Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Last week I ended up getting up at about 3:30am and couldn’t sleep. So I did what any self respecting nerd would do. I went upstairs, opened up Visual Studio, and started making my first Windows Phone 7 program. I really wanted to create a program to be able to read the Mac address and display it easily from the phone. I quickly realized that the Silverlight functionality available on the phone is incredibly limited. By incredibly it’s really very pathetic. I would say it’s the most closed ecosystem of any mobile phone on the market, with exception to BlackBerry, but even then I haven’t dived into BlackBerry programming since the 8000 series.

It was fine enough to be able to use the emulator for phone development, but since I have a real phone I wanted to dive right into using things I create directly on my device. That’s when I discovered the App Hub. It’s basically like Apple’s development program where you have to pay $99 plus tax to join their little programming community/marketplace. With that cost you you are entitled to exactly one year of membership, and access to using a development device. This is where Apple and Microsoft take a sharp turn away from each other. With Apple it’s a one time yearly fee for complete access to the marketplace, documentation, code development environments (Xcode), SDK’s, and ability use development profiles on your physical devices. Microsoft on the other hand requires a background check to even get started. Microsoft didn't mention this until AFTER I paid them.

I failed the immediate background check. This is the second time I've failed to prove that I am me. It was asking questions related to my mortgage bank, my student loan bank, and what my monthly mortgage rate is. Well, first the mortgage bank list didn’t display my bank, my student loans were paid off/bank not listed, and none of the listed monthly mortgage rate range were even close to mine. Instead of a quick check it’s turned into a week long wait, having to fax a copy of my drivers license, and just today was granted access to start using my device for programming.

Talk about a buzz kill. Nothing like waiting a week with NO status updates to kill my enthusiasm. First the device is incredibly limited in access to physical functionality, and then jumping through hoops even to use the device I paid hard-cash to own really just puts it over the top from being sad to pathetic. Still, I am happy to see they finally agreed I am me, and now from this day forward I actually feel the $100+ dollars I paid to get denied was at least worth _something_. I’m hoping to push out a few project ideas and at least get a bullet point on the resume that I’ve made Phone 7 applications.

After getting a first hand glimpse of the Windows Mobile Phone 7 from a buddy I just couldn’t contain my desire to program on the new platform. I’ve been slowly drifting away from Microsoft since the introduction to iPad development, and especially after having been burned so badly by the brick that was my Windows Mobile 6.1. Two years of servitude to the stylus will make anyone a bit skittish to get back into the mix. However, the newly intuitively designed touch sensitive interface really showed me that Windows Mobile had changed, and maybe this time it really would stop beating me at night.

Later that night I happened to be cruising around on Amazon looking for some decent study guides for future exams, and happened to note Amazon had a beta wireless.Amazon.com. Man, what a mistake to click that link to see the Windows phone offerings. Not only were the Windows Mobile Phones listed, but they were only $49.99 with new contract sign-ups. I still haven’t seen my willpower since that moment in time, and I think it left me for good this time.

Two days later my new Windows Mobile Phone 7 was at the door, and a crisp clean gorgeous Samsung Focus was unboxed. Instantly I knew this was the phone for me. The display was epic, the finger tracking was tops, and the fluid OS sealed the deal. I realized then I had made a good decision, but also a two-year pact with the devil (AT&T) but that’s another story.

After having spent the better part of last weekend out of town I had ample time to study, delve into phone functionality, and really get a sense of total device functionality The first thing I noticed was how heavily tied to social networking this phone is. The integration of Facebook/Live/Gmail contacts is astoundingly good. Albeit a little confusing trying to manually import my old contact list to the new phone. There didn’t seem to be a clear cut ‘add contact’ flow. The contact list was initially created from my Facebook friends list, live messenger contacts, and when adding phone numbers the phone asks to append details to the contact. This indicates to me these contacts are co-dependant on my current friend or buddy statuses. I'm not totally sure whether they’d be removed from my ‘People’ list if i dropped them from Facebook or messenger accounts.

The entire weekend was one big love fest with the device. I don’t think it left my hand for more than an hour or two, and at that point was either on my lap or at the charger. Don’t even get me started on the Zune device management software. Talk about making iTunes look like something straight out of the early 90’s. Seriously, iTunes is a pile of crap comparably to how fluid and well thought out the Zune interface software is. Somehow Microsoft managed to make the act of syncing look cool.

