Kivanc Ozuolmez

There is some good news with the updated marketplace policies:

• You still have to pay a registration free which entitles you to 5 free app submissions
• But any further “paid for” app submissions are free
• Only “free” app submissions have a cost associated
• Also MS are introducing the Trial API
• Includes the Push Notification service.

http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/

 

Avanade announced my and Alex van Herwijnen’s MVP status renewal by a press release; can be found on this link; (Dutch)
http://www.avanade.com/nl/about/news/pressdetail.aspx?id=467

Sevgili arkadasim Celiker, uzunca suredir uzerinde calistigi .NET Micro Framework'le ilgili tum bilgilerini bir site altinda toplamaya basladi. Ornek kodlar, uygulamalarin yani sira cihazlara da ulasabileceginiz bi site : 

http://www.micro-framework.com  adresinde.

GHI ve DeviceSolutions firmalarına ait tüm cihazlara ulaşabilirsiniz.

Microsoft has released the icons that will be used in its Windows Phone 7 OS. The download page explains that the pack is meant for application developers writing software for the OS. There are 64 icons in the pack, 32 light and 32 dark, in .png format, with a vector-graphics option for import into Microsoft Blend.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Microsoft telling I'm awarded by MVP status for 2010. Very good news..!
This year is my 5th consecutive year in MVP Award program.

Sevgili Arkadasim Celik'in blogunda gordum, super dogru bir tespit oldugu icin buradan paylasmayi gorev bildim :)

Bazen karşımızdaki insanın kifayetsizliğini anlatmak için kelimeler kifayetsiz kalır.Karşımızdaki insan o kadar kendinin farkında değildir ki, ona dert anlatmanın ne kadar meşakkatli bir iş olacağını düşünerek bile yorulabilirsiniz. Üstüne üstlük bu insanlar, yüzdükleri sığ suyu bulanıklaştırarak derinmiş gibi havası yaratırlar -ki bu yine aslında sığ sularda olduklarının bile farkında olmadıklarını gösterir. Bu bulanıklaştırma yeteneği de onları devlette başkan, şirkette yönetici, takımda lider, sosyal ortamlarda en çok konuşan /konuşulan kişi olup getirir karşımıza. Zira genelde, sayısı çok olmasa da, diğer derin insanlar "bununla mı uğraşacağım olm" modunda takılıp kendini geriye çeker, karşısındakine dersini 101'den başlayarak vermesi gerektiğini fark ederek bezip susarlar veya "şimdi bir dakika arkadaşım, o öyle değil,şöyle" demeyecek kadar mütevazıdırlar çünkü kendilerine mutlaka bir hata payı verirler.

Biliyorum, hepimiz en az bir kez (en iyi niyetle bir -ki ben fazlaca iyi niyetli bir insanımdır) böyle bir insanla karşılaşmışızdır. Devletimizin başındaki hükümet elemanlarına ve genel olarak siyasetteki tiplere bakarak bile anlayabilirsiniz ne kadar iyi niyetli olduğumu. Ben genelde koşarak uzaklaşma yolunu seçiyorum ama yukarıda bahsettiğim gibi, bu kişi gelip başına müdür filan olunca koşarken kolundan yakalayarak canını sıkmaya devam edebiliyor işte.

Hah, bu kadar uzun uzun anlattığım durumun bilimsel bir adı varmış desem? Resmen mutlu oldum. Bundan sonra kendini bilmez, kafası donuk, cahil filan gibi yetersiz deyişleri kullanarak kendimi soğutamamalara son! Buyrun size Dunning-Kruger:

Dunning-Kruger Etkisi ya da Kifayetsiz Muhterisler

New York Stern School of Business’te görevli psikologlar Justin Kruger ve David Dunning’in tarihe geçmelerine vesile olan bulguları, yani Dunning-Kruger Etkisiadıyla literatüre geçecek olan teorileri de, Türk sağduyusunun yüzyıllardır "cahil cesareti" dediği şeydir aslında.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’nin Aralık 1999 tarihlisayısında yayımlanan teorileri özetle "cehalet, gerçek bilginin aksine,bireyin kendine olan güvenini artırır" der. (Bu cümle de Charles Darwin’e aittir zaten.)

