It’s very rare that Passion, Talent, and Opportunity line up.  When it does, you ring the effing bell.  Starting next Monday, I am going to be moving over to the Windows Phone 7 team, working on the developer experience.

The common theme in all of my work to date in my return to Microsoft has been the developer.  Developers, developers, developers.  [call me Monkey Boy Jr??]  So when I was presented with the opportunity to work on the developer experience for Windows Phone 7, I had to take it.  This position feels like a once in a career kind of deal, and I couldn’t be more excited.  You know it’s the right role when you are part excited, part scared, and the mix ratio keeps shifting.

As for the blog, this new role will mean more posts here about mobile.  Also, if you are a mobile developer, I want to hear from you.  You can follow me on twitter, and I am always watching the hash tags #WP7 and #WP7Dev.

Windows Phone 7 301 Redirect Bug

I checked with the Windows Phone 7 team before putting this post out, and got the OK to write about it.  I hit this bug when building out my FriendLinks Windows Phone 7 application, and was surprised to find it was a bona fide bug and not a problem with my coding skills.  If there was a default value in the constructor for any new project I start, it would look something like:

codingErrorResponsibilty == this.programmerName;

In any event, here’s the cruxt of the bug.  If you are using HttpWebRequest developing on Windows Phone 7, and you get a 301 redirect returned from the web server, and that web server sets a cookie, the current build (as of 03/16/10 at Mix10) of Windows Phone 7 will throw an exception.

In the case of my applications, I was trying to determine the title of the page as defined by the “<title></title>” tags for a given URL.  The function I wrote for this was:

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It’s pretty exciting to be at Mix10 right now.  There’s a ton of buzz around Windows Phone 7.  I got a chance to hang with some of the team (thanks AI), and they let me load my FriendLinks application onto a working phone, and it worked straight away.  Very cool.  Here’s a link to my first post about building this Windows Phone 7 app.

Today at Mix10, Microsoft released the developer tools for Windows Phone 7 Series.  I’m excited about seeing what apps will get built now that there is general availability of the Windows Phone dev tools.  That’s general availability, as in for everyone!

Charlie Kindel (if you aren’t, you really should follow him) was nice enough to get me access to the tools about 3 weeks ago, despite the fact that he and his team have had plenty on their plate since going public with WP7.  I have spent some time in the last few winks building and tinkering.

A little background on my dev skills.  I can write basic applications, and have been known to favor Python when trying out new ideas.  I have dabbled a bit with our ASP.NET MVC (MVC v2 just released – way to go guys!!) and taught myself enough C# to be dangerous.  What coding I do, I do for fun and in my free time.  I call it my nocturnal nerdiness, and have been logging some of my projects using the n00bnotes tag.  Prior to 3 weeks ago, I had never written one line of Silverlight (or WPF for that matter) code, nor any XAML.  I was really excited to have the opportunity to build apps for this mobile platform, as I once tried to get along with iPhone development, and while it’s clear that Apple has created tools that developers seem to love, I couldn’t get along with ObjectiveC.  That’s a me issue, and not a statement about ObjectiveC.  I get along famously with Python, but me and Ruby are not friends.  That’s just the way my brain works.

With that as a preamble, I wanted to share what I have created in just the last 3 weeks, working largely in what spare time I could find when not doing my day job or dealing with an recalcitrant 8 month old girl who refuses to sleep.  The main thing I want people to take away from this is that it in incredibly easy to built apps for Windows Phone 7.  If I can figure it out, anyone can.  The team has delivered a great development experience built on top of Visual Studio Express.  When you fire up the development environment, everything you need is there and you are ready to go.  It was a pretty painless experience to get the environment up and running, and it includes templates for Silverlight apps as well as XNA games.  While I have only been able to deploy to an actual phone once, the emulator felt like a software version of the phone.

