Last week when I read Jamie’s excoriation of the Blackberry Playbook dev platform (so many people forwarded it to me), it made me sad.  Sad because a developer was hitting friction on a platform on which he clearly wanted to develop apps.

Tyler Lessard from RIM responded to this open air criticism, and I give him points for his embracing this publicly.  I look forwarded to meeting Tyler at some point in the future.

There are some in the community that said Jamie was bitching and moaning.  He was.  They say he gave up too easily.  Perhaps.  This issue does elucidate a more pressing issue, which is the plethora of choices available to the discerning developer, and the decreasing ability to get it wrong if you are a platform provider.  Further, with Twitter and blogs being so public – they are forever etched in stone people! (i.e. the search index) – it’s hard for a platform provider to not to feel like they are under constant and heavy fire.

Yet, the very tools which quickly bring scorn and ire to some can provide for a happy ending to others.  In just under 4 hours, I was able to reach out to someone in another country, whom I have never met, and had never heard of prior to last week, and prompt him to action.

Even if we build the platform one developer at a time, that’s one more developer than we had last week.  Every developer matters.  Every. Single. One.  I effing love my job.

It’s not often I find myself kerfuffled, but that’s what happened when I was permitted to be a guest to discuss Windows Phone 7 on Windows Weekly, hosted by Leo Laporte and Paul Thurrott.  I’ve been a long time listener of several of the TWiT network podcasts, and fondly remember staying up late in grad school to catch Dev Null on “The Site” on MSNBC.  It was a lively conversation, and I have received many emails from people I don’t know with their thoughts on the show and WP7.  I love hearing from the community, and really look forward to meeting more developers building cool apps and games.

We also sponsored a couple of .Net Rocks shows with Carl and Richard (show 1) so that we could talk about the tools release, but more importantly so that we could enable 6 developers to talk about what they are building for Windows Phone 7.  We really wanted to give a microphone to devs doing cool stuff; specifically guys who are working without the aid of PR firms and other means to get the opportunity to promote themselves.  We know that there are going to be many apps built for Windows Phone 7 by small teams, and we really want to help get them noticed.

Stop the presses!  I’ve got some news.  The great team at GDGT is coming to Seattle, and they are having a bit of a party and meetup.  There should be a great deal of nerdosity going on there, which is awesome in its own right.  This will be further accentuated by the fact that the Windows Phone 7 team will be there to show off some devices.

Under normal circumstances, that would be pretty cool.  However, we’re not in the “pretty cool” business here.  I think I have made it clear, we are in the epic shit business.  Apparently, the nerdosity is expected to flow especially high at this event, and the request was made for the developer platform team for Windows Phone 7 to make an appearance.  Challenge thrown down.  Challenge accepted.  Challenge contorted into something all together different.

Since announcing the email alias to which you can send your device requests (about 2 weeks ago), we’ve been blown away by the response.  We’re still making our way through those requests, getting them into a CRM system and assigning them to our field evangelists.  That’s a tale of logistical complexity for another day.  However, the whole point of having preview devices is to get them into the hands of developers, right?  So we have two things to share.

First, if you are a developer in the area, and want to come to the event, bring your laptops with your Windows Phone 7 XAPs.  We will have phones on site to which you can deploy your code.  You can see it running on a real Windows Phone 7.  You get to share it with the crowd.  That’s not bad, but certainly not epic.  No, no.  Epic is in reserve for those true hackers who show up with the goods.  For those who have got the best XAPs, we are bringing a couple of phones with us, and some developer agreements to sign.  That’s right…the “A” gamers will be walking out with phones on which to continue their coding.

Are you game?  Spread the word, and see you there.

Inspired by the always entertaining Mike Klucher, I snapped this pic of my own avatar on my daily use Windows Phone 7.  He talks about the very way I felt when my avatar showed up on my phone this week.  It made me smile.  I even went into the XBox Marketplace to change around some clothing options to see how long before it appeared on my phone.  I was not disappointed.

I also felt great sadness because my achievements were so dated.  Not that the system wasn’t working.  No,no.  This was a stark reminder that I haven’t been playing nearly as much XBox as I should be!!  So, off to GameStop I went and picked up my copy of Red Dead Redemption.  I very much plan to use the “hey, it’s Father’s Day” excuse all weekend long.

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.

Making Async Calls to Web Services

Wow, what a huge pain this was for me to figure out.  When you do some web searching about how to connect to web services in C#, you will invariably find yourself staring at content about WebClient class.  I couldn’t make this work for me, and now that I am 3 weeks into it, I can’t remember what the specific issue was.  Something about Twitter not doing Basic Auth correctly, and needing to set the username and password in the header, necessitating the use of NetwrokCredentials.

In any event, I had to use the HttpWebRequest.  This is where things got challenging for me, since I had never done any async programming in C# or Silverlight.  [Apologies for the wonky formatting in the code samples, but I have a narrow blog and the style isn’t doing auto wrap]

public void GetStatuses()
{
    NetworkCredential nc = new NetworkCredential { UserName =

                          _username, Password = _password };

    string url = http://twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.xml?

                               + "count=" + _count + (_sinceID > 0 ?

                               "&since_id=" + _sinceID : "");
    System.Net.HttpWebRequest request =

                              (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
    request.Method = "GET";

    if (_username != null && _password != null)
    {
        request.Credentials = nc;
    }

    IAsyncResult token = request.BeginGetResponse(

                                  new AsyncCallback(GetStatusesCallBack),

                                  request);

}

Sorting out how to correctly get the async call done, and then set up the callback, was where I completely threw a rod.  Basically, you need to set up a web request to happen on its own thread, and then you need to assign a delegate function to process the response.  Figuring out how to do this took me 2 days, mostly because I didn’t know what questions to ask, or what terms to use when searching online, and in this specific case, only code that I did discover was useless for me because I was trying to learn something new and didn’t understand the samples I found.

Looking at the call, you may notice that I am using the REST API from Twitter, and setting the since_id and count variables to ensure that I am getting the data that I want.  This is so I can reuse this function to make subsequent calls while the app is running and only get the new tweets.  Twitter makes things pretty easy to get the data you want.

Here’s how you handle the async callback function to actually issue the HTTP request and process the data which comes back:

public void GetStatusesCallBack(IAsyncResult result)
{
    bool foundNewSinceID = false;

    try
    {

        WebResponse response = ((HttpWebRequest)result.AsyncState)

                                       .EndGetResponse(result);
        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response

                                       .GetResponseStream());
        string responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();