Slides from NTK 2011

As promised: here are slides of my two presentations from NT Konferenca 2011. I hope you enjoyed my sessions.

1. In the Clouds with Windows Phone 7

2. Visual Studio LightSwitch

BTW: Slides are in English so anyone can take advantage of it. Demos will follow

 

Windows Phone 7 Emulator – HTC Mozart Skin

I’m a proud user of HTC Mozart Windows Phone 7 and I’m really excited about it. However, I’m not always in the mood to deploy and test my applications on it, so I still use Windows Phone Emulator. Emulator performs very well, but it’s looks awful, especially if you’re used to hold a real phone in your hand day-in day-out. That’s why I decided to create my own skin for it. Yes you guessed…it looks the same as my HTC Mozart

Installation guide

This is a two step procedure in which we’ll change the skin of emulator and Visual Studio designer. Make sure you backup all files before overwriting!!!

In ZIP file you’ll find two folders. Each one contains corresponding skin.

• Visual Studio Designer
• Windows Phone Emulator

1. To install skin for Visual Studio designer, extract content from “Visual Studio Designer” folder to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Emulation”. On 64-bit machines is the corresponding folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Emulation”.

2. To install skin for emulator, extract content from “Windows Phone Emulator” folder to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft XDE\1.0”. On 64-bit machines is the corresponding folder “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0”.

That’s it. Happy coding.

Download Skin

 

Expression Blend – Keyboard Add-in (Preview)

Expression Blend is one of my favorite tools, but at moments it becomes awkward, especially as I’m used to do most of the work with a keyboard. So I got an idea to create an add-in, which will allow me to customize keyboard shortcuts.

Here’s a description and a few screenshots:

• Create a new keyboard schemes (blank or from an existing one)
• Remove current keyboard scheme (unless it’s a default one)
• Filter commands for easier access
• Assign or remove shortcuts to a command
• Display a list of shortcuts for a selected command
• Display a list of commands used by a current shortcut

If you’re familiar with Visual Studio, then you won’t have problems in using it, as it’s nearly the same

Before I publish it (that should happen in very close future), I have to fix some bugs and get around some “nasty features” of Expression Blend. However, I’d be glad to receive some feedback prior to official publication.

 

Two quick tips for Windows Phone 7 Emulator

1. Hit Pause/Break to toggle the use of a computer keyboard. Alternatively you can use PageUp and PageDown keys. After keyboard is activated, you can notice an icon with keyboard language in the top right corner.
2. Hit Alt to switch among character options. A menu shows up at the bottom of the screen with all possibilities for a character located before the caret. The menu is automatically closed unless you hold the key for a while.

 

WordPress for Windows Phone 7

Recently WordPress introduced another great addition to their WordPress application family named WordPress for Windows Phone 7. Trough the application you can manage your blog, add new posts, moderate comments and more.