Getting to grips with a Windows Phone 7

Last Wednesday I became the owner of a windows phone 7 (WP7), a HTC Radar to be precise. My current mobile contract had expired and I had been toying with the idea of getting a WP7 for a while.  Unfortunately I was dubious about the platform and didn’t really want to take out a long contract and end up with a phone I didn’t want, and as all my attempts to get a free phone failed I decided to try and buy a SIM free phone. A brand new phone was beyond my budget so I turned to eBay and found a few WP7’s listed and managed to pick up a Htc Radar for about £200 which was a result.

Why a WP7?

I have already been asked why I’d want to buy a WP7 and the simple answer is that I am a .Net developer and I want to do some mobile development, not just on the emulator but to be able to actually deploy to the device for testing and ultimately the market place.  Whilst I’d already got an Android phone (HTC Desire) I was faced with having to find time to learn java or find the money to buy MonoDroid neither of which were likely to happen.

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I ran into a problem the other day that I could find very little information about so I thought I’d put a blog post together to

a) remind me
b) hopefully help anybody else who runs into this problem.

I picked the obtuse title as it is very close to the ambiguous error message I got and should hopefully help other people find the solution far faster than I did.

Recently I was working on a MVC3 application, it was working well and I wanted to sort out dependencies for our CI server so that we didn’t need to have MVC installed on the server for the code to build and intended to do this by adding bin deployable dependencies.

What type of team leader are you?

For a lot of developers the team leader position is a coveted one, it is as if when you become team leader the business is acknowledging you and your skills, but unfortunately for a lot of developers that reach this position it is not always what it seems.

From my experience the team leader role will usually fall into one of the 3 following categories:

1. Team leader as Development manager
2. “Normal” Team leader
3. Team leader as technical lead/architect

Lets take a quick look at what each of the categories entails.

GiveCampUK–one very busy weekend

So the weekend of the 21st of October saw me attending the inaugural Give Camp UK event organised in the main by Paul Stack and Rachel Hawley to provide bespoke software solutions to charities.

The challenge was to be able to create the necessary software during the weekend and if possible get it live for the charities to be able to use.  The event was to start at around 5pm on the Friday night and coding to finish at 12pm on the Sunday when the teams would then present the software they had created to the other teams.

Friday 21st

I travelled into the event with my co-worker Johan Barnard, we had no idea of what we would need to do or what sort of software was needed but we were looking forward to the challenge!

We arrived at UCL just after 4pm and after registering we meet some other developers we knew including our other colleague from Dot Net Solutions, Mark Rendle, and waited for the kick off.