Friday, 30 April 2010

WP7 Build 6176 "Unlocked"

A long time without blogging but it was a really full period. I would love to have more time for writing and testing, but I have some "stressing" deadlines. As you probably know Microsoft released the new version of the Windows Phone 7 Development tools and there is a new version of the emulator. The old "unlock method" still works and there is already an unlocked version on XDA Developers and you can download the image here. The new version of the bin doesn't work on the old XDE emulator because there seem to be some changes in XDE hardware...

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

WP7 IsolatedStorage Backup/Restore

One of the drawbacks of the WP7 Emulator is that it doesn't save the state between sessions and also it is difficult to deploy a file with your project and then use it. This means that every time you start a new session of the emulator you loose all the data on the IsolatedStorage. I've developed a small solution (there is room for improvement) for backing-up and restoring the files (folder structure included) of the IsolatedStorage. It is...

Monday, 12 April 2010

WP7 IsolatedStorage Speed

I was wondering if it makes any sense fully implementing SQLite on IsolatedStorage as the "quality" of the db support will depend a lot on the speed of of the storage. I read on some posts that the speed of IsolatedStorage was a problem, but I've wanted to compare it with the speed of the Filestream. The problem is that you cannot compare the two directly so I had the idea to compare both of them with another "item" that is available on both systems....

Wednesday, 7 April 2010

iPhone Printing using MonoTouch - Proof of concept

Printing from the iPhone (also iPad I presume) it's not an impossible task (as it is in WP7 for the moment). It can be done using a network printer connected to the device using wireless radio (infrastructure or Ad hoc mode). As there is no internal driver for printing developers will have to write an interface to the printer. The "task" is pretty big as there are many programming languages for printers: HP PCL5, Epson ESC/P, PostScript, Zebra Programming Language, ASCII printers and many more. Using socket programing available in MonoTouch it...

Thursday, 1 April 2010

WP7 CTP SDK or HOW TO GET THE DEVELOPERS FRUSTRATED

Initially this post was about WP7 Printing. Two days ago I thought that it would be nice to write about printing from WP 7 and iPhone and the only "compatible" that I could think of was using a WiFi printer (on the iPhone the bluetooth stack doesn't have implemented the SPP and you have to hack it ). It's something I've already did years ago in Compact Framework when I wasn't using PrinterCE or PrintCe and wanted to share it cause it is a new beginning and at some point in a small business application you will need to print something. (it was...