Metin çözme, araç kullanma, tenis oynama gibi çeşitli alanlarda yapılan araştırmaların sonucunda şu bulgulara ulaşılmıştır:

• Niteliksiz insanlar ne ölçüde niteliksiz olduklarını fark edemezler.
• Niteliksiz insanlar, niteliklerini abartma eğilimindedir.
• Niteliksiz insanlar, gerçekten nitelikli insanların niteliklerini görüp anlamaktan da acizdirler.
• Eğer nitelikleri, belli bir eğitimle, antrenmanla artırılırsa, aynı niteliksiz insanlar, niteliksizliklerinin farkına varmaya başlarlar.

Değerlendirme zaafı

İki uzman daha sonra, bu teorilerini test etme fırsatı da buldular. Cornell Üniversitesi’nden 45 öğrenciye bir test yaptılar, çeşitli sorular sordular.Ardından öğrencilerden "testin sonucunda ne kadar başarılı olacaklarını tahmin etmelerini" istediler. En başarısızların (yani sadece yüzde 10 ve daha az doğru cevap verenlerin), testin yüzde 60’ına doğru cevap verdiklerine,ayrıca iyi günlerinde olsalar yüzde 70’e ulaşabileceklerine inandıkları ortayaçıktı. En iyilerin (yani en az yüzde 90 doğru sonuç alanların) en alçakgönüllüdenekler olduğu (soruların yüzde 70’ine doğru cevap verdiklerini düşündükleri)görüldü.

(Not: Dunning ve Kruger bu çalışmalarıyla 2000 yılında Nobel de kazandılar.)

İki uzman psikolog bu bilinçsizliği, "kronik kendi kendini değerlendirme (auto-evaluation) yeteneksizliğine" bağlıyorlar. Çalışan, kendi kapasitesini değerlendirmekten ve eksikliğini teşhis etmekten acizdir. Ama asıl vahim olan, bu "yetersizlik + haddinibilmeme" kokteylinin, mesleki açıdan, karşı koyulmaz bir itici güç oluşturması. Kariyer açısından bir eksiyken, artıya dönüşmesi.

İşinde çok iyi olduğuna yürekten inanan "yetersiz", kendini ve yaptıklarını övmekten, her işte öne çıkmaktan ve haddi olmayan görevlere talip olmaktan en küçük bir rahatsızlık duymayacaktır. Aksine bunu bir "hak" olarak görecektir. "Uyanıklık" bilecektir.

Bu arada, gerçekten bilgili ve yetenekli insanlar ise çalışma hayatında"fazla alçakgönüllü" davranarak kendilerine haksızlık edecekler, öne çıkmayacaklar, yüksek görevlere kendiliklerinden talip olmayacaklar, kıymetlerinin bilinmesini bekleyecekler (ve bilinmeyince için için kırılacaklar ve kendilerini daha da geriye çekecekler) ve muhtemelen üstleri tarafından"ihtiras eksikliği" ile suçlanacaklardır. Üstleri de zaten genelde"aynı yoldan geçmiş" insanlardır.

Buna, insan kaynaklarının, iki benzer CV arasından, "kendine güvenen ve iyi sonuç alma olasılığı yüksek" adayı tercih edeceği gerçeğini de eklerseniz, Dunning-Kruger Sendromu’nun Peter Prensibi’nin (*) yatağını yaptığıda ortaya çıkar.

Sonuçta, "kifayetsiz muhterisler" her zaman ve her yerde daha hızlı yükselecekler ve daha yukarılara çıkacaklardır. Etrafınıza bir bakın,uzmanlara hak vereceksiniz.

(*) Peter Prensibi: Her çalışan, iş ortamında yetersiz olduğu noktaya kadar yükselir, der. Bunun doğal sonucu olarak,yüksek makamlar daima yetersiz insanlar tarafından işgal edilir.

Kifayetsiz muhterisi nasıl tanırsınız?

