Mango – Outlook Folders as Live Tiles

I love the email client with Windows Phone 7, very quick and easy to keep updated on what’s going on with both my personal and work worlds.

To help organize my life, I make significant use of rules on the server and folders to move certain emails from certain folks into different folders.  One thing that could have made this better with the initial release of Windows Phone 7 was the ability to quickly pull the phone out of my pocket, swipe the lock screen and see if I have any unread emails in any of my folders, not just my inbox.  When I was out in Redmond in December I made this suggestion and “presto” in the keynote at TechEd this year, they demo-ed folders as live tiles. 

Now I can say Windows Phone 7 was my idea!  Well maybe not, but hey- I love this new feature, it adds something that will have a big impact that none of the other platforms have.

-twb

Windows Phone 7 Training/SQL Saturday #77 – Pensacola

If you are attending SQL Saturday #77 and are interested in Windows Phone 7 development, you might want to plan on coming a day early.  I will be doing a full day of WP7 training.  We are going to start out from the basics and throughout the day cover a number of topics you’ll need to know to build apps for the real world.  Also I’ve got a number of topics I’m going to cover, but we will have some flexibility in the material, so be sure to bring your real world questions and problems.

You can sign up here.

Then on Saturday, Joe Healy and I will be hosting a Windows Phone 7 Garage where we will provide our experience to help you get a leg up on building your app.

As an added bonus we will be giving away a free production Windows Phone and a copy of Visual Studio 2010.  All you need to do is show us some progress on a WP7 app during the event and you get a raffle ticket to be entered in the drawing.  As an added bonus if you attend my training on Friday, you will receive a bonus ticket to be entered into the drawing, so come to my training, start working on a phone app, have a good time and have a chance to win some awesome goodies! 

Of course there will be plenty of swag to give away.

Hope to see you there!

-twb

ByteMaster – WP7 Tribute App

Joe Healy the local Microsoft DPE of DevFish fame needed some way to learn a new tool for creating WP7 without any code called AppMakr.  As he said:

Kevin's a WP7 (and fruit and android) dev in Florida, deserving of his own tribute app. Yet he doesn't have one. So I'm building it for him. I was going to build one for myself, but hey, that's cheesy.

So the ByteMaster Windows Phone 7 Tribute App was born!

You can read about his experience here.

As you can see from the downloads from last month, a number of people are actually downloading it.  Not sure if that says something about the content or the person that wrote the app.  My guess is the later.

Anyway if you are interested in using this tool, be sure to check out his follow-up post on getting the app submitted.

BTW – The main pivot of the application is my recent blog posts.  If you are reading this in the app, we’ll see if it causes some sort of memory leak from the self referential recursive nature of this post .

-twb

Windows Phone 7 – Quick Tip #27 – Handle Landscape on Edit Views

When talking to the folks that came up with Metro, or really anyone that used their brains to create the most awesome Windows Phone 7 platform, they said when making design decisions the most important consideration was the experience provided for the consumer.  Everything else was secondary…period.  We should take that same approach when building our applications. 

Case in point, one of my latest apps, ContactSwap let’s you enter your profile information. At this point I’ve grown to love the virtual keyboard provided with Windows Phone 7 and when entering profile information my screen looks like:

Not too bad.

Then I was out “swapping contacts” with someone and they had an LG Quantum.  When I saw them entering their information I said oh sh*t.  That’s not a very good experience is it?

So the moral of the story goes, even though you might be tempted to lock in your application to work with Profile mode to provide a consistent experience across the screens, you probably shouldn’t.

And instead of having:

Rather than, at least on your input screens:

For screens that don’t have to use your keyboard (which hopefully is the majority of your app) I’ve found that supporting either just Landscape or Portrait can really let you provide a consistent user experience.

-twb