Windows Phone Dev Event in Zagreb

_DSC4788Last week was a great week for my user group FutureDEV – instead of a regular meeting, we have organized a small event on development for Windows Phone. At first we planned to do just another meeting, with me redelivering my NFC talk from WinDays…

But no – I’ve mentioned that to our Nokia Developer Champion team, and they have offered to support the event with some sweepstakes prizes, and the local Microsoft DPE team has suggested that we do two sessions in parallel, covering both beginners and advanced topics. We added a roundtable discussion featuring local Windows Phone developers – and the Windows Phone Dev Event was born!

We have offered 150 free tickets and around 2/3 of them were taken in less than 24 hours. A few days later they were all gone and we asked people to let us know if they cannot make it, so we can invite others. Out of 150 people, around 100 showed up. That’s just the average for the free events – around 2/3 of registered folks show up, and that’s exactly how many people our venue (Microsoft Croatia office) can accommodate. Perfect Smile

We had two sessions – Andrej Radinger was in charge of the jumpstart to Windows Phone development, and I was (again) talking about NFC, playing with NFC tags and showing some NFC related code. Fun as usual.

After sessions, we had a small chat with local Windows Phone developers: Ante Marić, Hrvoje Stanišić, Igor Ralić, Petar Paar and Zvonimir Dimovski, presenting their published applications and their overall experience with WP development and WP Store.

WP_20130528_005Last, but not the least – the sweepstakes: Tino Petrina, student developer that loves Windows Phone won the Lumia 820 developer device, and there were prizes sponsored by FFWD.PRO conference, Pluralsight and Mindscape. And we had T-shirts for everyone, sponsored by Microsoft, with the following text: “I attended mscommunity.hr and I almost won Lumia 820” Smile

8871196113_7387776113_b  8871199491_83971e2deb_b

_DSC4786  _DSC4776

More photos from the event can be found here and here (at the bottom).

And last, but not the least: thanks to Microsoft DPE Croatia and Nokia Developer Champion Program, Mario and Vedran for the photos; and MS student partners Andrej, Mislav, Ana and Ivan for welcoming people at the entrance.

Posted on June 1, 2013 by domagoj in Windows Phone

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Long time no see

e87d664e4ce06e56e1982c805d26099aI obviously write posts in batches, so this is the first post in a new batch Smile

So, let me do a quick resume first. I’ve been quite busy with the WinDays conference at the end of the April. WinDays is the biggest IT conference in the region and I was very much involved this year as a speaker and part of organizing team.

I have participated in the following sessions:

Opening ceremony – with the live demo that included Windows 8, Windows Phone, Intune, Office 365… and other sexy stuff

Developers Keynote – as a co-host with Ivan Kardum

ASP.NET 101 – beginner’s intro to ASP.NET, with Hrvoje Hudoletnjak

Windows Phone & Windows 8 101 – beginner’s intro to the new Microsoft platform, with Andrej Radinger

NFC + Windows Phone – my (almost) famous talk about NFC

Besides the sessions, my company worked on WinDays official web-site, as well as official Windows Store and Windows Phone apps.

After the WinDays, I’ve been quite busy to organize another event, but I’ll leave that to the next post…

PS. I have moved my blog from www.domagoj.pavlesic.com to domagoj.eu – seems a bit simpler :-) The old address will continue to work as well.

Posted on June 1, 2013 by domagoj in Other

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Backup to the cloud! With berries.

Off-site backups are always complicated. In my main development machine, I have an SSD with all the data, and the data is nightly copied to the RAID1 disks. That seams like a decent backup solution in the case of disk failure, but what if somebody steals my computer or the whole house burns to the ground (yeah, a bit overdramatic, right?)? I need a decent off-site backup.

Portable disks or DVDs or tapes are obsolete, I wanted to backup to the cloud! My loving Azure, of course. Azure Storage is cheap, fast, and data is replicated to the three different locations (in the same datacenter, or on the other side of the world – it’s up to you).

Other than that, I needed a piece of software to do the dirty work (to copy all the files) and my first idea (being a developer and all) is to write my own utility for that. But then I’ve stumbled upon this piece of software called CloudBerry Backup and – that’s it. My problem is solved, nice and simple. Every night it copies all changed files to the cloud and I feel much safer now. Even if I delete a file, it will be available in the cloud for 30 days. Just perfect.

It supports other cloud providers as well, encryption, compression, real-time backup, virtual disk to access the files in the cloud, bandwidth and scheduling management and – C# API for your custom needs.

The only downside of the cloud backup is that the initial copying can last for days, even weeks. Luckily, I have a LTE connection with upload speed of 17 Mbps, so it took only one weekend.

It’s not free (29,99 US$), but it is worth every penny. I’m evaluating a server version on the server and it works great as well. I will buy it and cancel the expensive backup service from the hosting provider.

Posted on March 28, 2013 by domagoj in Other

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Speaking at MS Network in Teslić

boxYes, I know, I don’t write enough here – but what can I do? I have such an interesting job I don’t have time to write about it more. I have like ten topics in the pipeline, but… first things first.

