The Norwegian Windows Phone Developer Community are together with Microsoft Norway hosting a Windows Phone 7 application contest. The three best Windows Phone 7 applications/games entered in this contest will win a HTC Windows Phone 7 device!
Who can participate in this contest
I wanted to make it as easy as possible for my blog readers to directly retweet my posts. First I started to install and test several WordPress plugins for this but I just couldn’t seem to find one that I liked. Some of them are to massive and are showing information about how many and who has retweeted your post, I don’t need that. Other required the Twitter Anywhere connection and the user must accept that the retweet application on my blog can connect directly to their Twitter account, I don’t want to force my readers to do this. I decided to create the Retweet functionality by myself so I would have full control on the behavior. This post will tell you step by step how to achieve this.
First I wanted to shorten the post url by using Bit.ly, I am not a php expert or familiar with the Bit.ly API so I googled and found the php code needed for using Bit.ly to shorten my url. I found a great example at www.devmoose.com in a post called Automatically Create a Bit.ly URL for WordPress Posts. Just follow the steps in the referred post at devmoose.com to achieve this. I did a minor modification to the code to make it work in my WordPress : I added “<? php” before the code and “?>” after the code. I also added the “if function exists” check.
As a Microsoft MVP I was given three Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate with MSDN subscription activation cards for me to give away. This is to celebrate the launch of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4. I chose to distribute these activation cards to persons in online communities and I used twitter to see how many I could reach.
I announced a ReTweet contest from my twitter account. Continue reading »
When planning/starting a software project (probably other projects as well) you are often provided a list with requirements written by the customer. It is now your job and responsibility that you meet all the requirements. Not only do you need to meet the requirements you also need to meet the requirements in a manner so that the customer agrees that the requirements are met. How can you increase the possibilities for this to happen?
First you need to make sure that you and the customer understand the requirements equally. It is quite easy to interpret the requirements, the hard part is to interpret the requirements correctly (according to the customer). What you need to do is to systematic go through each requirement and describe, with your own words, the functionality you associate with the given requirement. When this is done you must present your functional description to the customer and make sure that you both have the same and good understanding of the requirements. This might be time consuming, but it is worth the time.
Earlier today I received an e-mail with the subject: “Congratulations 2010 Microsoft MVP”. I had almost forgotten that I was nominated for the MVP award 4 months ago and I nearly choked on my coffee and continued humbly to read the e-mail.
Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Device Application Development technical communities during the past year.
It’s just three days (2 1/2 to be specific) left until Norwegian Developer Conference 2010 starts and I am really looking forward to it. To shorten the time waiting for this I have planned my day three at the conference.
I have earlier planned my day one and day two at this conference.
Microsoft Norway invites you to a day filled with Windows Phone 7 hands-on training. Ben Riga and Neil Hutson will demonstrate the Windows Phone 7 platform and show you how to develop applications for WP7. You will also get information about the Marketplace and you will be able to finally try a Windows Phone 7 device!
I have just completed reading Agile Principles, Patterns and Practices in C# by Robert C. Martin and Micah Martin. I learned a lot while reading this book, particularly about patterns. This book contains a lot of information with its’ 38 chapters and 700 pages, but it is written in a easy to read language and have plenty of figures and code examples. I think that everyone involved in software development will benefit from reading this book, particularly developers and solution architects.
Section 1 in this book focuses on agile development covering practices, Extreme programming, planning, testing, refactoring and a case study.
Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC) 2010 starts 3 weeks from now and I am looking forward to this conference.
For a while ago I planned what sessions to follow on day one of this conference and now I have planned what sessions to follow on day two.
The MSDN & TechNet Live tour 2010 in Norway visited Oslo as the final destination 26th April. Microsoft invited me to join them on this tour and to be on their Windows Phone stand, off-course I accepted this invitation.
I was not able to be in all of the four cities this tour visited, but I got to be in Stavanger and Oslo. The period this tour lasted was the same period that Norway and the rest of Europe had to shut down the air traffic because of the ash cloud from the volcano eruption on Iceland. This caused some difficulties for the crew, speakers and partners to get to the different cities. Despite the difficulties the tour was completed successfully.
