So, this is good right?  Of course it is but, I couldn't avoid feeling a bit nostalgic remembering when installing an OS (not only windows) was an usually daunting task reserved for geeks; when after passing the initial screens you would have the certainty that something would have to be fixed, a missing driver, a setting here or there, etc.  But with Windows 8 so far, things have worked right from the start. I can also "feel" (yeah, literally I have that 'sensation') that the RTM build is even faster than the consumer preview.

Great work Windows 8 team!

I had the privilege to work closely (they might say perhaps too closely) with our user assistance team to create what we call our 0-60 experience for both Office and SharePoint that includes all the resources in https://dev.office.com and, as expected, we have lots of code samples. The approach that we took was simple; start with the basics and grow from there.  Accordingly you will notice that we have a lot of “hello worlds” that illustrate fairly basic operations and over time we are going to add more that interweave different SharePoint services. 

Sometimes I’m asked if it wouldn’t have made sense to start the other way around, with just a few big samples illustrating a ton of features.  There are certainly pros and cons but we essentially listened to feedback and realized that reverse engineering long samples was not the best way to understand the fundamentals of a new platform. There are significant changes and a fundamental new way to think about extending SharePoint and I think our samples do a good job introducing each piece of the puzzle in a digestible way. Of course once developers are up to speed they will be looking for more “meaty” samples and we will make sure we have those too. We are learning along with all of you, early adopters, and we are open to all your feedback; participate on our blog and forum.

I encourage you to try things out for yourself; it literally takes minutes to have your first app running. You don’t even have to download anything to get started, simply sign-up for a free developer site during the preview and get going!

Happy coding and thank you for kicking the tires with the preview!

Well, I couldn't really write about anything related to my work before but now that its all (or most of it) public I plan to share a bit of the inner workings of how and why things were designed the way they are. I worked (and continue to) in many of the areas involving Office and SharePoint apps including the store, licensing, some of the APIs but mostly the 0-60 experience; I'll share more shortly but in the meantime head over to https://dev.office.com and build your first Office or SharePoint app; it will literally take you minutes to get everything you need to build your first app; even better you can win one of the prizes of the Apps for Office and SharePoint contest! https://officeappcontest.com/

Enjoy!

An App “store” is a feature that every single major piece of software will have in the foreseeable future to the point of making it a commodity.  The decision for us moonlighters will now be which platforms and marketplaces to target. Do you care about reach? Do you care about $$$? Do you care about having fun while coding?   For me it’s a simple decision, I will go where the masses are as long as the platform is leveled enough for me to create something useful  without retorting to ancient languages (E.g. forget about me coding in C++, won’t happen).
What about you? What is the key ingredient that makes you tick?

Mobile developers have long been using browser controls to serve as the bridge between the web and native applications for Windows Phone, Android, Iphone, you name it; yet that always has been a bit of a hack IMO but what are we if not hackers I guess.   More formal, yet still limited, APIs have been emerging to make scripting languages a first class citizen in this new brave world of multiple devices.

Why am I so excited about all this? Well, because it has been a refreshing and rewarding experience to plunge again into the client world in one of my moonlight projects, TinyText.  It is a simple yet pretty useful text messaging client that also integrates with Facebook so whenever your friends join TinyText you can also send messages to them (kind of a Facebook address book). 
I originally started with the goal of building a Windows Phone app that would allow me and my wife exchange messages without paying for SMS; I just find utterly absurd to pay for SMS in a world where phones have unlimited data.  Then my friends saw the prototype App and they like it. I thought, well, why not, let’s release the app and have my friends join. People starting downloading the App and now I have thousands of users growing a bit each day :)

Yet the biggest complaint was that there was only a client for windows phone; not anymore.  Yesterday I released the beta version of TinyText Everywhere, which is a web version of the App built with nothing else than HTML, CSS and JS. It is pretty basic I admit but it gets the job done and runs fairly decent on all devices and browsers I’ve tried it on (IE, Chrome, Safari, Android, IPhone, IPad).  As the underlying platforms start exposing more JS APIs I envision the web version being the “only” version that I will ever maintain. Sure, there will be no escape from providing different flavors of the app for different devices but it will be a lot easier to use the same language (HTML + JS + CSS) and the same distribution mechanism (the web) to cater for multiple devices.   Will I ever release a native version for Android or IOs?  I wouldn’t discount it but we’ll see ;)

Take away from the story? In the off chance that you aren’t yet honing your web development skills (particularly HTML5, JS), what are you waiting for? Get on it.

Solution? Use a stack panel instead with a scroll viewer. Since my app doesn't require loading hundresds of items (50 at most) the memory consumption is not a concern.  Scrolling to the end works flawlesly and manual scrolling is smooth as silk.

Happy coding

Game Tracker. This is a simple utility for folks that like board games and still want to play them old fashion, using the actual board :) The app helps to track the scores and time of each player. At the end of the game the app displays stats and graphs and it even allows to store a picture of the board game, my friends and I like to do that a lot for scrabble games, we usually come up with very, let’s say inventive, words :)  Get it here: zune://navigate/?appID=2f5f9dea-c608-e011-9264-00237de2db9e

TinyText. Do you like to pay for SMS in an era where most smartphone users have unlimited data plans? Well, I don't, it is non-sense! And that is why I developed TinyText, a small messaging app. The UI is very similar to the native SMS client. Once you download the app it allows you to send unlimited text messages to others that are also using TinyText. You no longer have to be jealous of your BlackBerry friends; you now can have free chats too with folks that have a Windows Phone … I’m particularly proud of this one as I know for a fact that at least my wife and I will use it every day J

Get it here: zune://navigate/?appID=f7b0d554-b70c-e011-9264-00237de2db9e

Things that I learned (besides the obvious)

·         Don't forget the back button. The first two times that I submitted the apps for certification they failed for silly yet important reasons. First I didn't remove the Chrome of the emulator when I took the screenshots to be posted on the marketplace and second and more important IMO is that I didn't fully test my apps to ensure that the back button worked as expected. The apps didn't crash but the action of the back button was a bit confusing so I had to fix that. I do hope that more automated tools exist in the near future to test an app before even submitting it for certification, MS and developers could save a bunch of money and time by performing a standard set of tests offline.