Over the next few days of Mix10, I am going to put up a few posts about my experiences with the development tools, highlighting some of the blockers I hit, how I solved them, and for some of them, how I should have solved them, which I eventually fixed during code refactoring.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a link to the current version of the code.  This is my FriendLinks application, built for Windows Phone 7 [UPDATE: 3/24/10 – oh the joy of forgetting to remove commented code with your twitter pass.  Ooops…code updated.]  You will need the development tools in order to open, edit view.  The only disclaimer I make is that the code works.  Not all of it is pretty, and in some places I haven’t gone back to fix things I fixed elsewhere (i.e. walking XML for Bit.ly versus for Twitter).

This specific post is about some of the things that gave me the biggest problems in getting started.  The app that I built is pretty simple.  It’s meant to allow you to connect to Twitter, pull down your friend timeline, and parse the timeline looking for URLs sent by people you follow.  I use Twitter for content discovery, and this is my ultimate time waster app.  When you click on a link the listbox, some additional calls are made via the Bit.ly API, and the TweetMeme API, to get additional information like the number of retweets that article has, the title of the page referenced and the number of clicks as tracked by Bit.ly.

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I was watching Colbert the other night, and caught the very tail end of an interview with author Annie Leonard.  She was promoting her new book, “The Story of Stuff.”  I didn’t catch enough of the interview to know if I wanted to buy it, but did catch enough to grab my Kindle to order up a sample chapter.

The subtitle of the book is: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-and a Vision for Change.  Let’s stop and think about that one for a second.  The author is railing against how the obsession with consuming, ostensibly, atoms is ruining the planet.  OK, I get that.

Imagine my surprise when I could only purchase her book in atom form.  Not available on the Kindle.  Wha?  Look, I get that not everyone has a Kindle, and that reading devices aren’t quite mainstream, but doesn’t this hypocrisy sort of negate her whole message?  Dave Ramsey rails against the use of debt for anything.  He’s a man who stands by his principles.  You cannot use a credit card to purchase wares from his site.

What principles is Ms. Leonard standing by when her book is not available at ship date in any form other than atoms?  The lesson here for entrepreneurs is pretty clear.  Know what you stand for, and why, and stick to it, lest you ruin your credibility.  This is an epic fail.

ABC has an awesome hit show on their hands with Modern Family.  While there isn’t anyone who can hold a candle to the sheer personality awesomeness of NPH on How I Met Your Mother, the cast and writing on Modern Family are genius.  It’s very rare that I laugh out loud at television, certainly not consistently week to week.  Well, except Family Guy.

This week, however, presented some comedy for both the wife and I.  A rarity, though this is the only sitcom we watch together.  You can view the episode on Hulu, and the scene in question is at 1:00 in to the show.  It’s a gem, and basically cured my wife of any thoughts that she might be crazy.

Ty Burrell may be the the nerdy father we all cringe at, but secretly know we are, but Julie Bowen is a real hidden gem in this show.  Her timing and delivery are under utilized, though she is often over shadowed by the Sofia Vergara.

There’s a great podcast I have been listening to since 2006 called Keith and the Girl.  The content is most definitely NSFW, but discovering this gem was like finding Howard Stern before everyone knew about it.  It’s a fantastic show, and they have also done a great job of building community around it.  As of this morning, in the 5 years they have been doing the show, they have had 60 tattoos and 2 brandings of their logo.  Crazy.

In any event, Keith and Chemda (the “girl”) are publishing a book on Mar 9th called “What Do We Do Now?”  They get lots of relationship type questions emailed to them from listeners, answering some on the air, and eventually got a book deal.  Awesome.

Here’s the nutty part which I never knew.  I’m sure authors are well aware of this, but all pre-order sales for a book count toward your first week sales number.  It’s an interesting game you can play as an author, especially one who shows up with an audience, in that you can promote the book well in advance of the release, get the core audience purchases to land you on the best seller lists, and then in store placements which result will likely have a multiplier effect on sales thereafter.  I love it.

If you want a good laugh, go read their sample chapter, or pre-order the book.  They do the show for free and make money from ads and merchandise sales.  Why not buy yourself or someone you know a copy and help get these guys on the best seller lists in the first weeks?  I plan to post my video review later in the week, but I just loved this idea of hacking the best seller list and wanted to share.