Its in the marketplace

Finaly it appeared in the marketplace LostKilo
That took a long time.

Wating for certification again

Now I am waiting for the certification process to comlplete again. It may fail as I didnt have a About page for the application. We will see.
I started putting in the resources file for the next version, as my next step is to make different language versions. French, German and Spanish.

Version 1.1 Submitted

With the correct spelling this time!

Rejected! due to Icons

Well, that was rejected. Apparently I used a standard icon for the application. Well, it wasn't standard but it was widely used lets say. I spent the day creating my new icon, did very well I think. I was following a tutorial for Expression Design. At least I learnt something about using Expression Design.
Here are the icons.

Submitted!

At last I have submitted Lostkilo to the AppHub. Now I just have to wait for the certification process to finish.
Here is the screen shot I used.

Links I am looking at this morning instead of doing this work

I read it and I don't agree with it much and its a very boring post, so don't bother reading this - Five Microsoft apps that will change IT

This states something I have said before and that the 'App' concept is to spread. Report: Apps Move to New Devices in 2012 I would go further than this article and say that the app, and the app marketplace concept will spread to the desktop as a haven of safety for corporate and private users. If those apps are given some form of authority via certification filtering.

i follow Michael on twitter so that where this link came from, But I am lying, I haven't read all this I just went to look. Michael Crump’s Development Daily!

Clearly I need to read about the marketplace test kit, as LostKilo is nearing completion, Marketplace tsting

Somewwhere I go every day as its an aggregation of VS news. Top 10 Microsoft Developer Links

This is about kinect for windows as opposed to kinect for the xbox. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kinectforwindows/archive/2011/11/22/kinect-for-windows-building-the-future.aspx

And so that amounts to half an hour of not fixing the problem of navigating between page on the windows phone.

Tough luck for American Users

I am about to go and remove the optin to log LBS, or pounds or whatever they are. What a stupid system that is. This application is for charting weight loss in Kilograms. I think I need ot do that in this release to make it simple, adn to make sure I get it out of the door.
I am probably crossing off a large number of users. Tant pis.

Advertising

Finally got the advertising working correctly. And registered in the Microsoft advertising service.

Resources For the Windows Phone

Theme Resources for Windows Phone

How to: Apply Theme Resources for Windows Phone

The weight list 2

Added the edit and delete button. Not wired up yet though. These are sitting inside a border. I am not so sure what colours are good to use with the windows phone. So far its all pretty much black and white. I think I have to be careful because people can set the phone colours to invert as white on black or black on white and I am not sure what will happen if I some other colour.

I have found a link to some tips to deal with the colour issues. From The Wolf Bytes.

The Weight List

Still working on the weight list. At least it now has some data in it. Though it is not displayed very well. It needs and edit and a delete option for each item in the list.

The Weights List Page

I added the weights list page. Its still empty though. This is going to be where the user can edit any of the weight values entered, or delete en entry. So far my idea is to have a simple list view, with an edit and a delete button. continuing with the simplest thing that works idea.

To this blog I added a features page. There are so many items that are not going to be in the first release. I wanted to do a motivational feedback page, each time a person enters a weight, it can compare to the previous weight and give some feedback. That is not going to be in the first release.

Enter Today's Weight

I managed to put an advertisement on the 'Enter Todays Weight' page. And I will put one on the chart page. I do wonder if this is the right route to take though. Probably every developer does.
The 'Enter Todays Weight page is near completion. When you enter the weight you are taken to the chart page, that seems very satisfying as a process and I think it works very well. There is one issue currently, the user can add as many weights for the day as they wish, and they are stored with the time as well, but it does mess up the chart for a user if they do this. It doesn't look so good.

The next page has to be the edit page. List all the weight entries and allow the user to edit or delete an entry. I like the feeling that its getting close to completion.

I would like in the future to create a paid for version that does not have advertising. I need to start a list of future development features.

WP7 Examples

The page from MSDN for the phone samples.
Code Samples for Windows Phone

I was looking here because I wanted to show an advertisement in the panorama control, next to the chart. But I wanted to show a full height advertisement. It seems that is not possible.

Progress with entering today's weight

I am creating a page to enter today's weight. I have a nice weight entry process that allows the user to select a single digit and change it. As, most of the time a persons weight is only changing by a few hundred grams a day. Only on digit has to change. Its a drop down selector for each of the digits that make up the persons weight. The date is auto filled with today's date.
Only, I am not sure where the user should go after entering the weight. Should I direct the user to the chart, so they can see progress. Or should I just return them to the main menu.
I could also go through a feedback page on that days weight entry.
Next I have to enable the editing of the weight collection. Then we should be able to do a first release.

Software Development Guidelines

This is a really good summary of everything in software development guiding principles.The Principles of Good Programming

SOLID Software Development Priniciples

Generaly reading around today, led me to this excelent pdf about SOLID.
Solid Software Development Principals SOLID I have read it all before and act on it. But its always good to remind myself. Also on one of my previous contracts I was acting as Software Development mentor, and when I mentioned SOLID I got a bunch of blank stares. This document would have been useful then.

The Hackers Diet

The Hackers Diet is the source of inspiration for LostKilo.
The calculations used are the sme as the ones represented here .

Adding missing DLL's to WP 7.1 Application

I had a missing dll in the phone app today. This blog post was were I was trying to get a resolution. I am not there yet. But I want to record this link here for reference tomorrow.
http://www.scottseely.com/Blog/11-05-08/Adding_the_lsquo_other_rsquo_WP7_Libraries_to_your_VS_2010.aspx

This did not resolve the issue. I also tried adding ALL thsoe dlls as references, and it still did not resolve the issue. I think I may have to re-create the dev environment.

scales

I need to set the bottom and left hand scale for the chart. I was thinking of setting the kilos scale to be the maximum weight + 10 kilos and the minimum to be the minimum weight minus 10. But motivationally, I think it may be better to see the weight scale go down to the weight where you are heading.
In addition to this, eventually, setting the target weight will mean the scale has to accommodate the targeted weight, and date.
All items should be available through the settings.

OpenId

In the several pre-development stage of LostKilo, I used OpenId. I would like to contunue using it, as it has advantages to the user and to me, I feel its a win win situation. Here is some sample code on implementing OpenId in mvc. This means all I have to save in my database is the user email.

Modal Dialog Choice

Here is an article about modal dialogs to be used with the ASP.NET MVC stuff. It is not a very good article. I have used the jQuery UI block and many others. I am going to collect some information about these here.

There is a thread on StackOverflow but it doesnt say much. David Wiliams has some explanation here.