·         If you want to take advantage of push notifications there is no escape, you will have to have a cloud service to orchestrate stuff. I naively thought that I could figure out a way not to setup a service and still offer notification for my apps; no sir, the way notifications are currently designed forces you to have a cloud service on your own. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could bundle a free (or cost effective) Azure offer for Windows Phone Apps that require a service?  I ended up going with GoDaddy to host my service for ~$6 a month. Who knows, if the service really takes off I might migrate to a more scalable solution J

·         Silverlight toolkit for Windows Phone. Want to add some additional cool controls to make your apps look more like the native apps that ship with windows phone? the SL toolkit is the answer.    What about the full SL toolkit? well, it does work too for WP7 with some tweaks. In my case I wanted to use the graph controls (charts and so on) and the only way to make them work (back when I tried it) was to use a tweaked dll from this fellow:  https://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2010/04/20/phone-y-charts-silverlight-wpf-data-visualization-development-release-4-and-windows-phone-7-charting-sample.aspx

·         I like the Pivot Control better than the Panorama. You will find different opinions on the matter but I personally like the Pivot Control better than the Panorama one, why? The interaction is cleaner, less "draggy" so to speak.  Very few apps really need a gallery- like landscape mode and even those that do end up slowing down users more often than not. So my recommendation is to stick with the pivot control.

·         Facebook integration, a bit of a pain. Until a fully fleshed toolkit is released specifically for windows phone I highly recommend using the browser control + JavaScript and a service (e.g. hosted html/aspx) to do your Facebook interaction instead of trying something fancier.  I looked at both the “toolkit” at https://facebooktoolkit.codeplex.com/  which doesn’t seem to work on WP7 without some tweaks and also looked at https://facebooksdk.codeplex.com/ which seemed more promising but didn’t have the documentation and downloads ready when I needed them.  Net just look at the JavaScript samples that Facebook provides and you can do the rest using a browser control in WP7.

·        PowerPoint is your best friend to create nice looking graphics. You don’t have to be a photoshop whiz. With PowerPoint and Paint.Net you should be able to create most of the graphics (e.g. icons) that you will ever need for a WP7 app. Also Binging for “Free icons” will yield a bunch of sites that offer free icons, just make sure that they are also available for “commercial use” if you plan to charge for your application.

I probably missed something so I might augment this post in the future with some learnings. Oh, yes, I couldn’t finish this post without saying,  I LOVE MY WINDOWS PHONE 7 !!! J

But why do people switch teams? There are myriad reasons, some positive some not so much, but in my limited experience I can confidently say that in the majority of cases I’ve observed it is simply for the thrill of trying/learning something new.

When I decided to switch pretty much all my colleagues asked me why?  I was thriving (I think J) on my old team, I was offered a lot of freedom to decide what to work on for the next release and I really, really enjoyed working with my previous manager. And yet I switched. And my “Moving on” e-mail was just one of several that now ex-crm folks have sent.  Is there some sort of anomaly with the CRM team?  Nope, not at all, in fact the team is in pretty good shape and people like me really had a hard time making a decision.  Yet when you work for a company like Microsoft it would be a shame not to take advantage of possibilities offered by other teams; the company has such wide array of products and technologies that usually the question is not should I switch? Rather, where to switch?

Suddenly my network of acquaintances in other teams has exploded. Now I know folks that work on Xbox, Office, Visual Studio, Windows Client and Server, Window Phone, Zune, Dynamics, Bing, AdCenter etc. Most of them CRM alumni J

I once read an interview with a fellow that worked for Steve Jobs (can’t recall the name) and he mentioned that one of the best things about Steve Jobs was his ability to “connect the dots” and that he was really good at it because he had a lot of experiences that had given him a lot of dots to connect, well, change is precisely about that, about having more dots to connect.  

I won’t lie, it’s hard to be a “newbie” again to some extent but as time goes by I hope to report that it was worth it (so far so good). 

And why am I boring you with all of this? Well, because I’m super excited about all the stuff happening for the new release of Office and Sharepoint  (BIIIG time) and given that I can’t share any of it I had to write something else to appease me.

Now, back to the ton of stuff that I’m supposed to be learning J

I do miss my old team quite a bit. You know, you really don't appreciate what you have until you lose it even if the lost was voluntary. The new team is great too but I miss my old pals.   I hate and love the 'newbie' feeling; tons of thigns to learn, not very productive at the moment yet very excited and moving as fast as I can to be so shortly. We'll see how it goes :)

While folks have all sorts of interesting theories of why I’m moving reality is not that convoluted, it just time for me to move onto new challenges; that is just the way my brain operates. I guess I’m similar to Windows 95; every so often I need a complete reinstall J

What am I going to be working on? Can’t tell, but it is going to be very cool, trust me.

I expect to still write the occasional post about CRM tips & tricks so hold on for a while before you remove me from your news reader J