WP7 Need for list with integrated search

A lot of time since my last post, but it's a really busy period. This is a small "inconvenient" when you own a small and have a lot of projects. I would love to have more time for blogging. This will be a small post...

Maybe you've already read about this on other blogs, but seem that there are some lucky developers that can already develop/test/debug on a real device.

First of all ... I WANT ONE TOO :) Maybe we will get lucky and the guys XDA (especially
DA_G) will be able to port the leaked Mondrian ROM to other devices. It would be even nicer to have a developer device directly from Microsoft given/sold to developers registered on Windows Marketplace (I am not one of them yet). It will have to be a NoBrand device for development purpose which will have access to the beta versions of the WP7 OS (something like Apple does now) ?

But let me get to the post. When I watched the video posted with Windows Phone 7 startup/setup there are 2 aspects that I didn't like and I've already talked about both of them in my previous posts.

• The first aspect is the "ugly" buttons that are a little too small for my taste.
• The second one is the list where you have to choose the Time Zone. It's not
  practical and the user is very very slow to find/select what it needs (it's true that you won't set the Time Zone every day, but it's about the speed of finding what you need in a list with many items). Why not just put an embedded search option? It could be implemented on the properties of the ItemsSource. Wouldn't be easier to just pop up the keyboard and write +01 to filter the list to all items on GMT +01, or Rom and have Rome directly? Sure the developer could implement this functionality but I would love to have it already there and to have the possibility to enable/disable. They need to put this functionality on the Application list also otherwise the user will get "nuts" trying to find an application.

Microsoft Help Us to Help You

Namaste!

WP7 Memory Requirements

Finally some time for blogging. Let's go to the subject...

The new "unlocked" image gives the possibility to do some tests of how much memory does WP7 eat as OS and also how much memory the developed apps occupy.

The emulator starts with 77 MB occupied. To understand how much that changed in comparison to previous versions I started all the other emulators I have installed on my development system and this is the result:

Not so bad... The memory requirement only doubled (the same happened when they passed from PPC2003 to WM5).

As the apps don't offer the option to exit them programmatically I've started launching all included applications. Arriving at 160 MB of memory occupied the emulator doesn't work correctly anymore and you will get screens like these ones:

This may be a bug of the RC emulator image, but I still prefer a GOOD OLD EXIT function for my apps.
I than run some tests to see how much memory a simple application occupies. The "empty" application generated by VS 2010 started with the debugging option occupies around 8 MB of memory and without debugging 6MB. I did the same test on Win32 and NET CF and grouped the results in a chart:

Let's say that an empty app that does nothing and occupies 6MB means that the framework is not yet optimized. It would be interesting to see how much memory requires a more complex application. Looking at this chart I think Microsoft should offer the possibility to develop natively or using NETCF on the WP7 platform.

Then there is the whole Running,Paused,Suspended,Resume mechanism that doesn't convince me 100%. If the OS decides when to suspend(kill) an application why doesn't the OS automatically save the state of the suspended application and then when the app resumes the OS could automatically reload the last state? The OS has access to the File System which is faster than IsolatedStorage accessible to the user. Personally I prefer the "old" way to work with the apps not this one that seems copied from the iPhone OS. In fact the whole OS looks like is developed taking iPhone as a model and not looking at what was good in the old OS. They erased not only what was bad but also what was good like the possibility to group the applications in folders which was implemented since Pocket PC , that misses in WP7 and which will be implemented in iPhone OS4.

In hope I will find more time for blogging.
In the meanwhile NAMASTE!

WP7 Build 6176 "Unlocked"

A long time without blogging but it was a really full period. I would love to have more time for writing and testing, but I have some "stressing" deadlines.
As you probably know Microsoft released the new version of the Windows Phone 7 Development tools and there is a new version of the emulator. The old "unlock method" still works and there is already an unlocked version on XDA Developers and you can download the image here. The new version of the bin doesn't work on the old XDE emulator because there seem to be some changes in XDE hardware emulation. The unlocked image pretty snappy and there are also some new programs.
The best thing is that the unlocked emulator image works for debbuging in VS 2010 on my newly installed Windows 7 x64 on myApple macbook (I've reinstalled 3 times the macbook last week cause I configured more partitions for windows and I finally managed to replace my old Asus notebook). One of the things I've noticed is that an "empty" application uses 12 MBytes of RAM which seems a lot for an app that does nothing.
Hope I will have more time for testing! Have fun with the new tools

WP7 IsolatedStorage Backup/Restore

One of the drawbacks of the WP7 Emulator is that it doesn't save the state between sessions and also it is difficult to deploy a file with your project and then use it. This means that every time you start a new session of the emulator you loose all the data on the IsolatedStorage.
I've developed a small solution (there is room for improvement) for backing-up and restoring the files (folder structure included) of the IsolatedStorage. It is using an WCF service that stores/sends file content from/to the IsolatedStorage in/from a folder named Backup located in the WCF project folder. For optimizing the communication the service uses binaryMessageEncoding. It also splits the files in 100Kbytes parts (you can modify this size from the source code if you want bigger parts- it will be faster) .
The solution is easy to use even if it took me a lot of time to make it work (especially the readerQuotas, maxBufferSize, maxStringContentLength). In fact I was having "fun" with it at 3 o'clock in the morning. If you want to backup your IsolatedStorage just hit backup and it will write the content of IsolateStorage in the Backup folder of the pc. If you want to restore/copy files to the IsolatedStorage copy the files/folders you want to the Backup folder of the PC and then hit Restore and it will copy all the data to the IsolatedStorage.

