Windows Phone 8

Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 (2013.5) RC–Released

May 5, 2015 .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Framework 4.5, .NET Framework 4.5.2, ASP.NET, ASP.NET 4.5, ASP.NET MVC, BCL(Base Class Library), KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Portable Class Library, Visual Studio 2013, VisualStudio, VS2013, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8 No comments

Microsoft has released an release candidate version for VS2013 Update 5 (short: 2013.5).

This update is the latest in a cumulative series of technology improvements and bug fixes for Visual Studio 2013.

What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Update 5

Current iteration query token
Team Project Rename support for Local Workspaces : – [ability to update local workspaces after a team project is renamed. Performing a get or check-in will automatically correct the workspace mapping so that it uses the new team project name.]

WARNING: All prior releases of the Tools for Apache Cordova are incompatible with Update 5. If you have previously installed a Tools for Apache Cordova CTP extension, you must uninstall that extension before installing Visual Studio 2013 Update 5.

Download: Visual Studio 2013 Update 5 (2013.5) RC

KB – https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3021976?wa=wsignin1.0

https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-update5-vs

Windows Phone Screen Sharing/Mirroring to PC

July 4, 2014 KnowledgeBase, Mirror Casting, Visual Studio 2013, VisualStudio, VS2012, VS2013, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Store Development No comments

Being mobile developer and strong follower of Mobile related technologies, always admire to demonstrate my work to my friends and colleagues. All this time I was fancy about iOS Mirroring provided through apps Reflector and Air Server. With help of these tools we used to mirror our iPad/iPhone to be mirrored to a Windows/Mac and then project that to large screen using a Projector. These tools seamlessly mirror your activities on iPad/iPhone and audiences get a live view of the application running in a Live Phone. Advantage is you don’t have to rely on iOS Simulators coming with XCode and iOS SDK alone to demo your applications.

Coming to Windows Phone, we can have the same through a Wired Connection. Probably in recent Microsoft demos you might have fancied how the presenters used to share their Windows Phone activities and features from their live phones. You don’t have to envy them, it is available for our use now.

Microsoft has provided an application to be installed on Windows/Mac or Tablets and through a Wired or Wifi.

Download Project My Screen App from Microsoft

It is pretty simple to use:

1. Just install the app on your Windows/Mac

2. Connect your Windows Phone to USB (wired)

3, Launch “Project My Screen App” from Start Menu. It will detect your phone and your will will be prompted to Accept the screen sharing. Click on ‘Yes’, and look how amazing it is to share your screen on PC.

PS: There is a caveat you all need to know, you cannot share DRM protected contents through this feature.

Enjoy your live demos…

Visual Studio 2013 – Update 2 is available

May 14, 2014 .NET, .NET Framework, .NET Framework 4.5.2, Azure SDK, Microsoft, SQL Server 2014, Trial Downloads, Updates, Visual Studio 2013, VisualStudio, VS2013, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8 apps development, Windows 8.1, Windows Azure Development, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone Store, Windows Store, Windows Store Development, Windowz Azure, XBOX Development No comments

Microsoft has released the latest update for Visual Studio 2013 with major improvements including support for developing Universal apps for Windows 8.x, Win Phone, and XBOX.

Here are the list of improvements included as part of the release(lending from Visual Studio team blog):

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 has many new capabilities as well as fixes that address bugs, customer feedback, performance, and reliability improvements. Here are some new capabilities that are part of this and related Updates and links to where you can find more info.

Universal Apps. With this release you can now build universal apps that can run on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 while sharing code and assets through shared projects.

TypeScript. The TypeScript language is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript. As a typed language you can define classes, modules and interfaces that compiles to JavaScript and runs in any browser.

Web Tool. Our web development tools have many new features like SCSS support, a new JSON editor, updated ASP.NET templates, and an improved URL picker.

Azure tools. It’s easier to take advantage of Azure with options to create websites and SQL Azure databases directly on Azure for simpler deployment to a development / testing environment.

Diagnostics. Our diagnostics tools also got some enhancements. Performance events now let you navigate to user code for MVC Methods or jump to the SQL command for database queries. It is also possible to view the Windows Store diagnostics tools at the same time to see all your diagnostics information on a shared timeline.

Slipstream install. You can download Visual Studio with all its latest features from one install that includes Visual Studio 2013 RTM and Update 2 for Visual Studio.

There are a number of other important updates that are available today in addition to Update 2 for Visual Studio 2013:

Apache Cordova and Visual Studio. Cordova tools in Visual Studio let web developers build cross-platform mobile applications targeting Android, iOS, Windows and Windows Phone using use their existing skills in HTML and JavaScript. To learn more about Apache Cordova visit http://cordova.apache.org/

A cloud optimized .NET. The latest updates to the framework provide a cloud optimized mode that is smaller, lighter weight, and designed for cloud and server workloads.

.Net vNext. This update to the .Net framework is optimized for cloud-first and mobile-first development. It enables you to compile C# 6 and VB code with Roslyn compilers, speed up Windows Store apps with the .NET Native ahead of time compiler, and has a cloud optimized mode for ASP.NET apps.

TFS 2013 Update 2. It’s worth mentioning again the updates in TFS 2013 like improvements for tagging, charting, shared parameters, cloud load testing application analytics, and a lot more.

Check out Somasegar’s Blog and Brian Harry’s Blog to get more details on some of the highlights in this release. For a quick view at all the features and fixes included in this update go to the KB article.

DOWNLOAD:

Visual Studio 2013 – Update 2 (Web / ISO)

WP8Dev– How to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone

August 12, 2013 C#.NET, Codes, KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Mobile-Development, VisualStudio, VS2012, Windows, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Phone Store, XAML No comments

This post will give you an overview on how to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone. As a developer when you are developing for Windows Phone – and your application would need to interact with certain sensors in windows phone to achieve a certain functionality, you would need to verify whether the sensors are supported in targeted devices.

