Anyway, I got quite discouraged after all this time with 8 apps in the marketplace, some since WP7 launch, but only an extremely lackluster download performance in the Marketplace.  I was beginning to think nobody appreciated me.  Or, more to the point, it seemed clear that nobody liked my offerings.  I’ll confess it: my best performer, the Fraction Calculator, has accrued a mere 185 downloads in the past 9 months or so.  Obviously, at this rate, I’m not heading for a state of independent wealth, that’s for certain.

So I kind of temporarily tossed in the towell while I tried to think of something I could do that would actually be popular.  I’ve been trying to pick up the skillset of an XNA game programmer, but this has been proving to be a rather tough climb in learning-curve land.

But over the past week it seemed like I really needed to try out converting one of my apps from paid to ad-supported.  I picked my most anemic app, Just Sayin’, to work on first. This app has gotten only  12 total download over the past seven or eight months, all paid, so I guess this means that I’ve earned about $7 from the effort — which was small, since it was a quick throwaway.  I didn’t really expect much from it.

As my subject for putting an ad into it, I decided to reissue it, renamed “Free Sayin’”, and with some enhancements.  And so I did it.

The result has been somewhat dramatic.  To my surprise, and it has been less than 5 days since I published it, and I don’t yet have any download numbers, the ad unit has already gotten 3,600 impressions, and there are about 7 reviews on the thing — to this point none of my apps garnered any reviews, except for Fraction Calculator which got exactly one.  I guess the app, by its nature, engages the user somewhat, and to go through the entire stock of clever sayings and quotes that it displays might take an hour or so if someone is diligent at sitting there, and this might explain the impression count.

Since then I have reissued Fraction Calculator and Decimal2Fraction calculator as free, ad-supported apps, but they are new enough that I have virtually no data on them.  I don’t expect much from them, but… one never knows.

I guess the future of ad-supported apps is perhaps brighter than for paid apps.

The Keynote

The classes were all held in the Center, although the lunch was distributed from a large assembly room in the lowest floor of the church proper, and the keynote was delivered in the chapel.  And what a delightful old structure the chapel is!  Here’s a photo of the keynote being delivered, taken using my Dell Venue Pro Windows Phone:

2011 Portland Code Camp Keynote with ScottHanselman

Scott Hanselman did a bangup job delivering the Keynote, and in true Hanselman style combined wit and information for a very entertaining session and well worth the trip to Portland from my home town of Olympia, Washington (110 miles one-way).

In true Mike Clark style, I don’t remember much from the keynote except for the way the projector kept overheating and turning itself off, necessitating someone resetting it.  About eight times, I would guess.  And one story Scott told about one of his Africa trips.  He may have blogged about in the past, but I don’t remember it from his blog.  Here’s a paraphrased version:

While on a trip with his family to Africa a few years ago (his wife is from there), they were driving between Nairobi and some podunk town I don’t remember the name of, and there was seemingly nothing between them except trackless wilderness.  They started having trouble with the Landrover vehicle, namely one of the brakes locked up and they were having to drive it with the brake on one wheel smoking away.  Scott said someone in the car suggested they stop and pour water on the brake to cool it — which he thought if they did it would shatter the brake and possibly make things worse.  He started to think that they were in serious trouble, possibly mortal trouble!  As he was having this thought he saw ahead of them a Masai warrior standing by the track, in full Masai traditional dress.  He thought that maybe they could stop and ask the fellow where there might be some help for their vehicle.  As they neared him, Scott said the Masai gentleman wasn’t paying any attention to them, his focus was entirely on the cell phone in his hands, busy texting!  Here out in the middle freaking nowhere there was this Masai warrior wearing centuries old traditional dress, texting manically away on a 21st century electronic device!  Scott said he pulled out his cellphone and to his surprise found that there were a full five bars!  More than could commonly be counted on in Portland.  So, he relaxed knowing that he would be able to summon help if the vehicle did break down.

Of course, from the coverage map shown here on the Kenya-Advisor website, coverage is good only along a particular corridor running from Lake Victoria to the coast.  Not that this is worth complaining about!

There were quite a number of sessions at Code Camp, but inasmuch as my interest these days is pretty much all Windows Phone all the time, that was all I was interested in — and there were sessions all day on this vital subject.  In fact during one period there were two sessions, and I sent my wife in to take notes on one while I attended the other.

