Announcing SharePoint/Windows Phone 7 Toolkit

Software Logistics is proud to announce that it is releasing on CodePlex a toolkit that will simplify the task of building Windows Phone 7 applications based upon SharePoint 2010 servers running Forms Based Authentication.  This toolkit also allows you to use the same libraries to build Silverlight desktop applications.

This first release requires your SharePoint 2010 installation to support Forms Based authentication but once you do that, building applications is fairly trivial.

This toolkit will allow you to do the following:

• Authenticate against a Forms Based SharePoint 2010 server.
• Downloads lists of data from the server.
• Create built-in, prepackaged filters to limit the data without writing CAML.
• Once a list item is selected it’s passed to a data-driven page that correctly renders the form based upon the Meta-Data for that List from the server.  This includes formatting and validation.  The data can even be updated and added back to the server.

You can download the Toolkit from CodePlex at:
http://sharepointwp7.codeplex.com

This first version is fully functional and works well on the data set for my server. 

Please let me know what you think, if there is enough interest I have a number of ideas for expanding this concept.

-twb

SWFLDG – Windows Phone 7 Garage – A fun trip!

On Thursday June 24 DevFish (a.k.a. Joe Healy) and I packed up for a journey to visit John Dunagan and his totally awesome .NET developer group in Fort Myers/Naples Florida to do a Windows Phone 7 Garage meeting.  It turned out to be an _interesting_ trip to say the least.  Before the trip I tried to convince DevFish to stop off at Nervous Nellies a really nice watering hole on Fort Myers Beach.  This plea was unsuccessful (and the primary reason why were in time for our meeting) so we continued on down I75.  Somewhere AFTER we Daniels Parkway where we would have turned for Fort Myers Beach, my truck began pulling to the left, I pulled over and ended up with the following.

No problem, I figured, I’ve got a spare and the jack and tire iron that came with the truck, we’ll be fine.  Well no…when I bought the truck it had those little 1” high tires with sparkling chrome wheels…for any of you that know me, that just ain’t my style.  I had the dealer put back on the original tires, but they must have kept the other lug nuts.  The &(&(!$#$% tire iron didn’t fit the lug nuts on my truck.  Normally I keep a speed wrench and hydraulic jack in the bed of my truck, but the prior weekend I had hauled some stuff and cleaned it out, I put the spare back in but not my jack and tools.  Luckily a Road Ranger passed by and we were able to get his assistance with the right sized wrench.

If you know DevFish at all, you know he just couldn’t let this folly go without giving me a hard time.  More on this later.

So here I am pushing my tire into WalMart to get a new one put on.

And here I am pushing it back out, WalMart doesn’t carry tires for “real” trucks with 18” tires.  DevFish’s theory here was that I washed my hands after wheeling the tire in and jinxed myself as to them not having the tires.  Of course this just fed the fire as to him giving me grief.

Revenge of the Truck

So after DevFish giving me non-stop crap for the past 1/2 hour, my truck decided to say ENOUGH and decided to come to my defense!  BOOM after walking around the back of my truck, Joe’s shin came into full contact with my bumper hitch…

I was seriously torn, I’ve done this myself and I knew how much it hurt, I also knew how good it felt to have my truck stick up for me.

So, that was the end of my bad luck, I just had to pay Tires Choice $300 for the penalty of getting a flat tire.  You read that right, when it was all said and done $300 for a new tire…ouch!

That’s not all!

So it was then time to start our meeting.  DevFish booted up his main laptop and guess what?  Smoke started rolling out of it!  Ok that might be a slight exaggeration but his hard drive had some serious problems and he couldn’t boot it up.  Then he went to his backup machine, but that didn’t have a Power Point viewer on it…so after about 30 minutes of everyone sitting around while Joe tried to get his demo going, he moved to my machine and things worked fine.  Karma strikes again!  I knew better then to give him grief over this since I needed to drive home the next day, had an important call around noon and didn’t want Karma striking me with another flat tire.

BTW – I did the Mango talk and a small demo of something VERY cool, I’ll be releasing soon, these went well.

Happy Ending

The night ended well however enjoying a few pints of Guinness at a local pub.

I’m just worried about our next trip together where we are heading to Las Vegas before BUILD and driving across the desert to get to LA…wish us luck!

-twb

Windows Phone 7 – Quick Tip #31- Debug your Phone App and service Simultaneously

You’re building a Windows Phone 7 app that has to talk to some sort of server component you are building.  Your first thought might be to create to different projects and solutions so you can debug both at the same time.  There is a better way:

First have both the client and service application as part of the same service, then right mouse click on the Solution node of the Solution Explorer:

Then click on Properties in the popup menu, once you do so you’ll have the opportunity to set the startup project(s)

Then make sure “Multiple Startup Projects:” is selected, then for the two projects you want to start at the same time, just set the action to Start.

-twb