Years ago I purchased the domain KimmysCookbook.com as a joke.  A friend on facebook had posted a picture of her taking a turkey out of the oven and a bunch of us started commenting on it and eventually the domain came to be.  She is a good cook, the joke wasn’t about her cooking, just about making a cookbook.

Anyway, I never did anything with it really, just posted that picture and let it sit.  Got to thinking that it would be a cool recipe site and with all the new stuff coming out of Redmond recently, why not take the time to build it up piece by piece using these technologies. 

I’ve been toying with the idea for a while, so I’ve already created a database locally for storage, but since we are looking to use new technologies and also doing it on the cheap and fast, we’ll use EF4’s code first ability tied with SQL Server CE 4.

Here’s the path I’m looking to take.  Each of these will be a separate iteration and push to the server.

1. Quick ASP.net MVC 3 with EF4 code first site
2. Add Silverlight support for ingredient editing
3. Add OData support
4. Silverlight out of browser with touch support
5. Windows Phone 7 application

As with any project, these items may change as we go along.  Next entry will outline step 1.

Registering your phone for development requires the use of Windows Phone Developer Registration tool.

In Windows 7, hit the Windows key (or start button) and type “reg”.  It should show up as one of the first items in the list.

You will want to have you phone tethered to your machine and unlocked if you use a PIN.  As it states, you must have an active account developer account for this to work.

Once the tool is up and your phone is tethered and unlocked, simply enter your Windows Live ID and password and hit the register button. Simple as that.  If you need to unregister a phone, just run the utility again with the phone you need to unregister and the button will change from “Register” to “Unregister”.

Recently a friend of mine asked me about digital frames and specifically about the Toshiba DMF102XKU. I hadn’t heard of it, but have had my fair share of digital frames – none of which have really had all that I wanted in a frame.  I want one that can get online wirelessly via at least 802.11g with WPA for security. I read through the specs on Amazon and it sounded good, so I ordered three.  I wanted a couple for gifts as well.

Opening the box shows the remote and the instructions.  One thing to note, the instructions are just a quick start guide.  The little booklet says to get the full owners manual you have to download it.  The link unfortunately does not go to the owner’s manual and doing a search on the site doesn’t turn it up either.  That’s one strike against it.  I’ve emailed them about sending it out.  Will update this post with whatever response I get.  Along with the quick start guide an “important information” guide.  This is only in English, so if you don’t speak English you are out of luck.  Of course if you don’t read English, you probably aren’t reading this anyway.

Another issue is the stickers on the frame – they were a bit difficult to get off and left a bit of residue behind.

The frame can either be mounted on a wall or use the stand.  The frame feels good, sturdy and well built.

When you first turn it on, it runs through a demo slideshow which shows the capabilities of the frame and some sample pictures.  The resolution is 800x480 and it has a tilt sensor to detect if it’s in landscape or portrait mode.  That’s nice.

So, the device is powered up and going through the demo.  Grab the remote to start working with it.  Remote doesn’t work.  Hmmm.  Grab one from another unit. Still no go.  So perhaps the unit is bad.  Looks like I’ll need to get in touch with customer support.

Thankfully the unit has a control built into the frame that lights up when you touch it.

So, let’s get this thing online.  That couldn’t be simpler if you have a modern router.  Just hit the WPS button on the router and the frame and it will do the rest for you.

Getting setup with online stuff is a little confusing.  In the image on the left above, there is an option for “Online Service Settings”.  It would make sense that this would be where you set up all your online stuff.  However, the only thing you can do there is setup 3 different Picasa accounts.  What you need to do is click Mode either on the remote (mine doesn’t work) or on the frame itself.  From there you click on FrameChannel and it will prompt you to activate your frame giving you an access code and a website to enter it into.  If you don’t already have a FrameChannel account, you can create one and the choose the services that will come down Here is a sampling of what can be done on FrameChannel.

I have set my facebook account up to feed into it, and within just a couple minutes the pictures started coming in from the facebook friends I selected to have feed it.  The “My Friends Photos” tab allows you to invite people to email or MMS photos to the frame.

There are a couple ads for FrameChannel that cycle through.  I need to figure out how to get rid of that.

You can also add things like Digg, Twitter, Facebook status messages and more to the frame.  I have added local events so when something is available in my area, it will show it to me.

Overall I’m pleased with the device. I hope I can get the couple issues I have worked out. Honestly, I’ll probably never use the remote, but I I want to have it available.

Ok, so I was chatting with Scott Hanselman the other day about an issue I was having and he asked what the WEI (Windows Experience Index) was on my machine.  I told him was 4.9 to which he said “that’s pretty low” … great.  Ok, I’d been wanting a new machine for a while now anyway and that was one of the things that pushed me to get a new one.

So, here is what I ended up getting.  It’s still in production, but should be here by the middle of the month. I’m very eager to get it!

• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
• Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-720QM Quad Core processor (1.6GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 2.8 GHz
• 1GB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) HD 5650 Graphics [HDMI, VGA] - For Quad Core Processors
• FREE Upgrade to 8GB DDR3 System Memory (2 Dimm)
• 160GB (Solid State Drive Flash Module)
• No Additional Office Software
• No additional security software
• 9 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (over-sized)
• 15.6" diagonal High Definition LED HP Brightview Widescreen Display (1366x768)
• TouchScreen with HP TouchSmart's intuitive multi-touch applications (includes HP TrueVision Webcam)
• SuperMulti 8X DVD+/-R/RW with Double Layer Support
• Intel Wireless-N Card
• Backlit Keyboard with Fingerprint Reader

I will of course upgrade it to Windows 7 Ultimate first thing.  Before I do however, I’ll get the WEI and post it!  The multi touch display will certainly help in developing for Windows Phone 7.

