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.

Even with the new Windows Phone 7 coming out, I’m sure there are still some of out there that are building applications for the older Windows Mobile platforms.  I’ve been doing them for years but had a break for probably a year.  Most of my older development was either Pocket PC stuff or WinMo 5.x. 

Fast forward to now.  Had a project come up that was with Windows Mobile 6.5.  Being that I love Visual Studio 2010 like it was one of my kids (maybe not quite that much), I sought out the SDK for Mobile 6.x for VS2010.  Well, no such luck, it’s not supported.  Back to VS2008 we go.  So I go download the DTK for it and install it.

Ok, all installed and ready to.  Now it’s time to create the demo for the project.  So I create a quick little something with a few screens and very little functionality just to get ideas down for the client to look at.  Go to build it to test the little bit that’s’ in it and get some screen shots.  F5 and we wait and wait and wait … literally for minutes.  Ok, this can’t possibly be right.  Off to Bingle an answer.  I find a lot of people experiencing the problem (from quite a while ago), but no real answers.  Fine, suck it up and just get moving forward because of the time constraint on the project. 

About once a week or so, I’d get so frustrated at the build times that I’d search again, trying various different search terms.  One person said it had to do with the references being made in the project – poppycock.  One suggestion was to kick of MSBuild via the command line to speed the build. By this time, my build was literally taking about 5 minutes.  This still isn’t a very big solution – it’s one project with 4 screens and a few classes.  Building from the command line took about 5 seconds.  Ok, something to do with the building process in VS.  Search some more.

So I ran across this article from VS2005 days talking about the Platform Verification Task (PVT).  I read through the article (quickly) and tried to implement the fix.  Well, it didn’t work for me.  Frustrated as anything, I shoot off an email to Scott Hanselman and we start trying to narrow it down via email.  He found the same article and pointed me to it. Told him I had already tried it and it didn’t seem to work. So he figured it had to be some add-in or something else and suggested firing up Process Explorer and trying to debug it.  Before going through all that, I decided to check that PVT article again and double check what I had done.  Well, it was BKAC and I had a typo.  Fixed the typo and VS builds in seconds too!  Thank you Scott!

So, I do recommend reading the PVT article referenced above, but here is the nitty-gritty on what needs to be done:

• As an admin, navigate down to %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\[Target Version].  In my case, it’s 3.5.
• In there, you will need to edit Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets.  This is just an xml file.

• Find the line (about 2/3s down) that says Name="PlatformVerificationTask" you’ll want to modify it to Name="PlatformVerificationTask" Condition="'$(SkipPlatformVerification)' != 'true'"

• Next, you need to add an environment variable.  Go into the properties of the computer and go into Advanced system settings

• Now create a variable called SkipPlatformVerification either for the user (what I did) or the whole system and set it’s value to true.  If you later want to turn the verification back on, change the value to false.

• Restart Visual Studio if you had it open.

I hope this helps some people out, it frustrated me for a LONG time….

Microsoft Press is giving away Charles Petzold’s new book Programming Windows Phone 7.  If you have an interest in this platform, go get yourself a copy.  The book is about 1,000 pages and 24 chapters long.  It covers both Silverlight and XNA programming.  I just downloaded my copy a minute ago and am eager to start reading it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-ebook-programming-windows-phone-7-by-charles-petzold.aspx

Ok, yeah, I know I’m like *really* late to the game on this one, but I finally put this on feedburner.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/georgehandlin