I am very happy to release a set of 8 websites dedicated to trainings on the latest Microsoft Technologies, all grouped in one portal: www.tourtrainings.com

Right now you can explore:

• HTML5 & ASP.NET MVC: www.html5-tour.com
• Windows 8: www.windows8-tour.com
• UX Design: www.uxdesign-tour.com
• SharePoint: www.sharepoint-tour.com
• Xbox Kinect: www.kinect-tour.com
• Azure: www.azure-tour.com
• Windows Phone: www.windowsphone-tour.com
• Team Foundation Server: www.teamfoundation-tour.com

We expect to progressively provide more and more content delivered by technical experts in a city near you. Stay tuned!
You can follow us:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Google+
• RSS

Hi Canadian Windows Phone developers!
This year Microsoft Canada, created a nice contest (based on some post i saw on the web, other country are pretty jealous of us). So if you ever wanted to create apps for the Windows Phone, it now time to do so. So by publishing some nice apps, you may be rewarded with some cool prizes ( and yes they are very cool!). You can read all the information on the following website :  http://www.developermovement.com/.  Do like me and start find some ideas and create nice applications for one of the best phone!

Last week i find something nice. If you have an XBOX there is an advertisement for the Developer Movement. When you go, it give you some info about the contest and you can grab the wallpaper for your dashboard and a player picture. See some pictures :

I hope to install some of your nice apps!

Regards,
LP

Hi, this is a long time since i updated my blog. Up to now the new year keep me very busy. This small break (from my blog) is now over (I'll do my best to post update more often). So i decide start by changing the theme of my blog, which reflect my passion for the Windows Phone development. This year i will probably write about Windows 8 development, because in my mind these Windows Phone and Windows 8 development (base on XAML) are very connected.

Regards,

LP

Sweet first email of the year… announcing that I’ve just been re-awarded Most Valuable Professional (MVP) by Microsoft for Silverlight. This is my 6th year in a row as an MVP so I am very grateful!

2011 was awesome! This is the year I became Microsoft Regional Director (RD) (on April 1st…).
I also did lots of community events, speaking at Microsoft conferences and user groups on Silverlight, Windows Phone, LightSwitch and HTML5. I am still sharing on Twitter @LaurentDuveau.

The big surprise I mentioned 1 year ago was our alliance with Wygwam. Then we launched 2 products: SmartUse and IAS!

2012 also promise to be intense for my team, starting with exciting projects on Windows 8 and XBOX Kinect!

Content of this blog tend to be less frequent, and less technical, which reflect my career path, I am now evolving in much more management than coding.

Good news is I intend to travel much less in 2012 as a second baby is on its way for February. No MVP Summit, no MIX, …

Happy New Year!

Here at RunAtServer, waiting for Windows 8 we have built our Metrofied Wishes Card!

http://www.runatserver.com/voeux/2012/wishes.htm

www.runatserver.com / Web, Mobile and Touch Solutions  / Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn!

Recently, I've been interviewed by Frédéric Harper from Microsoft on the “Connexion Developpeur”. The subject of the interview is about the development of the Windows Phone application for TechDays 2011 (Canada).

You can read the interview (in french) here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cdndevsfr/..-windows-phone-7.aspx

Regards,
LP

Today is an exceptional day for RunAtServer. My co-worker and i are proud to announce the release of our product called SmartUse. SmartUse is a solution designed specifically for professionals in engineering and architecture.

SmartUse is an application that allows engineers and architects to manipulate, and annotate their plans on touch screens such as the S55 table, digital tablets (toughbook) and computers. Information is instantly shared between the site and offices.

Designed on the model of a drawing table, the table S55 fulfils all the functions of a plans room and to view actual size plans.

SmartUse was designed by RunAtServer team, a subsidiary of Wygwam. Revolution for the construction trades, it leads to savings on paper, space and working time. It streamlines and optimizes the work of engineers and architects and guarantees them comfort and ease of use.

For more information, please visit the product website : http://www.smart-use.com

Regards,
LP

So last night I did a presentation at the Communauté .NET Montréal about - Les nouveautés de Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" ( What’s new in Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”). I really enjoy presenting last night. Thanks to everyone who were present.