1. Gücünü delegasyon bahanesinden alır. Ekibinin orkestra şefi havalarına girer.
2. Çok gürültü patırtı eder, çok şey yapıyormuş havası estirir.
3. Koridorlarda hızlı hızlı, düşünceli edayla yürür.
4. "Beşer şaşar" diye düşünür. Ama genellikle şaşan beşer kendisi değil, başkasıdır.
5. Ne olursa olsun, hazırlıklıymış, olacakları önceden biliyormuş gibi davranır.
6. Üstlerine karşı son derece kibardır; altındakilere (özellikle de en çok ihtiyaç duyduklarına) kötü muamele eder.
7. İktidar ilişkileri ve göstergeleri onun için çok önemlidir. Astlarına kimin üst olduğunu hatırlatmayı sever.
8. İlk denemede başarılı olamazsa, başarısızlığının belgelerini yok etmeyi unutmaz.
9. Talimatlarını Post-it ile e-postayla verir böylece astlarıyla yüzleşmekten kaçar.
10. Toplantılarda son sözü mutlaka o söyler, gerekirse başkasının sözünü tekrarlamak pahasına.

 

And another nice post and a video is here:

http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-show-and-tell.aspx

 

 

This time, it's a funny leakage, but the announcement time is already there.

the first images from WM 7 Today screen can be seen here : http://www.htc-hd2.org/content.php?5-Leak-First-Pictures-Of-Windows-Mobile-7-From-MWC-2010 

 

This series of Web seminars will lead you through common application development scenarios in Windows Mobile 6.5. From “hello world” to embedded databases, from sending a simple SMS messages to using the new touch-screen enabled Gesture APIs, these sessions will get you started developing custom applications for your Windows Mobile 6.5 device.

 

Link is here

 

Just posted to MSDN Downloads is a brand new SDK for doing Windows Mobile development. The SDK is coupled with new emulator image downloads for the following languages GER, FRA, ITA, JPN, CHS and ESP. The download link is :  Windows Mobile 6.5 SDK Download page.

 

Edit on 25.Jan.2010 : SDK Download is pulled back by MS, with an explanation "SDK download has been temporarily pulled to address the necessary issues."

There’s been quite a bit of talk since the early CTP/Beta release of Visual Studio 2010 regarding the lack of support for Windows Mobile development. However, what most people fail to pick up on is that you can build Windows Mobile Widgets using either Visual Studio 2008 or Visual Studio 2010 (in fact you can probably do it using earlier versions of Visual Studio but I haven’t tried it). Interestingly an update to the Developing Widgets for Windows Mobile 6.5 MSDN article talks about coming support within Visual Studio for doing widget development:

Starting with Windows Mobile 6.5.3, developers can create Windows Mobile widgets using Visual Studio.

Given that you can already do most of the development within Visual Studio this would suggest better IDE support for perhaps debugging or packaging your widget…. This is pure speculation but if you want to get a bit of a heads up on widget development using Visual Studio, try the following posts from Nick's blog:

• Windows Mobile Widget 101 – Getting Started 
• Windows Mobile Widget 101 – Start Menu Icons
• Windows Mobile Widget 101 – A Gadget Side Note
• Windows Mobile Widget 101 – Handling Form Factors
  

The version of Windows Mobile mentioned in the MSDN article and by Mary Jo in Is Microsoft (slowly) picking up the pace with Windows Mobile? must be a reference to some of the leaked builds.

 

Couple of days ago Alex Yakhnin posted a nice brain storming article on RIAs and Mobile Devices, here. If you think about the Silverlight functionalities we have now and having them on a limited mobiel device....

That's explains a lot why we still don't know anything about Silverlight on mobile.

The Office Mobile 2010 offering is part of yesterday's release of the overall Office 2010 beta, which offers publicly downloadable versions of Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, Project 2010, Visio 2010, and Office Web Apps. The products are touted as delivering "the best productivity experience across the PC, phone and browser."