I didn’t really run into the negatives of the phone until I got home and tried to set the phone up on my wireless network. It was a disaster. I try to run a tight ship on security around my house, and especially with wireless access. I use a three stage approach, first I disable SSID broadcast, I require a connection password, and I use Mac address filtering. To say I was shocked to find that the Windows Mobile Phone 7 doesn’t display a Mac address anywhere in any settings would be an understatement. It’s nowhere. I spent close to an hour examining every single menu, setting, and poking in places I knew it couldn’t be. Turns out I wasn’t crazy, for now, and Microsoft didn’t include support to display the Mac address. On top of that the phone can’t see SSID broadcast disabled networks, and does NOT include support for manually adding the network to the phone. The solution? Enable SSID broadcast, turn off Mac address filtering, allow the device to connect, and then get the Mac address from the LAN device connection listing. Considering this device is targeted to business users try talking a bank’s network admin into that one.

The next problem I had ended up being with what I was most excited about, the Xbox Live integration on the phone. Before I knew what I was doing I setup my phone to use the Live account my MCP credentials are associated with. It then created a temporary XBox Live account under that Live account. That is NOT the same Live account my actual XBox Live account is associated with. There is no obvious way to change the associations on the phone, and instead requires going to the ‘Edit Profile’ settings for the auto-generated account. Once in the edit profile area you have to scroll all the way to the bottom, past the form entry fields, and there is a link on how to change the Live account the XBox is currently using. Ok, I can try that, but kind of annoyed the phone isn’t the one that can be changed. The saddest part is the XBox Live account steps provided by the phone show the pre-Kinect XBox update menus. Not entirely accurate account management menu navigation instructions, but none the less I found where I needed to go and followed the steps from there. After OK’ing the change on the XBox to use the Live account my phone is using my XBox instructs me that I cannot change the Live account it’s associated with because the one on the phone already has has an account. Seriously? I tried it twice to the same results. At this point I have some auto generated ‘PlayerXXXXXX’ account, and no way to get my gamer tag information for my real XBox Live account.

The remaining problems are more nit picking (so far) than anything else major, and could be from my past year of using primarily Apple interfaces. It has to do with the cursor displayed on finger press to navigate blocks of text. That is where iWhatever kills Windows Mobile. The cursor appears and the first thing to note is how incredibly distant it is from your actual finger whereas with Apple the retina display appears at least at your finger tip. The next thing you notice is how incredibly jerky the cursor behaves when it actually gets focus within the text block. It takes a surgeons dexterity to get the dang thing moved between a character and a trailing period. Good luck if you’re in a moving car. Seriously, it’s horrible, and makes me really wish I had a physical keyboard to overcome how terrible it is.

Still at the end of the day for all the negatives (so far) the device really stands out. The interface responsiveness is what amazes me the most. Coming from a web background I can’t help think it looks like like someone threw a bunch of floating divs with fixed width/height styles with solid background colors. Really though it’s the small things that amaze me the most. When I scroll through the main category list the bunching of the boxes when I try to scroll too far, or when I flip my thumb sideways and the top panel just folds out of view. Simple but oh does it make such a difference to me. Even when the wallpaper (if you call it that) needs to be slid upwards to view the menu options is simply an aesthetic wonder. I sat slightly sliding it upwards just enough so it would fall back down for at least ten minutes. When it comes to actual applications don’t even get me started on how neat the panorama display is. Its noticeable after years of navigating an iTouch interface that my thumb isn’t bent nearly as often to press or move around. I just slide my thumb from left to right and things just happen. It’s just the way you physically interact with the device that really stomps the competition. It’s much more… for a lack of a better world ‘useable’.

Why can’t I quit you Windows Mobile? I am now the semi-proud owner of a new Windows Mobile Phone 7. The specific phone being the Samsung Focus. In short it’s night and day better functionally than Windows Mobile 6.1, and I dare say superior to the experiences I’ve had with iPod Touch 3rd gen and iPad. There are server quirks I really do not like with the Windows Phone 7, but all-in-all it’s not a bad first gen phone.