Here the material that i used for my presentation:

Slides in PDF format:
http://storage.lppinsonneault.com/public/Presentation/Mango.pdf

The demos from my presentation:
http://storage.lppinsonneault.com/public/Presentation/Demos.zip

Here is a few link on resources that might be helpful if you are working or planning starting a Windows Phone application:

Jeff Blankenburg – 31 days of Windows Phone Mango
http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2011/10/31/31-days-of-mango/

Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone
http://watwp.codeplex.com/

Marketplace Test Kit
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh394032(VS.92).aspx

The Windows Phone Developer Blog
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/

Windows Phone Power Tools
http://wptools.codeplex.com/

Leveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/...-mango.aspx

Don’t forget Twitter is a really good source of information about Windows Phone:
@lpinsonneault
@gcaughey
@wp7dev
@jeffblankenburg
@winphonegeek
@plaberge

Thanks,
LP

Wednesday November 23rd, I'll do a presentation at the Communauté .NET Montréal. The subject of my presentation is about the new feature of Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”. This presentation target developers who are interested in building or migrating Windows Phone apps.

In my presentation i will talk about the following topics:

• Hardware specification
• Sensor API
• Software API & Database
• Application Model
• Silverlight & XNA Integration
• Task & Choosers
• Integration Services
• Marketplace

So if your are interested by one or multiple topics …

You’re welcome!

Don’t forget to visit the Communauté .NET Montréal website for more information:
http://www.dotnetmontreal.com/events/25833231/

Regards,
LP

Still a few seats available for the next Silverlight Tour stop in Montreal, come and learn top Silverlight content from local experts!!!

Here are the slides we used for the “Back from BUILD” presentation at DevTeach Ottawa 2011 with Colin Melia (@colinizer).

We talked about:

1. The Windows 8 experience
2. What’s new in Silverlight 5
3. WinRT – the new cross-language Windows client platform
4. Building a Metro Style app with XAML
5. Building portable libraries for cross-platform apps

I think attendees appreciated that we let them play with the new Windows 8 tablet…

Here are the slides we used for the “Silverlight 5 and HTML 5” presentation at DevTeach Ottawa 2011 with Frédéric Harper (@fharper):

Download the demos:
(requires Silverlight 5 RC)

This time, I refrain myself from doing this kind of jokes:

This week in Ottawa, I did a full day workshop on Silverlight, as a pre-conference of the DevTeach Canadian event.
I showed how to build from scratch a business application, from the Db to the UI, covering these topics:

• Entity Framework
• WCF RIA Services
• DataBinding
• Sécurity (users and roles)
• Validation
• MVVM and Command
• OOB
• Animations, Styles and ControlTemplate in Blend
• Silverlight Spy tool (www.silverlightspy.com)

Get my slides

Get the code

The app I built is from the MS hands-on-labs, you can get all the word doc and vs files there:
http://www.silverlight.net/learn/overview/silverlight-4-training-course

If you are interested to learn more on Silverlight don’t forget the Silverlight Tour Training, a four-day course on Silverlight 5 with VS2010 and Blend.

Last year, i did an unofficial Windows Phone application. This year the team in charge of the TechDays ask me to create the application for this Year events. They provide me with a brand new event OData feed. In this new application, I’ve decided to make the application to support some Mango feature like Fast-switching, Secondary Title, etc.

I restart from scratch for the implementation of the Data inside the application. Now the application is fully functional without Internet connectivity (only the first time to gather the latest data from the OData feed).

I did a brand new scheduler, where you can easily view and flag which session you want to see. I hope you will like the application and find it useful.

The application have just been certified so the application should be available by Tuesday morning.

Here is the direct link:

I hope you enjoy TechDays (currently in Toronto, and coming soon in Vancouver and Montreal).

Regards,
LP

Building an application 100% bullet proof is somewhat something impossible, mainly in when the application can be use by wide range of customer. In Windows Phone, we are affected by the device, the connectivity, the lock screen, etc.). In some combination of event an error can occurred that have not been tested.