 

 

According to Microsoft, Office Mobile 2010 (above) includes mobile versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and the new SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010. The software is claimed to allow transfer of documents to and from desktop PCs while preserving rich formatting, such as tables, charts, font styles, and SmartArt graphics. Excel Mobile 2010 now provides more than 140 formulas, several previously only found in desktop Excel, the company adds.

In addition, the company says, SharePoint Workspace Mobile 2010 will let smartphone users browse document libraries on an enterprise's SharePoint server, open files for viewing or editing, and save them back to the server if desired. It's said the software can also automatically sync documents -- when a file is modified on the server, a copy on the smartphone will be updated without user intervention.

Microsoft says PowerPoint Mobile 2010 now allows a Bluetooth-equipped smartphone to be used as a presentation aid. When a PC and smartphone are connected, the PC's screen will display PowerPoint slides, while the phone displays any associated notes, according to the company. The phone can even be used to advance slides.

Outlook Mobile 2010 -- also promised but apparently not part of this week's beta -- will provide online access to corporate email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and other information from a smartphone. It will also include a Conversation View, which allows combining related messages and then moving, categorizing, or deleting them "in just a few clicks," Microsoft says.

The free Office Mobile 2010 beta requires Windows Mobile 6.5 devices -- we didn't see any word about whether they must be touchscreen-equipped, though this seems likely -- and Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Downloading the application from the Marketplace (below left) will automatically install the software onto a phone (below right). 

 

For further information about Microsoft's Office Mobile 2010, see the company's website, here. 

Looking for a quick way to get the basics of Windows Mobile development? Try the RampUp “Develop Windows Mobile 6 Applications” e-learning.  Whilst this focuses on Windows Mobile 6 using VS2008, a lot of the points covered actually apply to all versions of the Windows Mobile platform.  Topics include the following:

Level 1: Mobile Development Introduction
Level 2: Device Emulators
Level 3: Mobile Windows Forms Development
Level 4: Advanced Mobile Windows Forms Development
Level 5: SQL Server CE Introduction
Level 6: Security and Deployment
Level 7: Mobile Web Development

Well that should be the Microsoft chant with the simultaneous release of Windows Mobile 6.5, Marketplace and a host of complementary applications such as an updated MyPhone that’s available for download via Marketplace. If you’re like me, one of the cool new “premium” features of MyPhone is the ability find your lost phone.  Here I’m showing the “known location” feature but you can get MyPhone to ring your phone, even if it’s on vibrate.  I so want that feature for when I lose my phone.

 

 

 

Review by WMExperts on the new Zune HD, very cool indeed:

Couple of days ago, in one of the communities I follow, a question was asked if there is a way to integrate a map into a  integrating the Bing Map (javascript) Control into a Windows Mobile Widget.  Whilst the javascript engine in Windows Mobile 6.5 has been given a massive injection of life, I was very skeptical that the javascript control would work out of the box. I was proven wrong with the map working with no modifications.  The following code is taken out of the online visual sdk, with the only change being the height and width of the map div to fit into the widget.

<html>
   <head>
      <title></title>
      <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
      <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ecn.dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.2"></script>
      <script type="text/javascript">
          var map = null;           function GetMap() {
              map = new VEMap('myMap');
              map.LoadMap();
          }  
      </script>
   </head>
   <body onload="GetMap();">
      <div id='myMap' style="position:relative; width:240px; height:260px;"></div>
   </body>
</html>

The only issues I found with the javascript control relate to the gesture support within the widgets in Windows Mobile 6.5. When you pan your finger within a widget it attempts to scroll the widget itself.  Unfortunately this means that you can pan the map by dragging your finger across the map.  Instead you have to use the navigation control in the top left corner.

 

I'm quite late to announce the paper here, but two mobile MVPs, Michele Leroux Bustamante and Nickolas Landry, did an excellent job talking about using WCF from the .NET Compact Framework: http://wcfguidanceformobile.codeplex.com/ . If you wonder the capabilities and the usage of WCF services on Windows Mobile, please pay attention to this whitepaper.

