Last week I attended a (great) conference Mobility Day and organizers asked me to build a small Silverlight application for prize giveaway at the end of the day. Every participant had a number at the back of their ID card and if the wheel stopped at your number, the prize was yours. Application itself is very simple and it took me maybe an hour to build it from scratch. The important thing is that it can be run from any computer from the web, and the total number of participants can be set via URL, like this: http://demo.dizzy.hr/mobilitydaydrawing/?max=333. To use the app, first focus it and then expand to full screen with F11 key. Wheel can be started and stopped by mouse click or space key. Not really a smart application, but useful and attractive.

The main topic of the conference was Windows Phone 7. The day before the conference, I got an e-mail – can you port this app to Windows Phone 7? So I did – it took me five minutes and the only thing I had to do is remove part of user interface, because the phone’s screen is smaller. Everything else was just pure copy & paste. It worked great in emulator and I’ve sent it to organizers to try it on the real device. It worked fine, although the phone CPU/GPU is a bit slower than a computer, so animation is not so smooth. But it can be tweaked (I will when I get my hands on an actual device). If you have a developer device or want to try it in the emulator, download it here.

[BTW, during the conference there was a millenium photo taken, you can check it out here using Deep Zoom. I wish it was not only 12 megapixels.]

It is not like you have a real device in your hand, but you can get some look and feel of Windows Phone using an emulator. If you have touchscreen monitor, your experience will be much better, but that’s not a requirement. You don’t need anything else installed on your system, not even Visual Studio 2010 :-)

I have tried this steps on Windows 7 machine, it should work on Vista as well. I’ve read there are some issues on Windows XP, please let me know if you try it.

1. If you don’t have Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools installed, please do the following:
   • download Microsoft XDE 1.0 (3 MB) and install 32bit or 64bit version, depending on your system (unzip and run sde_xde-enu.msi or sde_xde64-enu.msi)
   • alternatively, you can download ISO image of Windows Phone Developer Tools and run files from there (430 MB)
2. If you have Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools installed, please check version (you should have June/July 2010 version)
3. Download unlocked Windows Phone 7 ROM (92 MB), remember the folder you’ve put it in (I’ll use “C:”)
4. Run one of the following lines on your command prompt (save it to batch file for future use) – change the folder you’ve put you BIN file in!
   • “C:Program FilesMicrosoft XDE1.0XDE.exe” “C:WM70C1-6414-unlocked.bin” /VMID {E575DA31-FC47-4766-853F-018D823B9EE6}
     OR
   • “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft XDE1.0XDE.exe” “C:WM70C1-6414-unlocked.bin” /VMID {E575DA31-FC47-4766-853F-018D823B9EE6}
5. Have fun! :-)

This walkthrough is based on Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools beta published in July 2010.
Please let me know if any link stops working :-)

I didn’t invent this – thank goes to En1gma and RustyGrom at XDA-Developers (where else? :-)).

You’ve developed your first Windows Phone 7 application and you want to share it with your friends or colleagues? Just follow this simple steps:

1. Copy all files from “BinRelease” folder of your project. Move it to target machine.
2. Have the Windows Phone 7 SDK installed on target machine (comes with Developer Tools)
3. Open “XapDeploy.exe” in “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft SDKsWindows Phonev7.0ToolsXAP Deployment” (actual path may vary on your system, but you get the idea)
4. Select “Windows Phone 7 Emulator” as Target
5. Browse for XAP file on your disk (the one you’ve copied from “BinRelease” folder)
6. Deploy

That’s it!

In one project I’m working on for a few months now I got the request to show progress bar in the form of circle – empty circle would mean 0%, and filled circle stands for 100%. It seemed like and interesting challenge, so I think I’ve found the simplest solution to the problem.

Let’s build it together…

First of all, we need a Path element with one ArcSegment and one LineSegment:

It will draw something like this – StartPoint is on the right, (A), ArcSegment draws half a circle to get to the point B, LineSegments goes to circle center C and since we have set parameter IsClosed to true, it draws another LineSegment to close the drawing in the point A, even if we didn’t write it explicitly.

We will bind this circular progress bar to a slider, as this is the simplest way to show how it works. You can, obviously, bind this to something else – the important thing is to get a value between 0 and 1 (0% – 100%).

This is the base that we need to have defined in XAML – the rest of the work will be done from code behind. We have named ArcSegment to be able to change its properties, namely Point and IsLargeArc.

First of all, we need circle radius and an angle that will represent a part of circle we want to show. Radius is equal to ArcSegment size (width or height, doesn’t matter), and the angle is full circle (360 degress or  2*PI) * percentage. When we have this two variables, you can use the following formula to calculate the point on the circle that corresponds to our percentage.