So my philosophy about that is to be pro-active. So i don’t want to wait the complaint of customer, i want to know when an error occurred with as much information to help me reproduce the problem to finally fix the issue.

To achieve this goal, there is some analytics component available for Windows Phone 7. Some of those are able to tracking the errors that might occur in your application. But i find out a nice component, that do the a really great job.

BugSense is a really simple component. When i mean simple, it’s really simple add the component and add 1 line of code in the App.xaml.cs and your done. The component can be download as standalone package or you use NuGet to install the package.

Here is a screen of the only line of code that is required by the component.

On the website you have access to a nice Dashboard that will provide you with a lot of information about the error and the recurrence.

You can if you want replace the default UnhandledException event with the event that is built-in the component, you can do it:

public App()
{  
  BugSenseHandler.Instance.Init(this, "Your_API_Key"); 
  BugSenseHandler.Instance.UnhandledException += OnUnhandledException; 
  //UnhandledException += Application_UnhandledException;
  ...
}
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
	font-size: small;
	color: black;
	font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
	background-color: #ffffff;
	/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt 
{
	background-color: #f4f4f4;
	width: 100%;
	margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
	font-size: small;
	color: black;
	font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
	background-color: #ffffff;
	/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt 
{
	background-color: #f4f4f4;
	width: 100%;
	margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

You can also trap the exception in your try..catch statement:

try {    
   //Some code to execute
}
catch (Exception ex) {    
   BugSenseHandler.HandleError(ex);
}
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
	font-size: small;
	color: black;
	font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
	background-color: #ffffff;
	/*white-space: pre;*/
}
.csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; }
.csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; }
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
.csharpcode .str { color: #006080; }
.csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; }
.csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; }
.csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; }
.csharpcode .html { color: #800000; }
.csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; }
.csharpcode .alt 
{
	background-color: #f4f4f4;
	width: 100%;
	margin: 0em;
}
.csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }

So what happen when there is an error, the user will get notified and a report will be sent to the BugSense so you can get notified and review the error. As you can see there is some options, that allow you to control the popup window that show up by default (yes you can turn it off if you want).

Once an error is logged you indicate in your account to receive Email notification. Which is a good idea when you want to have a nice application (that don’t bug too often ).

It’s the first time i use this component and I'm very impressed by the quality of the tools and all the feature it provide (client side and server side). What to say more … I'll use it in future applications. Oh yay … i practically forgot that it FREE. www.bugsense.com

Regards,
LP

Note: I love my phone, this post is a way to describe my (short) experience with the latest version of the Windows Phone OS (Mango), read that as my feedback to get a better product.

The Good

• First, the update process was excellent this time! Microsoft learnt a lot from NoDo it seems… good job!
• Twitter and LinkedIn integration in People hub!
• I can now “Snooze for x minutes” for calendar reminder… huge gain for me! I must admit I use my calendar as a tasks reminder (a better way to do this?)
• Nice little fix: in silent mode, the camera makes no more sound… back to spy mode ;-)
• Save location in Bing Maps (favorites), this basic feature was curiously absent from the previous version (only tiles, but I don’t need 25 more tiles on my home screen, thanks).
• Email threading view (Hello modern UX… I have this in GMail since 2004…)
• I managed to get WiFi sharing from the phone (Good!), but with an awful trick (very bad!)
• Bing maps local search! I can now search for “pizza” and not getting direction to Italy (I’m in Canada)
• A lot more nice little additions here and there…

The Bad

• No more direct access to the “folder” button in my inbox. This really bugs me. I use folders in my inbox, lots of them. Before Mango I had a “folders” button at the bottom of the screen. It is no more there in Mango (replaced by a search button), and you have to open the appBar to access it, 2 taps instead of one, for something you do all day long.. this is not a win.
• Bing Maps for navigation: turn by turn indications is nice, but still not a real GPS replacement. The default maps app is still a bad GPS, period. (No auto correction, live speed, current speed limit, 3d view, ...)
• No Silverlight or Flash in the browser :-(…. come on this is lame!

