Making WPConnect Easier to use
If you are building a Windows Phone application and you are using your phone to debug AND you are using the Photo Chooser or or the Camera Launcher task you may have found out that it will not let you access the camera or pictures while you are connected to Zune.
But, you have to be connected to Zune to debug on the phone. Well, kind of. The Windows Phone Team put out a tool called WPConnect.exe that allows you to dubug on the phone without having Zune open.
Here are the steps.
- Connect your phone
- Make sure Zune launches and connects to your phone.
- Shut down Zune
- Using a Dos Prompt, Navigate to
- (for 64 bit machines) C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x64
- (for 32 Bit machines) C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x86
- Type WPConnect.exe
It will then tell you that you are good to go.
NOW FOR THE EASY WAY
I got tired of having to navigate using a command prompt (Too may keystrokes) and I use this often enough to matter, so I created a shortcut for the Dos Prompt that takes me right to my designated spot in one click. Here is how you do it.
1. Right-click in the open space of your desktop and click New > Shortcut.
2. For the location, type or copy and paste the following:
%windir%\system32\cmd.exe /k
3. Click Next.
4. For the name, type something descriptive, like “Command Prompt for WPConnect” then click Finish.
5. Right-click on the new shortcut and choose Properties.
6. Change the “Start In” field to whatever directory you want the command prompt to start in.In my case, I want it to start in the 64 bit folder we talked about above:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x64"
Be sure to include the quotation marks, and of course you would need to customize this file path to your own system (32 or 64).
Now when I want to use WPConnect. I just use the pined shortcut
and Type WPConnect.exe
Hope that helps
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Installing Windows Phone on Win 8
If you have installed windows 8 and want to do development on windows phone using the Windows Phone developer tools, you will need to have an actual device since the emulator at this point does not play nicely with the Hyper V installed on Windows 8. But since I installed it on my main machine, I still want to do phone dev on it. If you try to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 bit.ly/wptools1 you may run into the following error.
If you have this error come up, here are the steps to get around it.
Download and install the latest version of the Games for Windows – LIVE www.xbox.com/en-US/LIVE/PC/DownloadClient
Click on CLOSE when it ends.
Rerun the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 setup and choose to repair it. This will re-run the previously failing XNA Game Studio installers.
To learn more about why this works, or if this does not fix your issue, Check out Aarons blog post on getting it to work on Windows 8 blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2012/02/29/10274694.aspx
When done you should see this.
And you are good to go (with a real device that is)… I am working on seeing if I can get a work around for the emulator. I will let you know.
Daniel
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Hello World on IPhone, Android, and WP7
although I am not going to add this to the series I am doing “Tale of three platforms” (mostly because I did not do the video). I thought I would share this with you. My buddy timothy Strimple @tstrimple pointed it out to me. It shows what it takes to do Hello World on all three platforms. As a matter of fact, that is exactly where I am at in the series.
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Install Windows 8 From USB
If you want to install the Windows 8 Developer Preview from a USB, you can follow the instructions below.
Download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool [USB Download Tool]
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview from Windows Developer Center. Make sure you are downloading the iso image. If you are not sure if your processor is 32-bit or 64-bit ready, getthe 32-bit .iso file.
Insert a USB drive into your computer. (It must have 8GB or greater storage capacity ).
Install the Windows 7 USB Download tool you downloaded from the MS Store
Launch Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool you installed.
When it launches select the ISO file you downloaded earlier by clicking on “Browse”.
Select the USB Drive you inserted earlier. It must be 8GB or over and everything will be erased.
Let it run its course….
Once the tool is done, you will need to restart your PC with the USB plugged in.
On start up, you will need to enter the BIOS utility of your computer and boot from the USB. This is different for different computers. If you need help, just do a search for Entering Bios for your specific PC. In BIOS you need to make USB one of the bootable drives.
Once booted from the USB drive; follow on-screen instructions to install Windows 8 Developer Preview.
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WP7 Sample Database : Part II
Last week I told you about a great post that a fellow evangelist on my team (Jerry Nixon) put together on the Windows Phone 7 Database. Here is his follow-up post.
Storing Windows Phone application data is a pretty normal requirement. If you want it to persist across sessions, or even phone reboots, you really have three options:
- Save to the Cloud
- Save to Isolated Storage
- Save to Local Database
Each is correct for certain scenarios. But in this article, I will ONLY walk through the Local Database. This is an enhanced version of SQL CE – meaning your SQL skills are an asset. And, if you don’t….
