Nokia Windows Phone Training Day 2

Not a bad way to start the day. Cooked to perfection as well.

Final day of training in Berlin today.

This time we were in the slightly more intimate surroundings of the cafe next to the college we were at yesterday. Really nice setup, with fantastic food. The food has been really good everywhere I’ve been on this tour.

They had even branded the conference table upstairs, which was rather sweet.

The German audience stayed tough on us. One of the things that I reckon is that if a course goes well the audience learns a lot. If a course goes really well, the teacher learns a lot too. And that is how it has turned out. Some of the technical questions that we got really had us digging deep to find answers and even writing test programs to show what was going on. And I now have ideas for a whole bunch of blog posts about Windows Phone development that I must write down before I forget.

Then it was straight to the airport to fly home. Busy day tomorrow. Is there any other kind?

Nokia with Windows Phone in Berlin

Today we did the first day of our Windows Phone training in Berlin. Of course I took pictures.

Not a bad view when you are having breakfast

What we are here for

Badges

They even had branding on the floor…

Jens Dissmann of Nokia Germany gets things started

A great audience, with some really tough questions.

I said I’d put up links to the content. Here we are:

You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx

The ones you want are:

01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications

There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

You can find the Tidy ToDo application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482

Update on Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 10:48PM by Rob

Oh, and we got some questions about Codec support in Windows Phone. You can find the list of supported codecs for media playback here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff462087.aspx

Heading for Berlin for Windows Phone Fun

Why can you never find a mouse when you need one…

Flew out to Berlin today. The Nokia Windows Phone Training is moving on to yet another country. I wasn’t able to make the Madrid one on Friday, but I’m told it went well and that a good time was had by all. And here I am in Berlin. Lovely city. I’m wandering round remembering why I like it so much.

The hotel suite I’m in is the biggest one I’ve ever stayed in. It has a bigger living room than our house. I did actually get lost in it at one point. I’m only here for a couple of nights, back in Hull on Thursday, but I really could live in this place. Me and around ten of my friends…

Mango and Visual Studio 2011

Spent a little chunk of today upgrading my Windows Phone to the proper version of Mango. Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of the Release Candidate for Windows Phone 7.5 and last week they released the final version. When we did the Release Candidate upgrade we were told to make a backup of the phone and keep this safe, safe, safe so that we could revert back to the version from the mobile operator (in my case Orange) and then apply their upgrades too.

Of course I lost mine.

I can’t really think of a good excuse either. I just went back to where it should have been and it wasn’t there. I think I confused CTRL+Drag (copy) with Drag (move) and then ended up with one less copy of the file than I thought.

Never mind, the good news is that the Windows Phone folks have supplied an update that removes the need to return to any backups. This is also nice because it means that any SMS messages, phone calls and other stuff in the really useful messaging threads will stay up to date. The update runs twice, once to put the latest version of Windows 7.5 on your device and again to reconnect the phone to the update servers from your mobile operator. It works well, in fact the first thing that happened after I’d done all this was another update from Samsung.

If you have upgraded your phone to Windows Mango Release Candidate you should be getting the messages about upgrades real soon now. I’ve not noticed much new about the new version yet, but then the Release Candidate was pretty darned solid anyway.

Make sure that when you do the backup you do it on a machine which the phone is synchronised with. That way it will take (another) backup that might be useful in the future. I’m going to try very hard not to lose this one.

Update on Monday, October 3, 2011 at 05:23PM by Rob

Oh, and the final version of the Windows Phone SDK is now out. Head over to create.msdn.com to get your copy. Great stuff.

Bathroom Fittings

Went up town today and bought some bathroom fittings. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of toilet roll holder there are.