The Ugly

• Search (physical) button: Well… what to say about the infamous Search button.. I call it the SUX button. Totally useless now with Mango. Before that we had the search button used for Contacts, Emails, Marketplace, ... and Bing Maps for everything else (Impossible to use this button for your app) which leads to inconsistency, and user afraid of clicking on the dammit button and get ousted to Bing.. the UX was just a bad failure. Now with Mango the phone search button is only for Bing, no searches on apps, no contextual search. Useless, but at least it is consistent now…
• Monstruous trick to get WiFi sharing to work (see here for details). Seriously, tethering and Wi-Fi sharing should be built-in the product.

Anyhow I like Mango, and can already see potential improvements that should be added for an upcoming update…

Recently i was working on some Windows Phone project. I remembered that one of the improvement with the latest SDK for Windows Phone 7.1, was the introduction of a new tool that will help developers to test their apps prior to submit them to the Marketplace. This was a great idea because many were complaining about the time it take it take for an application to go through the Certification process.

First, the certification process is pretty complex, on the tester side. It require automatic testing done by a server, which is fairly fast. Then, the apps is tested manually by a tester, this is the part of the process which take longer to complete. Try to imagine you testing an application that you don’t know the purpose and how it work. For my part, I really don’t want to be in their pants! From my past experience, they are doing a very good job.

To return to the main subject, a new tool is now available with the SDK which is called “Marketplace Test Kit”. This will guide the developer through all the test that are done by the automated process and the manual testing.

Here is the walkthrough to test your application:

1. Open the “Project” menu
   
   
   
   
2. And then click on the “Open Marketplace Test Kit”
   
   
   
   
3. Now you have the first screen that will allow you to enter all the information required by the automated test process.
   - Application Package
   - Tiles
   - Screenshots
   
   
   
   
4. The next screen is the “Automated Tests”, this is the screen that execute and give you the result of the automated testing process. The result can be useful, because it will provide you the detected Manifest information like the Capability:
   
    
   
   
   
   The result will look something like this:
   
        
   
     
   
5. The next section is the Monitored Test, these tests are manual but a log is generated and analyse automatically base on the the navigation you do while testing the application. This look for memory issue, navigation pattern issue, performance. Do execute the test you need to have your phone connected, because the test is done using the device. So if you don’t have a device you won’t be able to process those tests.
   
   
   
   Once your done testing you can either exit the application or click on the “Close Application” button in the test screen. You will result like those:
   
   
   
   
   
6. The last step is 100% manual. So these must be done manually and you must use your own judgement to identify if the test “Pass” or “Fail”. You just need to follow the instruction. This may be less or more complex depending on your application.
   
   

In conclusion, testing your application must be a task you must do for each application (version) prior to submit to the Marketplace. This will make sure you won’t wait for the certification for bug that you could have trapped doing those tests. Also, by doing those test you will improve the quality of your application and you will help improve the delay for the certification process.

Regards,
LP

The first 15 people to register for the DevTeach Ottawa Silverlight pre-conference on November 2 will get a free license of Telerik's RadControls for Silverlight ($999 value)!!
For more information on RadControls, you can visit their website at http://www.telerik.com/products/silverlight.aspx.

ALSO, each pre-con participant will get an exclusive 50% rebate on the Silverlight Tour training (995$ value)!!
The Silverlight Tour is a four-day, soup-to-nuts breakdown of Silverlight 4 (already have Silverlight 5 exclusive content). This includes learning the ins and outs of XAML, hosting in the browser, the tools and using Silverlight on the server.

More info:
http://www.runatserver.com/SilverlightTraining.aspx

So don’t wait more and register now!

Still a few seats available for the next Silverlight Tour stop in Montreal, come and learn top Silverlight content from local experts!!!

>> This course will be taught in French * <<

Yesterday I did a presentation (in french) at the Montreal .NET Community with Frédéric Harper @fharper (Microsoft Developer Evangelist).

So we naturally split the job: Frédéric was the HTML5 guy, and I was playing the Silverlight guy…. yeah this guy:

It was fun and we had a huge crowd!

Slides (french)

Demos