Facebook is now allowing you to download your data that you’ve put up.

This is good, because I’m sure most people probably don’t even know what they have posted.  I know I surely don’t.

Once the data is gathered, you receive an email to download it.

You are prompted for your password and then you can get the download.

Another security check is in place to verify your identity. This check has you verify people in 5 pictures of your friends.  They do allow you to skip twice since I’m sure (like me), many people don’t really know everyone they are friends with and of course there are times when people tag people in photos when there isn’t actually someone there so they’ll be prompted to look at it.  I’m not posting screen shots of this step since it contains pictures of people.

Upon successfully answer the questions of people, you’ll be prompted to actually download the file. In my case, it’s about 236 MB in size.

Once you retrieve it and unzip it, you end up with a directory structure like this:

My history only went back to 2009, however I know there is much more than that.  So the question is, do they delete it after a while or what?

The layout of the html is very basic, but it gets the job done.

Seems they really don’t want us to read it too easily…

My experience with migrating to BPOS wasn’t the best unfortunately. I’m documenting my experience here for my own recollection as well anyone else who may need help.  My migration is from a hosted exchange account from MailStreet. No real complaints with them, but I’m marketing BPOS, so I need to be using it. Plus there are more benefits to using BPOS over just a hosted Exchange service.  Granted, I won’t use many of them because of the current size of my company, but that should change over time.

My migration is very small – in fact, it’s just me right now, so I figured it would have to be really simple.  Well, one of my first problems was in sending up the csv file – it constantly erred out when I sent it up.

In all my navigation through the help on administration console at the time, I couldn’t find this page which my BPOS contact got from his technical contact.  This article helped immensely!  There is one thing wrong with the article though.  It says Step Three is to determine how to access the hosted exchange server.  This is actually done in the second step of the actual migration portion. The portion that is documented in that article the prep work to get the migration going.

Here is the csv format to use as text:

SourceServer,SourceIdentity,SourceLoginID,SourcePassword,TargetIdentity,DisplayName,ClientLocale, MailboxQuotaSize
<server>.<mailhoster>.net,user1@domain.net,user1@domain.net,password,user1@domain.net,User1,,5 GB
<server>.<mailhoster>.net,user2@domain.net,user2@domain.net,password,user2@domain.net,User2,,5 GB

If you have an administrative account on your hosted account (I do, I imagine most others do too), the only fields necessary in the csv file are “SourceServer”, “SourceIdentity” and “TargetIdentity”.  The identity fields are the email addresses.

One other issue I ran into was the value for the Source Server.  When setting up Outlook previously to work with MailStreet, the server name that was given to me was: mse17be2.mse17.exchange.ms. That never worked.  I logged into the administrative console for MailStreet and popped into OWA from there and the server name was: mail.mse17.exchange.ms. Using that name worked.  I’m certainly not an Exchange administrator by any means, so maybe that’s normal, I don’t know.  In any event, that worked and was another hurdle I had to get over.

Once you have your csv file created, open the migration tool.  If you haven’t already downloaded it, it can be found here.

When you first open it up, it’s going to ask you to log into your Microsoft online account.  After doing that, you’ll want to click “Add Mailboxes” on the right.  This will prompt you to upload the csv file you just created.  Now, because my migration is very small, I had already created my user account via the administration page.  So when I uploaded the file, here is what I saw:

At this point, click the migrate option on the right.  The second step in this wizard is where you choose the access method you will use for the hosted exchange account.

I chose administrative and put in the username (not the full email address) and password.

If you don’t get a value for your mailbox size, my finding is that the wizard will fail.  Obviously it hasn’t been able to resolve the mailbox. 

DNS change information can be found here and here.

And here are some important URLs to keep.

Unfortunately, they haven’t updated this page to show Phone 7 connectivity.  Thankfully, this page does.  It is, unfortunately, not as straightforward as it could and should be.  Hopefully the first update to the phone will address this.

Microsoft is giving away another free ebook!  This one is Moving to Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

The book contains three parts:

• Moving from Visual Studio 2003
• Moving from Visual Studio 2005
• Moving from Visual Studio 2008

Each part will help developers understand how to use Visual Studio 2010 to create many different types of applications and unlock their creativity independently of the version they are using today. This book will focus on Visual Studio, but we’ll also cover many language features that make the move even more interesting.
Each part will follow a similar approach and will include these chapters:

• “Business Logic and Data”
• “Designing the Look and Feel”
• “Debugging the Application”

Today is the release day for Windows Phone 7 devices here in the US.  I’m on AT&T and today they have the Samsung Focus and the HTC Surround available.  Tomorrow they should have the LG Quantum available.

From all the I’ve read about, the Focus is the way to go.  So, here we go.  Let the unboxing begin!

The headphones actually look pretty nice, unfortunately, we have yet another usb format on the cable.  *sigh*

I’m not so sure I like the back cover too much, feels a bit flimsy and don’t really like how it latches.

Here’s how it compares in size to my Blackberry and Zune HD.  The last picture shows that it’s just a bit thicker than the Blackberry.

Ok, battery is in and we are going to hit the power button.

Here is where all the beauty starts:

Signing in with my Windows Live ID.  This I have previously linked up with several other accounts.

So far so good.  I’m going to have to get used to the keyboard a bit since I’m so used to the keyboard on the Blackberry.  As of right now, I’m struggling a little with it.

Next post will go into some more of the functionality of the phone.