Posted by MichaelBird on July 25, 2012
Sharp Dudes recently put out its first Windows Phone application, it’s called Beer Tracker. I enjoy trying different kinds of beers, especially when I travel and find some local microbrewery. Over time, I’ve tried so many different kinds that I can’t always remember if I’ve tried a beer before, and if I do remember, I don’t always remember if I liked it. So, enter Beer Tracker.
Beer Tracker lets you enter the brewery and beer name, rating, information such as hoppiness, maltiness, bitterness, fruitiness… as well as comments and a description. You can also add a photo to each beer; especially handy to remember what the bottle or tap looked like. You can filter your beer list in many ways to find one you are looking for.
There are future updates planned to add SkyDrive backup as well as more information about the beers. If it’s popular enough, we’ll consider writing Android and IPhone versions. For now, if you’re a beer connoisseur with a Windows Phone, give it a try.
Beer Tracker Marketplace Link
Update. The app now includes SkyDrive backup, more beer data that can be collected, more filters, sorting… Still looking into a good search provider for fetching information on new beers you try as well as posting to facebook and/or twitter.
Posted in General, Programming, Windows Phone | Tagged: Beer, Phone | Leave a Comment »
Posted by MichaelBird on January 25, 2012
Just a heads up to all the WP7 developers out there using the Panorama control. I recently noticed that when I started my application, the panorama background would not be left-aligned. It would start with the seam between the two edges on the screen, then scroll into the correct placement moments later.
After playing around, I discovered that it had to do with the Build Action on the background image. I has it set to Resource instead of Content. Apparently both work, but only one of them works correctly. What will seem weird is that if you set the Build Action to Content, you will get a warning in the XAML where you set your panorama background telling you that your image should be set as a Resource. You have to ignore that warning or you will get the odd behavior.
Posted in WP7, XAML | Tagged: Background, Panorama, WP7, XAML | Leave a Comment »
Posted by MichaelBird on November 10, 2011
I recently gave a presentation called “Introduction to Visual Studio LightSwitch” to the Pittsburgh .NET user group. Attached is a zip file of the
slides for the presentation and an example project I built.
There is some sample code in the project that shows how to override a default add/edit modal screen with your own and have the close button work correctly as “cancel” in case you’ve been trying to figure out how to do it.
The slides and example project code can be found here: Presentation Material
I had several questions during the presentation about where the data goes if you create tables in your application without connecting to a database. I looked into it further and found that it is in a sql express mdf file. The file is Bin\Data\ApplicationDatabase.mdf under your project folder. In LightSwitch, they call this the intrinsic database.
Posted in .NET, Event, LightSwitch | Leave a Comment »
Posted by MichaelBird on October 10, 2011
I was working on a web site the other day and needed to do some column manipulation on a table and found it odd that the System.Web namespace didn’t seem to give me much help for what I wanted to do. I ended up writing these small extension methods to help and thought they might be useful to someone else so here they are.
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Posted in .NET, ASP.NET | Tagged: Extension, Unit | Leave a Comment »
Posted by johnhidey on September 13, 2011
The day for me started about 4am. Getting up at 4am to begin getting ready for my voyage to Anaheim to partake in the //BUILD/ conference. Was actually pretty easy to get up that early being that I was really stoked to be doing. Why stoked you ask, I ask the same thing since I purchased the conference along with everyone else without knowing an agenda, session list or even speakers.
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Posted in .NET, HTML5, Markup, Silverlight, Windows 8, WPF, XAML | Leave a Comment »
Posted by MichaelBird on April 5, 2011
Is it just me, or does it seem that C# and .NET, even after all these years, is still missing much of the productivity power of C++? I’m not talking about pointers or other unsafe code, just some productivity enhancements that seem like they are well within the purview of what C# is capable of. I’ve boiled it down to the two top things I would like to see added.
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Posted in .NET, C#, Programming | Tagged: Productivity | 4 Comments »
Posted by MichaelBird on April 5, 2011
I find that I occasionally need a property on a class where I need to know if it’s ever been set or not. This invariably ends up with the creation a second “is set” property for each property I need to track, like the following:
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Posted in .NET, C# | Tagged: C#, Optional, Property | 1 Comment »
Posted by johnhidey on March 30, 2011
I have been waiting for what seems to be months for my first update to my HTC HD7. After first hearing that the first update would include copy/paste and many other features I was stoked. This update was initially rumored to be released in January but that never happened. After that heart break, the talk on the internet was that it was coming in February, again it didn’t happen, but this time they did announce that there would be an update to come before the copy/paste update. This update was to update the phones updating process.
The update (February Update) to the update process got me a bit antsy that the copy/paste update would be coming soon behind that. Well February came and went and still never received the February update. Now I’m am wondering if I would ever be getting my February update.
Well, yesterday my skepticism was put to rest. I was sitting at work, happen to look over to my phone and seen a message that an update was available. WOW. Finally I got it. All I have to do now is sit back and wait for the copy/paste update (March Update) coming out soon after this February update.
The update process for my HD7 went as smooth as I would have hoped. Plugged phone into my computer, fired up the Zune software and did a check for updates. There it was. The information given on the update page stated that the update process could take up to 20 minutes. For such a small update, I didn’t expect it to take so much time. And, to my surprise it didn’t. The whole process took somewhere between 3-5 minutes.
Now as I check the status for the March update and see that t-mobile has it out for delivery so I am expecting to receive another message “Update available” sometime here soon.
I would always rather wait a bit longer to get the update right, than to have them push it and give me nothing but headaches (Now if I could only get my clients to think this way). Nicely done Microsoft. It couldn’t have been easier to update.
Phone update status page for US: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/features/update-schedule-usa.aspx
Posted in General, WP7 | Tagged: HD7, HTC, Microsoft, Update, WP7 | Leave a Comment »
Posted by MichaelBird on February 13, 2011
I recently found out about an unexpected difference between C# and C++. I came from a long C++ background and have been doing C# for years without this difference causing me any issues, but it’s still something to be aware of. It has to do with how a new object is initialized when there is an inheritance hierarchy.
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Posted in .NET, C#, C++, Programming | Tagged: C#, Constructor, Initialization, Java | Leave a Comment »
Posted by johnhidey on February 1, 2011
Last year there was some talk about Pittsburgh having their first Give Camp ( http://www.givecamp.org ) and it never got off the ground. This was mostly due to the organizers schedules and other Pittsburgh events which coincided with the date planned. Well this year, we are back and going to make sure it happens.
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Posted in Event | Tagged: 2011, Event, GiveCamp, Pittsburgh | 2 Comments »
