect but that doesn’t help after you have deployed your application and your users have they phone connected to the Zune software.

Although you can’t really do much to fix this issue, you can improve the UX of your app.  Right now if you launch something like a picture chooser, it will just fail silently, it won’t crash, but it won’t be shown either.  Here’s a relatively simple way you can see if the Zune Desktop is connected:

if (Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterface.NetworkInterfaceType == 
    Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation.NetworkInterfaceType.Ethernet)

{
    /*Sorry, you are probably connected to zune and your chooser won’t launch */

}
else
{
    /* You are probably good to go and you can launch a chooser */
}

What I do is just display a simple message box that says to use this feature please disconnect your phone from the computer (or something like that).

-twb