Next week I’ll be at the MSNetwork conference in Teslić, Bosnia and Herzegovina. I will be speaking about NFC on Windows Phone – how to use it as an end-user, but also how to use it in your own applications. I’ve just finished the slide deck, I’ve bought a dozen of NFC tags on the eBay and can’t wait for 4/4/2013 at 11:30, in the room Sava 1.

Will you join me?

Posted on March 28, 2013 by domagoj in Speaking, Windows Phone

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Moving from self-hosted Orchard to WordPress on Azure

Maybe you have noticed – and probably not – I’m moving my blog to another platform. I was using Orchard. It’s a nice piece of software, but I wanted to test Azure Web Sites with PHP and MySQL, so the WordPress seamed like the right choice. We’ll see :-)

I’m still moving everything to the new platform and tweaking stuff, so if there is a broken link or missing piece of information, use the old blog on old.domagoj.pavlesic.com (it’s the old blog, not the old Domagoj Pavlešić :-)).

About the transition itself, I’ve used the following resources/blog posts, that helped me a lot. So, if you plan to do something similar, check those links out:

– BlogML module for Orchard – enables export in BlogML format
– Migrating a blog from Orchard 0.5 to 0.9 – when you don’t know where to find the Export link
– Migrating your blog from any BlogML based platform to WordPress – great tutorial and a script to convert BlogML to WordPress WRX format

Cheers!

Posted on January 19, 2013 by domagoj in Other

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Speaking at Vizija 10 in Skopje, Macedonia

SpeakingAtVizijaSo, I’ll be in Skopje at Vizija next week to talk a bit about Windows Phone. It is a hard thing to do these days, since we don’t know everything about the future version (launching on the Oct 29th), but we are allowed to know enough to make two sessions out of it.

Windows Phone in business scenarios – Oct 24th, Wednesday, at 16:10 in Сина сала.
Windows Phone 8 Development introduction – Oct 25th , Thursday, at 9:00 in Зелена сала.

Furthermore, I’ll be at the Ask the experts on Thursday from 11:15 – 12:15, so do stop by if you’re in the area.

See you!

Posted on October 19, 2012 by domagoj in Speaking, Windows Phone

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My first Windows Store apps – published

There is more than 5.000 apps in the Windows Store, and two of them are made by yours truly.

screenshot_10192012_104837The first one was developed for Bosnian IT portal called HardwareBase. It is in Croatian language (at least officially) and it is basically a RSS reader. This is the first version and it lacks some of the planned features, but we wanted to be in the store before Windows 8 general availability, so this is some kind of preview version, complete feature set will be available in the next update.

Screenshot.20530.1000000The other app is a port of famous twitter wall solution called WallOfSilver.net. This service was originally developed for an old Mix 10k contest, and it was developed in Silverlight almost three years ago. I decided to port it to WinRT and I was surprised how simple that task was. Pure copy-paste and a bit of deleting XAML effects that are not supported (like shadows and blurs).  Check it out here and use it whenever you like – on conferences, halls, events, at home…

Enjoy – and report your thoughts Smile

Posted on October 19, 2012 by domagoj in Windows RT

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So, how do we call Metro now?

This is going to be my shortest blog post ever.

Metro/Modern are now Microsoft design style.
Metro style apps on Windows 8 are called Windows Store apps.
Windows Phone Marketplace is Windows Phone Store.
Mind the casing!

The source.

Posted on October 19, 2012 by domagoj in Windows Phone, Windows RT

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Conferences this Fall

I have like ten topics ready for my blog, but I don’t have time to write. That’s too bad, but I’ve been busy and this blog post will reveal one of the reasons. Conferences.

At the beginning of the September I was part of the KulenDayz, not only as a speaker (I’ve talked about Contracts in Windows 8 Metro/Modern app development), but I also helped with the organization a bit (my duties were the official web-site and the Windows Phone 7 app). There is much to be said about KulenDayz, but it can be summarized in a word: awesome. Best conference ever – open, friendly, fun and high level, all in the same time. During KulenDayz, there was the Regional MVP summit, so it was even better – 80 MVPs from 15 different countries.

Next on my schedule is Mobility Day. As the name suggests, it’s a conference about mobile solutions, and it will take place on September 27th in hotel Antunović in Zagreb. I will talk about Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 integration, so do stop by if in neighborhood. There is an early bird discount until 17th, and the members of MSCommunity get the additional 10% off (if you’re a member of my group, contact me to get the promotion code).

Last, but not least – DevArena. Hard-core developer conference in Zagreb that I like very much. This year, for the first time, I have an opportunity to speak there, and I’m very proud of this engagement. I have two sessions there – Development secrets of Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 UI design principles.  The date is October 18th, register here, see you.

Posted on September 10, 2012 by domagoj in Speaking, Windows Phone

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I am the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals Judge!

Do you know what the Imagine Cup is? You should. It’s a great student technology competition sponsored and organized by Microsoft for ten years now. Every year, around 350,000 students from 180 countries are part of this contents and only the best ones have an opportunity to participate in worldwide finals, this year in Sydney, Australia.

I’ve been judging the Croatia finals for last three years, and this year I’ve been selected to be one of the worldwide finals judges in Software Design category. Yes, I’ll be travelling to Australia, but more important – I’ll meet a lot of brilliant people: students and fellow judges. Can’t wait to be a part of this awesome event!

Posted on May 24, 2012 by domagoj in Other

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