Windows Phone 8 platform has support for the following sensors

Motion sensor
Accelerometer
Compass
Gyroscope

You can access these API’s through the below namespace:

Microsoft.Devices.Sensors

You can check for any of the sensor support through “IsSupported” boolean property of the class

Motion sensor [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion ]
Accelerometer [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer ]
Compass [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass ]
Gyroscope [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope ]

Here is the sample code block:

  public static string GetSensors()
        {
               StringBuilder sensorsList = new StringBuilder();

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Gyroscope, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Compass, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Accelerometer, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Motion,");
                }

            return sensorsList.ToString();
        }

Note: Only Accelerometer is supported in Windows Phone 8 emulator. To test remaining capabilities, you would need to deploy the application on a real Windows Phone device.

Sending Mobile Push notification using C#/.NET (iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and Blackberry)

August 9, 2013 .NET, ANDROID, Blackberry, Extensions, iOS, iPhone, KnowledgeBase, Microsoft, Microsoft SDKs, Mobile, Mobile Services, Mobile-Development, Nokia, Third-Party-Libraries and Frameworks, VisualStudio, VS2010, VS2012, Windows, Windows 8 apps development, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK, Windows Phone Store, Windows SDK, Windows Store, Windows Store Development 2 comments

This is an update blog to my earlier blog about Sending Apple iOS Push notifications using C#.

With that blog – I introduced you to how to send push notification using Open Source library APNSharp, by the developer John Redth. Redth announced that library is already deprecated.

Redth came up with with another open source project called as PushSharp:,published under apache software foundation license.

PushSharp is a server-side library for sending Push Notifications to iOS (iPhone/iPad APNS), Android (C2DM and GCM – Google Cloud Message), Windows Phone, Windows 8, Amazon, Blackberry, and (soon) FirefoxOS devices!. Single library serves the purpose of sending push notifications to multiple platforms. Pretty decent isn’t it?

Here is the basic architecture:

Features of PUsHSHARP

Supports sending push notifications for many platforms:

Apple (APNS – iPhone, iPad, Mountain Lion)

Android (GCM/C2DM – Phones/Tablets)

Chrome (GCM)

Amazon (ADM – Amazon Device Messaging)

Windows Phone 7 / 7.5 / 8 (including FlipTile, CycleTile, and IconicTile Templates!)

Windows 8

Blackberry (BIS and BES via PAP)

Firefox OS (Coming soon)

Fluent API for constructing Notifications for each platform

Auto Scaling of notification channels (more workers/connections are added as demand increases, and scaled down as it decreases)

Implementation using PushSharp is straight forward

Here’s some sample code: shared by Redth

//Create our push services broker
var push = new PushBroker();

//Registering the Apple Service and sending an iOS Notification
var appleCert = File.ReadAllBytes("ApnsSandboxCert.p12"));
push.RegisterAppleService(new ApplePushChannelSettings(appleCert, "pwd"));
push.QueueNotification(new AppleNotification()
                           .ForDeviceToken("DEVICE TOKEN HERE")
                           .WithAlert("Hello World!")
                           .WithBadge(7)
                           .WithSound("sound.caf"));


//Registering the GCM Service and sending an Android Notification
push.RegisterGcmService(new GcmPushChannelSettings("theauthorizationtokenhere"));
//Fluent construction of an Android GCM Notification
//IMPORTANT: For Android you MUST use your own RegistrationId here that gets generated within your Android app itself!
push.QueueNotification(new GcmNotification().ForDeviceRegistrationId("DEVICE REGISTRATION ID HERE")
                      .WithJson("{"alert":"Hello World!","badge":7,"sound":"sound.caf"}"));

You can get the Push Sharp for your .NET projects from below mentioned links:

Binaries from NuGet: https://www.nuget.org/packages/PushSharp

To install PushSharp, run the following command in the Package Manager Console

PM> Install-Package PushSharp

Source Code from GitHub: https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp

Documentation and Implementation Guides available at wiki page: https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp/wiki

Quick links to implementation guides

You can read my previous blogs here:

Sending Apple iOS Push notifications using C#

Apple Push Notifications Service API & C#

Installing Windows 8 Client Hyper-V inside VMware Workstation/Fusion/ESX

August 9, 2013 AMD-V/RVI, Client Hyper-V, ESX, Hyper-V, Hyper-V Platform, Virtualization, VMware, VT-x/EPT, Windows, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Phone, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.0 SDK, Windows Phone Development, Windows Phone SDK No comments

Typically I used to try latest version of Windows on VMWare Player, Workstation or VirtualBox. Recently I was trying to set up a Windows Phone 8.0 development environment inside a VMWare virtual machine.

I tried to enable Hyper-V platform components in my Windows 8.1 Preview Virtual machine. It shows an error.

Hyper-V cannot be installed: A hypervisor is already running

Unable to use Hyper-V platform inside a Windows 8 virtual machine
When trying to enable/install Hyper-V in a Windows 8 virtual machine, you will see the above error:

SOLUTION:

Solution for this problem is to edit your VMware Virtual Machine configuration(.vmx) file in your Windows 8 Virtual machine stored location.

Switch off/Shutdown your VMware virtual machine
Edit the corresponding .vmx file
Append the following entries to the vmx file (verify entry if already exists)

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”
vhv.enable = “TRUE”
mce.enable = “TRUE”

Save the changes
Start your Windows 8 VMware Virtual machine
Now go to Control Panel –> ‘Programs and Features’ –> Turn windows features on or off
Viola!, You can now enable ‘Hyper-V Platform’ . Now you can install Windows Phone SDK on your Windows 8 Virtual Machine