One of the things that continually frustrates me about building Windows Mobile applications in Visual Studio is that for some reason it takes so long to do a build. Behind the scenes there is a lot that goes on and I always forget that there is one part of the build that you can mostly do without, the platform verification.  As pointed out by the now quite old post by the Visual Studio for Devices team you can disable this part of the build quite easily:

1) Open the file %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.Targets for editing.
2) Go to the line which reads:
Name="PlatformVerificationTask">
and change it to:
Name="PlatformVerificationTask" Condition="'$(SkipPlatformVerification)' != 'true'">
3) Add the SkipPlatformVerification environment variable to the system and set it to "true" (To re-enable Platform Verification set the environment variable to "false")
4) Restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect (If building from the command line using MSBuild, add /p:SkipPlatformVerification=true to your command line to turn off the task. You can specify the variable in the project file also, so that this information is persisted across sessions).

As noted by Thomas you may just want to disable this functionality, instead of having it contingent on an environment variable.  In this case just change the PlatformVerificationTask line to: Name="PlatformVerificationTask" Condition="false">

Doing this you should notice that your mobile projects build just as fast as other projects within Visual Studio.  Note: This is still relevant in Visual Studio 2008 with SP1.

For any queries, questions, thoughts, feedback on the Marketplace

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/mktplace/threads

Frank posted about this a few weeks ago now but I didn’t want to repost it until I’d had a chance to use the new Spb Mobile Shell 3.0. If you’ve ever felt that the Windows Mobile interface is tired and stayed then this product will give your device a new lease of life.

 

Unlike some of the other interfaces that OEMs such as HTC have been working on, Spb Mobile Shell doesn’t seem to completely drain the system resources.  It works nicely on Windows Mobile 6, 6.1 and 6.5 from what I’ve seen and means that just about everything you want to do is just a few clicks or slides away.  At $29.95 this is a must!

 

As I mentioned in my previous post, CellID is the identifier for the GSM towers. So these towers are very generally fixed and their location (also address and/geographic location) is known by GSM providers. But for sure this is their business data and is not publicly shared.

Some biggies, like Google, OpenCellID and other communities developed some solutions to gather CellID vs. Latitude, Longitude data and they share them through their services. The bigger the community gathers the data, the better the data freshness, coverage and accuracy is. So Google has the best data for now.

In the code, we query Google’s map service to get latitude and longitude data with the cellId we had in my previous post. In the future posts, I’ll extend this project to show a map control thorough bing maps (live maps) and virtual earth services. Code is pretty straight forward with some HttpWebRequests and documents itself. So I’ll not tell the functions or response reading algo here. But it is “as is”. 

 

You can download the codes : GetCellDetailsII.rar (35.85 kb)

 

 

For an internal competition project here in Avanade, my colleagues and I implemented a location aware service works on the cloud. So I’ve many outcomes from that project and want to share them with you. Our aim was to go get the a location data, based on Latitude and Longitude but alas our HTC Touch devices don’t have GPS hardware installed in. So I decided to go for GSM CellID based location awareness and worked quite well. So here is the first step to demonstrate the basic structure on how to get GSM CellId with couple of lines C# code. I just referred to MSDN codebase the RIL_GetCellTowerInfo function in the Radio Interface Layer (RIL) API. 

 

        1.Call RIL_Initialize to get a RIL handle

        2. Call RIL_GetCellTowerInfo to get the information about the cell tower the phone is connected to

The “Cell” string that FindMe displays seems to be a combination of the dwCellID, dwLocationAreaCode and dwMobileCountryCode

       3. Call RIL_Deinitialize to release the RIL handle

 

You can find the code here. GetCellDetails.rar (24.03 kb)  I’ll add other steps to decode geo info (latitude and longitude data) from that cellID identifiers soon. Meanwhile you can check http://www.opencellid.org/ and similar services from other public or commercial vendors and get more info on GSM CellID.

 

Nick has posted a very nice trick on how to turn your widgets into Windows vista/7 gadgets. It’s impressive how easy it is. Check the link out.

If you are planning to build a widget for Windows Mobile 6.5 there is quite a useful page of documentation available at MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd721906.aspx