Hope you'll like it! Don't forget to modify the ServiceReferences.ClientConfig before you run the project

As usual you can download the Source code

WP7 IsolatedStorage Speed

I was wondering if it makes any sense fully implementing SQLite on IsolatedStorage as the "quality" of the db support will depend a lot on the speed of of the storage. I read on some posts that the speed of IsolatedStorage was a problem, but I've wanted to compare it with the speed of the Filestream. The problem is that you cannot compare the two directly so I had the idea to compare both of them with another "item" that is available on both systems. I've chosen a MemoryStream test as a constant. I am not making the same test between MemoryStream and IsolatedStorage or between MemoryStream and FileStream as I am not interested on how much faster is MemoryStream (that's why on the real device FileStream seems faster then MemoryStream but it's not true as it is not the same amount of data). I run the test for 10 times and then make an average (to have a more precise result)

Dividing IsolatedStorage/MemoryStreamSpeed=8.5991/1.2251=7.019 and FileStream/MemoryStream= 0.7/12.7=0.05511. To get an idea about the speed differences we devide the two results and we get 127.3634 which means that the IsolatedStorage is 127 times slower than FileStream. Of course this is not an exact result, but should reflect the speed difference. I might have some "glitches" in the tests but I cannot figure them out. If this result is at least near to the real one it doesn't make any sense to implement db engine on IsolatedStorage.

Another thing that I've noticed is that the x86 implementation of WP7 Emulator is much faster then the ARM emulation of 6.5 Emulator (at least MemoryStream implementation).

You can download the projects here

iPhone Printing using MonoTouch - Proof of concept

Printing from the iPhone (also iPad I presume) it's not an impossible task (as it is in WP7 for the moment). It can be done using a network printer connected to the device using wireless radio (infrastructure or Ad hoc mode). As there is no internal driver for printing developers will have to write an interface to the printer. The "task" is pretty big as there are many programming languages for printers: HP PCL5, Epson ESC/P, PostScript, Zebra Programming Language, ASCII printers and many more. Using socket programing available in MonoTouch it is possible to communicate/print to any network printer, but it would be easier to have a "unified" interface like the ones available on WinCE (PrinterCE, PrintCE), libraries that can be
ported to the iPhone.
The attached sample it's not simple line printing but implements a small part of the PCL5 interface. It will print two boxes and some text on any PCL5 compatible network printer (if you have such a printer you can try it). The only two parameters required are the IP of the printer and the port used for communication (usually 9100).
Let's hope that soon we will see PrinterTouch or PrintTouch library :). If you need more details or find this post useful please let me know.

I will continue my "quest" for developing a small S.F.A. application on the iPhone and/or iPad using MonoTouch.


SocketPrint

WP7 CTP SDK or HOW TO GET THE DEVELOPERS FRUSTRATED

Initially this post was about WP7 Printing. Two days ago I thought that it would be nice to write about printing from WP 7 and iPhone and the only "compatible" that I could think of was using a WiFi printer (on the iPhone the bluetooth stack doesn't have implemented the SPP and you have to hack it ). It's something I've already did years ago in Compact Framework when I wasn't using PrinterCE or PrintCe and wanted to share it cause it is a new beginning and at some point in a small business application you will need to print something. (it was a proof of concept).
I got everything prepared and started writing the WP7 app when I saw that in the System.Net there is no socket support. I've started digging up, again, in the emulators files wanting to see if the System.Net file is the same on the emulator with the one in the SDK ("\Program Files\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\Silverlight\v4.0\Profile\WindowsPhone"). What I've found out using Reflector is that there is no System.Net in the emulator image, but all the functionality is implemented in mscorlib.dll and there is also the Socket class fully implemented. What Microsoft did is to "cripple" the assemblies in the OS for the SDK. They made the version to be 2.0.5 (for some of the files) which will make compiled programs run just fine on 3.7 which is the the version on the emulator. mscorlib for example in the development tools is 428kb and on the emulator is 1,18MB. Almost every assembly in the SDK is "crippled". If you want to compare the sizes just download this zip.
I wanted to see if I can pass this restriction but the answer is no because the classes that are not available in the SDK assemblies on the emulator are compiled with the tag [FrameworkVisibilitySilverlightInternal, SecuritySafeCritical] (there is more than one tag) which results in a MethodAccessException if you try to use it.
Printing just turned out into frustration. Sockets are there, database support it's there, Microsoft can use it but developers cannot. It's not that it is not implemented (like copy/paste), but somebody decided that it's not safe to use them. On WP7 forum somebody said that this functionality could compromise the user experience and it is not ready for prime time. It is strange cause we have being using sockets and database in NETCF programs for years and never influenced the user experience or seemed not ready.
WP7 is a nice platform but developers don't have what they need, and some of this it's because Microsoft decided that they don't need it. WebIS don't have what they need, Resco also, Mozilla stops development on WM and one week later they have an Android beta version, Skype don't have a WM version anymore should be enough reasons to change attitude.
Microsoft needs developers