Kelly White and Alchemy

I wish I could report some details on the sessions, but I was there to acquire information by osmosis, and anyway, for a Code Camp I didn’t see all that much code going across the projector screens.  The most important part of these sessions were two given by Kelly White of Silvertail Software.  Kelly described how he was working with the Marketplace in marketing his WP7 game, Alchemy.  One emphatic thing he said was Do Not Publish Automatically.  His primary reason for this was that if there was something wrong that the tester doesn’t catch, then you have at least a respite to catch it before it goes out into the Marketplace.  He got bitten by this at one point, he indicated.

In fact, I got bitten on this once myself.  It remains to be seen, however, if this would actually be much of a safety feature.  My app got published automatically, having a fatal flaw in it, but I didn’t catch the flaw until a couple of days after it was published.  Waiting to manually publish wouldn’t have helped.  But he’s right in one sense: waiting gives you a chance to verify the operation of your app before it goes out to users.

I Finally Meet Mark Miller

In another session I attended, a “famous developer” named Mark Miller gave a presentation on design.  It was generally quite good and interesting, although I took exception to his characterization of the Metro interface as “terrible design.”  This surprised me, as he seemed to expect that there had to be some kind of color scheme coordination with the tiles and Hubs.  My question is, has he actually worked with the Metro interface?  I have worked with my wife’s iTouch and found its user interface to be adequate but quite clunky and very very prosaic (boring).  This being one of the interfaces that Mark was praising, I have to wonder whether he was being a purist for purism’s sake?  Oh, well, no accounting for taste.

Mark Miller works for DevExpress, and I remember him chiefly from his participation in the podcasts published by Carl Franklin, DotNetRocks and Mondays!  Mondays of course is a total comedy hour, and though it is a scream, is definitely an acquired taste — I have enjoyed it from time to time, but it gets a bit raunchy (a bit?!).  I haven’t listened to it for quite some time (Mark says they haven’t been recording it that regularly of late, everyone being rather busy), but DotNetRocks is purely technical and well worth any .NET developer’s attention.

Mark is very good at explaining things and clearly has a great depth of knowledge.  Both my wife and I got a lot out of his presentation, my quibble about his opinion of Metro notwithstanding.  I had a chance to speak with him personally at the DevExpress table later and found him to be very personable.

Winning!

But the most exciting event of the event, so to speak, was for me the prizes that they had drawings for at the dinner in the evening!  Mainly because I won something!  Not the XBox/Kinect package they had available (of course), but one of the prizes donated by DevExpress.  I won their toolkit named DXExpress Enterprise, which is a $1300 retail value!  The monetary value of the prize isn’t so exciting to me, but the capabilities of the package are worth shouting about!  Check this product out: DXExpress Enterprise Edition.  Tools for WinForms, AJAX, WPF and Silverlight!  Wow!  Nothing for Windows Phone, unfortunately, but hey, I don’t want to look this gift horse in the mouth!  And the package includes CodeRush!  I have always wanted to work with CR, and now I get my chance!  Thanks DevExpress and the Portland CodeCamp!

I expect that it will be approved and available in the Marketplace in just a few days, if the certification process runs true to my previous experiences.

And that’s assuming as well that the tester doesn’t find any Gotchas!

I will now begin working on the last exam app, for the General license class.  This one ought to go quickly as well, although there are a couple of wrinkles.  First wrinkle is some oddities in the question pool that I have to allow for.  Second wrinkle is that the current question pool expires on June 30, 2011!  There is little point of publishing the app if it can only be used for a couple of weeks, so I will publish it with the new question pool, which won’t be effective until July 1, 2011.  It’s OK, there won’t hardly be anyone who will want it in the short period between now and July 1.

Actually, it was back in the Marketplace a few days ago, but I’m just now getting around to mentioning it.  If you want to check it out, search in the Marketplace with my name “Mike Clark”, or with my Ham Radio callsign, WA7MC.

Screenshot:

I actually put the first Ham Radio practice exam app into the App Hub last week after what I thought was exhaustive testing.  Turned out it wasn’t exhaustive enough.  The thing worked fine up until the moment you hit the Windows button on the Exam page (or got tombstoned from it).  Then the jig was up and it would never work again, unless you deleted it and re-downloaded it.