If the angle is more than PI (more than 180 degrees), we should set IsLargeArc to true, otherwise we will end up with this:

Unfortunately, were not quite there yet – there is a problem (I would dare to call it a bug) with 100% status, when the second point of ArcSegment is the same as the first one. In that case, even if you set IsLargeArc to true, you will not get a full circle:

So, we must use a hack – when a percentage reaches 100%, that means that the angle is equal to 2*PI, we will decrease the Y coordinate of the point by some small number, like 1/1000. By doing this, the second point will not be equal to the first one, but since the difference is very, very small, we will not be able to see it on the screen.

One last thing before the end – it is more common to see the circle fill from the top point, probably because that’s the way analog clock works. So, you can use rotation transform to fix this:

Now we’re done. You can check the demo here, and download sample project here. In those samples I’ve added another white circle on the top, to achieve the “donut” effect.

Web User Group is the youngest user group in Croatian MS Community. I’ve founded it in December 2009 with support of Microsoft Croatia. Meetings are scheduled on the third Thursday of each month (except during the summer, in July and August).

Web User Group covers wide range of topics in the web-development area, including design, slicing, server and client technologies, tools and server software, services and libraries. The main focus is on Microsoft ASP.NET and Silverlight, but many standard technologies supported by Microsoft tools and platform are covered as well, like HTML, JavaScript and jQuery. Our wide topic area allows us to be appealing for a wide range of people, including web-designers, front-end and back-end developers, system engineers as well as decision makers.

Online

The group’s official web site can be found on www.webug.com.hr (in Croatian). Users and visitors can subscribe to the mailing list. Via mailing list, we inform people about meetings, benefits for user group members and availability of post-meeting materials.

Every meeting is recorded both video and audio and the video and screencast are available on our web site about a week after the meeting. There is also a Silverlight application that plays two synchronized streams at the time (video and screencast) – application is called Dual Streaming and it is developed especially for Web User Group.

PowerPoint presentations and photos from each meeting are available on official web site as well.

During every meeting we provide free online participation using LiveMeeting for people outside Zagreb and neighboring countries.

Collaboration

We work closely with DPE department of Microsoft Croatia and they support our activities with logistics, funding (beer and pizzas) and ideas. LiveMeeting broadcast and meeting recording is powered by Microsoft Innovation Center in Varaždin, and we give away their vouchers and discounts as door prizes.

We are full member of INETA Europe and integral part of Croatian MS Community. We work closely with them on promotion (for example, activities during WinDays conference in April) and organize shared group meetings (with SharePoint group in March and SQL/DEV group in April), in order to promote each other.

We collaborate with many other organizations and companies, especially event organizers. We are trying to arrange benefits for our members, like discounts, free vouchers, books, subscriptions and other deals. In seven months, we had more than 20 arrangements of that kind.

Our work is supported by several IT media in Croatia and numerous bloggers.

Meetings and people

Meetings are held in Microsoft Croatia office in the biggest room called Dante, which can accommodate up to 50 people and it is usually full. Registration system allows registration for 70 people, since some of them cancels in the last minute or simply do not show up. Usually, the interest exceeds the capacity of the room (the record was 95 registrations in February 2010, unfortunately, 25 of them on the waiting list didn’t have an opportunity to come). Currently, this is the biggest user group in Croatia.

Our mailing list has more than 350 active and valid subscribers that regularly receive announcements (not more than three times a month, two times on average).

Although I don’t use WordPress on my blog, I find very interesting that now it can store data in SQL Server database, either free SQL Server Express or some advanced version. PHP is still a requirement (I’m pretty sure that this will not change), but now you don’t have to install MySQL database on Windows (although it’s quite straightforward, using Web Platform Installer). But, the key point here is a support for SQL Azure – scenario that can enable high-traffic sites to use WordPress with no performance issue (at least not from the database point of view).

Several months ago a few friends and I were thinking about providing SQL Server support by writing a driver based on PG2WP plug-in that enables WordPress with PostgreSQL database. Unfortunately, we didn’t find enough time to do it, so the project was abandoned. Lucky for us, because all the hard would be wasted now that we have this patch.

There are also quite a few interesting articles on this topic:

• Migrating a WordPress Site from MySQL to SQL Server/SQL Azure

• Win $10k for Building a WordPress on SQL Server or SQL Azure Site

• WordPress: Why is Microsoft doing this?

• WordPress on SQL Server Architecture & Design

For more info, installation procedure and getting started articles, check out this site. Can’t wait to use it, here is the direct link to download section.