Reflection IT Blog

My Sudoku has been accepted in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace.

Play standard 9x9 grid Sudoku puzzles on your phone. Exercise your visual scanning and processing powers and strengthen your brain. With four difficulty levels, intuitive interface, and all the functions right at your fingertips, this Sudoku app is sure to be your favorite.

My Sudoku is running on a Samsung Windows Phone 7 device!

I have placed a movie of my Sudoku for the Windows Phone 7 on YouTube. I have build it using the new Beta bits. It uses the same Model and ViewModel code as my Silverlight implementation.

I'm almost finished. I only have to implement the 'Notes' and 'Import from Camera' features. I can't test the Import/OCR yet because the emulator doesn't support the WebCam, bummer. I hope i can test it on a device soon.

Cheers,

Fons

Last year I wrote a Sudoku using Silverlight 2. I'm now porting it to the Windows Phone 7. I started designing the UX. I decided to stick to the Metro design. It's really clean.

I'm using the ApplicationBar and Menu. I'm not totally sure which buttons to use. For now: pause, undo, redo and hint. I will have to create a ShakeTrigger which I will use to create a new game. I will have to postpone this until I have a real device to develop on. The accelerometer is hard to emulate.

I'm also planning to 'import' Sudoku's using the phone camera and OCR. But probably not in the first version.

The Windows Phone 7 supports single and multi touch gestures. I have implemented the Tap, Double Tap and the Touch&Hold gestures using Triggers. You can use them to trigger an Action in Expression Blend.

You first have to reference the GestureTriggersLibrary. Then you add an Action to a control using the Behavior assets. Finally you change the TriggerType using the New button.

The following example has tree TextBlock controls on with a ChangePropertyAction attached to it. This action sets the Text of the red TextBlock (textBlockResult) using the Tap, Double Tap or Touch and Hold GestureTriggers.

Yesterday I attended the Windows Phone 7 Developer Hub. The quality of the sessions was very good. They had some phone prototypes which you could play with during the breaks. I had the chance to play with an LG Windows Phone! It looks and feels great. I can't wait to get one!

It really inspired me to develop a new training for it together with my friend Loek. We plan to finish the training by the time Microsoft releases the first builds which we can run on real phones.

The content of the training will be: 

• Introduction: Windows Phone 7, Metro Design, Silverlight, XAML, Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft Expression Blend 4, Hardware, Emulator
• Controls: Runtime Controls, 3rd Party Controls, Events, Fonts, Tips & Tricks
• Graphics and Animations: Shapes, Brushes, PixelShader Effects, Resources, Transformations, Animations and storyboards, Key frames and Interpolation, Triggering and Programming Animations Methods, Tips & Tricks
• UI Customization: Styling, Skinning (Templating), Styling and Skinning, Template Binding, Visual State Manager (VSM), Tips & Tricks
• Data Binding: Element To Element Binding, StaticResource Binding, DataContext Binding, Binding to Collections, Blend Sample Data, MVVM, Converters, Data Validation, Data Annotations DataBinding from Code, DataGrid, Tips & Tricks
• Programmability: Using and creating Actions/Triggers/Behaviors and Commands. Using Files, Base Class Library, Asynchronous Programming, Sound, Accelerometer, Location Service
• Control Creation: Creating User Controls, Dependency and Attached Properties, States, Creating Templated Controls, Transition Effects, Tips & Tricks
• Networking: HTTP (Download, Upload, Data Serialization: XML, JSON, RSS), SOAP (XML WebServices & WCF), OData (WCF Data Services), Push Notification, Tips & Tricks
• Phone Applications: Navigation, WebBrowser, Pivot, Panorama, Lauchers, Choosers, Bing Maps
• Deployment: Marketplace, Unit Testing
• Closure: Summary, Resources, Books, Evaluation

If you can't wait you can prepare yourself with our Silverlight 4 training.

I have just installed the RC1 version of Windows Vista (Build 5600). My first impressions aren't good. It is slow: moving around my mouse cursor on an empty desktop makes my processor go up to 40%. Deleting 12GB took 25 minutes. I have a 2.6Mhz AMD processor, 1.5Gb RAM, SATA harddisk and a NVIDIA FX6200 graphics card. It looks like this is not enough.

It is buggy: IE7 crashed already 4 times when visiting my favorite sites.

Worst of all is the fact that Visual Studio 2005 Professional isn't working. It won't start. I get the following error dialog:

The Vista UI looks slick. I hope Microsoft will be able to fix my problems soon. For now I will have to keep working on my XP machine. I can also go back to the Beta2 version in which VS2005 worked well.

I stumbled today on this SourceForge project with some really nice screensavers. Goto rssavers.

A friend of my send me a link to a great freeware software application. I love it!

Qliner hotkeys is a free and open source keyboard productivity environment. It is the first product of it's kind that is usable by computer geeks and non geeks alike.

Key features:

• Smart Application Launching
• Smart Application Instance Switching
• Drag and Drop Configuration using an Onscreen Keyboard
• Support for 100+ International Keyboards (making it a handy tool for international keyboard users).
• Support for Dvorak keyboards
• Volume Control Add-in
• Clock Add-in
• Optionally maps Caps Lock key to Window key (handy if your keyboard does not have a Windows key or if you just hate the default bahavior of Caps Lock)

Hotkeys builds on the concept of Windows shortcut keys but takes this concept to a whole new level. Do you think key combinations are hard to remember? Just hold the Windows key for three seconds and up pops a Onscreen Keyboard with icons on the keys that are configured. This you can you use , not only to remind you of hotkey combinations, but also for Drag and Drop Configuration.

I have written an article two years ago with the title 'WinForm DualList Component'. In this article I mentioned the desire to extend the DualList component with Drag & Drop support. Finally it's done. Not by extending the original DualList component but by creating an new DualListDragDrop component (reason: cohesion).

Programming Drag & Drop (D&D) between listboxes is quite difficult. It requires at least 60 lines of code for every two listboxes. Therefore not many application support D&D. This component eliminates need of writing the code. You only have to set properties on it. Making it easy to support D&D in your applications.