After I caught this — fortunately decided to test it as an actual downloaded app after it got published — I pulled it from the Hub.  Fortunately only two downloads (besides my own) had occurred, so there hadn’t been much damage to users by this time.

Turns out that in coming back from tombstoning you would hit a Navigation exception.  Sometimes.  But once you did the thing was broke.  I thought it was some really esoteric bug, but it turned out to be a glaring omission in part of my tombstone-handling in the Exam page.

Man, I feel stupid.

That’s why I call them “stupid bugs”.

There’s only one troublesome issue: that tombstoning has proven to be a bit of a puzzle!  Whenever I am trying to return the user to the pivot they were on when they tombstoned it hasn’t been working the way I thought I coded it.  But it is only tonight that I discovered that the pivot Selection_Changed event is firing before the Page_Loaded event!  I hadn’t even known it was firing at all until the user made a pivot selection.  Evidently, the Selection_Changed is fired because the act of painting the page trips it.  At least that is what it looks like.  And since the Selection_Changed event was being used by me to memorize the new user location (i.e. which pivot the user was in now), of course it took the default, and thus overrode what had been set before the tombstoning.  I’ll figure a way around that shortly.  That’s actually the last significant “thing” holding me back from submitting the app.  So I am very sure that I will submit it to the Marketplace tomorrow.

I had a really bad time getting an important part of the navigation working with the Set Exam selection, which was originally done using a ListBox.  I found that when clicking on the MainPage selection button from Score page’s Return pivot, it would definitely try to send you to the MainPage, and would even start to display it (the AppBar would pop up briefly), but you’d find yourself on the Set Exam page instead.  Very odd behavior, and I bet it is a bug.  But, wanting to not screw around with it any further I changed out the ListBox selection for a bunch of buttons.  The odd behavior vanished with that.  Once I get this app submitted, I will definitely fire the ListBox/Navigation thing over to Microsoft to see if there’s some kind of bug going on in there.

So, after this I’ll be using this completed app as the template for the other two Ham licensing exams, and so as soon as I get the question pools ironed out they will go in as well.  I’m doing this at an awkward time for one of the exams, the middle one (General license class) because the current question pool expires at the end of June.  I have the new question pool, but it won’t be valid until July 1.  And by the time I’d be ready to submit that app it would be way close to the expiration date on the old exam.  So, I may delay that one and do the third exam (for Amateur Extra class) right after this current one goes in.

I was thinking to doing some more Ham Radio-related apps, but my wife wants me to start working on a game after I get these three apps submitted, so that’s the next goal — her thought (and I concur, actually) is that games have a better income potential, especially if they are ad-supported (See Elbert Perez’s blog).  I had a game in mind: a version of a VERY old arcade game favorite of mine: Lunar Lander.  Not under that name of course.  But I checked the Marketplace and there’s several games under that concept in there already — with much better graphics than I had planned to do.  I was going to go for the original vector graphics look and feel.  So, I don’t know.  I’m sure I could come up with something else. 

Maybe the Marketplace needs one more Sudoku app?    No?  I didn’t think so.

I sometimes have the luck of not having the same problems as everyone else, so I wasn’t expecting it, but was also not surprised to find that I was going to have to deal with it anyway.  So there we were.  So this is what happened: it got hung up on Step 6 of 9, and eventually popped out into Zune with the error code: 801812C1.

It had a web link and I followed it.  It said that there was a device driver that needed updating, and provided some ameliorative action.  I followed the advice, but it didn’t work.  In fact, I chased around the web looking for the best way out of this, but nothing seemed relevant.  One site suggested that I plug the phone into the PC, and when it tried to pull in a device driver from the web, tell it to stop and let the update go out for it instead.  This apparently was advice based on Windows 7, and I’m on Vista.  I tried to do it anyway, and it didn’t work.

But this gave me an idea.  Obviously there was some device driver already on my system, else Zune wouldn’t be able to talk to the phone, and it was doing so just fine.  So I chased down my Control Panel and then the Device Manager.  I found the WP7 driver in the listing for Portable Devices and I uninstalled it.  I also had it deleted when the management console asked if I wanted to do that.  I know this took immediate effect because suddenly Zune couldn’t talk to the phone.

