I have often experienced that the discussion “should we write user stories or use cases?” arises when a new project are about to start. I have also asked the question myself quite a few times. There is no right or wrong answer to this question, it all depends on the nature of the project and organisation. Personally I like to write both user stories and use cases for the projects that I am involved in.
We have entered 2010 and I am now actually enjoying (a lot of people are complaining) the cold and nice winter weather in Oslo (20 degrees Celsius below freezing). I have had a hectic start on this year preparing the start up of a large national project. This is very exciting and I find this a promising start on 2010.
2009 was the year that I started this blog. It has been interesting writing the posts and communicating with my readers. I have also learned a lot in 2009 and I will for sure continue writing posts on topics I find interesting.
Congratulations to NetCom and TeliaSonera, they opened the first operative LTE-net (4G) in the world today. This net is now launched in Oslo and Stockholm with about 2/3 of the Oslo area covered! NetCom will continue this work and are aiming for 100% coverage in Oslo in the near future.
NetCom started selling USB LTE-dongles today (manufactured by Samsung) so that NetCom customers in Oslo can start using the LTE-net on their computers today. This gives you a theoretical speed of 100 mbps but I guess that the more realistic speed will be about 10-20 mbps.
Today I found this great guidance regarding WCF for Mobile Devices. It is a 72 pages PDF document written by Michele Leroux Bustamante and Nickolas Landry in May 2009.
I recommend that you read this if you are designing/developing Windows Mobile applications that are using any kind of communication.
I have earlier written a post about writing user stories for agile (Scrum) projects. During several projects I have now refined the way I do this and in this post I will explain my preferred way to write user stories.
I have changed my mindset when writing user stories by using the INVEST acronym. The INVEST acronym is 6 rules of thumb that you use when writing/defining the user stories.
Yesterday was a historic day for the Norwegian Windows Phone Developer Community. The first meeting for this community was successfully held at NITH.
12 members attended and we started the meeting with pizza and a discussion about the goals and visions for this community. We find it important to be able to meet other Windows Phone/Mobile developers so that we can share experience and knowledge within this community. It is also very inspiring to listen to other developers talking about their projects and applications.
Yesterday I had a discussion with a friend of mine were we talked about the impressive evolution the mobile industry have faced the last 10-15 years. He then asked me if I could remember my first mobile phone and could tell him that I got a Nokia 5110 back in 1998. I think I had this phone for like three years and it was impossible to break it. Once I left the phone on the roof of my car with the result that my phone got airbourne in about 80 km/h. I stopped the car and tried to find my phone but I only found the front cover (separated from the phone) lying on the road. Then a friend tried to call me and we could hear the phone ringing from a field further down the road. It was just to put the front cover back on and the phone worked perfectly well and only had a scratch on the battery. Try doing that with an iPhone!
This made me think of all the phones I have had since 1998 and I thought it would be fun to try to remember all of them. Below you will see a list with all the phones that I have had (at least the phones that I can remember) Continue reading »
It is easy to think that developing an application for Windows Mobile using the built in GPS unit requires a lot and complex code. Luckily this is not the case. You can actually have the base for a .NET Compact Framework GPS application up and running in less than 10 minutes if you choose the correct tools.
This post describes what I have found to be the easiest and fastest way to create an application that is interacting with the GPS unit in .NET Compact Framework.
When developing Windows Mobile applications in Visual Studio creating user controls or custom controls will often help you get a better application and decrease your development time. Often you will have problem using your user controls or custom controls in the Visual Studio designer. Forms using your controls will not show at all in the designer and sometimes Visual Studio will shut down because of this (happens often if you are referring to external .dll in the user control or custom control).
I will walk you through a simple example on how you can achieve this with out any problems at all.
I have now been using the Samsung Omnia II for a while and these are my first impressions.
The first thing I noticed with the phone was the large and very sharp 480 x 800 pixel 16,7 millions colors AMOLED screen. The phone is filled with technology and software for most of your needs.