READ MORE
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Skype Beta for Windows Phone
The wait is over… Skype for windows phone (beta) is finally here.. head over to the Windows Phone Marketplace to download it. www.windowsphone.com/en-US/apps/c3f8e570-68b3-4d6a-bdbb-c0a3f4360a51
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T3P #1 Setting up for IPhone Dev
The first thing i had to do was go out a buy myself a Mac. Something that was good enough to do dev on without breaking the bank. I found a great deal at Best Buy (open box AND Rebate) for a MacBoo Air. Installed Bootcamp (And Windows 7) and we were on our way.
On a side note before we begin, I will say that it has been interesting to get back up to speed on a Mac. I have owned them in the past, but when you need to actually do things on one (besides email and web) it can be a real time drag to get comfortable. For example, I needed a blog post editor like Live Writer, (since I am doing this post from the Mac). It turns out that Live Writer is the MAN (or errrr ummm the Writer). I am using MarsEdit right now but can’t see spending the $40 it costs when my trial is over when it is so weak compared to Live Writer. There are a couple that are supposed to be better but they don’t work on Lion. Another thing that took me a while is Screen Capture. I figured out how to finally do it on a Mac : Ctrl +Cmnd+4+tab+stand on your head, but it only allowed me to copy to clipboard or to desktop, no edit. As you can see above, sometimes you need to blot something out. Anyway, after some searching, I found a program called Skitch that is free and seems to do the job. So I think that I have now realized that I am going to be dealing with a few non-dev issues before I can really get a nice dev flow going.
In addition to the above… I came to realize that I did not have enough room to do bootcamp on this machine. This was the first thing that was really easy to fix (Thanks to my buddy Scott Cate) I just had to go to Finder and open up the bootcamp assistant and then three steps later, the mac had reclaimed the space.
OK… Back to our IPhone Setup.
The first thing I did was to sign up as a developer at apple. https://developer.apple.com/ . This cost $99 dollars and took a few emails and about a day or so before I was “part” of the developer program. On the developer site, there are Getting Started Videos and Getting Started Documents. The videos seemed to be for development topics like “implementing in app purchases” or “Game Center Essentials”. So I went to the “Getting Started Documents” section. There I found the “Start Developing IOS apps today” document. This looked like the right place.
The first page stated :
As you proceed through the road map, you will use Xcode and the iOS SDK, Apple’s tools for app development. You will learn the basics of programming with Objective-C, the language that powers all iOS apps and frameworks, and will explore the Cocoa Touch frameworks. You will create a simple iOS app and learn how to test it on a device. Finally, you will learn how to submit an app to the App Store.
Seems easy enough…
So first I went to the App Store to Download XCode
But when I tried to install it, it said Sorry Charlie.
As you can see above… I have 10.7.2. So I need to update the mac os.
OK… Mac updated to 10.7.3 now… I went back to the App Store to Install Xcode and now it lets me install.
Once this is complete, there is a Developer Folder on my Desktop with all the tools I need for development (I think) .
In the next post we will start with a simple Hello World app before we move on to Android.
Other Posts in this Series
(This list will automatically grow as I write them)
- T3P #1 Setting up for IPhone Dev
- The Tale of 3 Platforms
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Can your phone do Mach 5
Now I admit, this is a really cheezy video… but it does go to show you the quality workmanship of the Nokia phones…. So I ask you, can YOUR phone do Mach 5?
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Phone Gap Tutorial #3 – Reducing the load
This is a Phone Gap tutorial Series in which I will create a phone gap application for each of the platforms it supports. It is mostly a journey of my own that you get to follow along on. I will start with Windows Phone and then convert it to IPhone, IPad, Android, Blackberry, Symbian. We will discuss tips and tricks along the way.
In the last post Phone Gap Tutorial #2 we looked at everything that was created for us when you start a Phone Gap project for Windows Phone from scratch. As I said in that post :
The first folder you will notice is the GapLib folder. This contains the Phone Gap dll that is specific to windows phone. This .dll has some interesting side effects when it comes to submitting to the marketplace.
In this post, we will discuss those issues and show you want you need to do to get around them.
If we look at the Solution Explorer we can see that there is a folder with the WP7GapClassLib.dll which is all the code of phone gap. We can also see that there is a reference to it as well.
Normally, this would be fine but with Windows Phone and the Windows Phone marketpla