Next step was to unplug the phone, and plug it back in.  Of course the Plug n Play kicked in, and it went out to dig out the driver from the web.  I let it do so, and eventually the driver was reinstalled, and Zune could talk to the phone again.  Great.  Now, having made certain that the driver was the very latest by uninstalling and reinstalling from fresh, I restarted the update process again.

This time the update went much better.  It breezed by step 6, and I thought it would cruise all the way through to the last step, number 9, but this time it held up on step 8.  Unwilling to screw things up by quitting too early (I think I had read that the update should only take 30 minutes or so), I let it sit for a good two hours.  Finally, I gave up and clicked on the Cancel button.  Thinking that the update had failed and wondering what would happen if I made another try, I hesitantly unplugged the phone and plugged it back in.  Eventually Zune recognized it again, and I was expecting to be offered the Feb 2011 update again, but Lo! and Behold! it was offering me the Mar 2011!  Huh.  Wadda ya know?

I fired up the Mar 2011 update and the process greased right through to the end, successfully.  Yay! 

Well, I don’t know if everyone who has had my problem will find their results the same as mine, but it might be at least one more pathway to a successful update.

I’ve been trying to get the attention of someone in the Mothership to beg and plead for a gratis WP7 device if one could be made available, since my finance department has thus far utterly denied the possibility of obtaining one through any commercial means.  I’ve contacted (or made blind stabs at contacting) various folks I’ve run into or heard from at Microsoft to this purpose, only to find success eluding me.  I had given up for a couple of months but resumed my importuning back last month.  Here the tide turned.  I found Chris and his email and shot off a desperate plea, including the magic mantra: “Help me, Obi-Chris Koenigy, you’re my only hope!”  Of course I hoped my geek-cred would be proven by this invocation, but feared it wouldn’t be enough.  Almost immediately I got an out-of-office notification that he’d be gone for a week.  Oh, well.  So much for that attempt, I thought.  He’ll never see my email amongst a week’s worth of backlog.  Then I was pleasantly surprised to get a response right away, and he said he would do what he could to help. 

Well, this went variously trying different avenues until Chris wrote me and said that he was coming back from MIX2011 with four devices, and oh, by the way, would I still like one?  Of course, I responded :Yes! 

Yesterday, that device arrived: a Dell Venue Pro.  It is gorgeous!

Quite frankly, this was completely unexpected behavior, and I wasn’t sure if it was native behavior or introduced by something I did, or something that the Non-Linear Navigation Service provided by Yochay Kiriaty caused, but it turns out to be native behavior.  I’ll explain the problem, then show how I overcame it.

Non-Linear Navigation Service

But first of all I want to emit a word or two in praise of Yochay Kiriaty and the Windows Phone Developer team for their work creating the Non-Linear Navigation Service!  Hip hip hooray!  The Ham Radio Practice Exam app is complex enough to be getting into some serious loop navigation problems and I was starting to despair that I would have to interrupt development in order to fix the problem myself.  But then I happened upon NLNS, and my problem was solved!  I am most grateful, and this ought to demonstrate the dedication and attention to detail put forth by Microsoft’s Windows Phone Developement Team.  This is one classy bunch!

Navigation Using a List Box

Rather than trying to work inside my app, which in the relevant locations has a lot of code unnecessary to illustrate the problem, I’ll use  a bare-bones example.  Let’s start with the list box:

List Box XamlList Box with Selected Item

Here is its SelectionChanged handler:  

List Box Selection_Changed Event Handler

Page1.xaml is a simple page with nothing in particular on it. The interesting behavior is demonstrated by running the app.  Click on either of the two list box items, and you will be taken to Page1.  Everything very normal and boring.  But now click on the Back navigation button. You find yourself back on the MainPage looking at the List Box, as expected, but there’s a difference.  See the color of the List Item you clicked earlier?  It’s a blue color and if you click on it now, nothing happens.  If you click on the other List Item, you will be taken to Page1, and upon return to the MainPage this time the other List Item will be blue and unselectable. 

List Box with Selected Item

The Workaround

The Code Workaround

http://iwasabouttosay.wordpress.com

Now I’ve blogged in many places before, but my WordPress blogs are now my current outlets.  I will not be updating the old ones, and they may even disappear because nobody ever visits them anyway — least of all me!

So, on with the show.

PS – that blogpost I said was “gone”?  Well, it wasn’t deleted, it was merely moved to the new blog.