Passed 70-583

I just discovered that I’ve passed yet another beta exam!

• 70-583 - PRO: Designing and Developing Windows Azure Applications

So when I get around to taking the 70-513 exam, I would have then fulfilled the requirements for the certification:

• Microsoft Certified Professional Developer - Windows Azure Developer

Time to brush up on my WCF!

Aussie Toilets WP7 App

My second app ‘Aussie Toilets’ has now been published on the Windows Phone 7 marketplace. It’s an app for locating the nearest public toilet, and it’s free!

It uses data provided by the Australian Government’s National Toilet Map website. It’s a useful app to have on your phone, especially if you’re out and about and need to find the nearest ‘public conveniences’.

The app displays a map of your current location (or defaults to Australia if it isn’t sure, or you’ve declined permission for the app to access your phone’s GPS).

Once you’ve zoomed in to a particular location, it will begin loading the database. This may take a few seconds, as the database is quite large.

It then displays up to 5 nearest public toilets.

You can pan around the map, and use the standard ‘pinch to zoom’ to zoom in closer or further out.

Tapping on a name will take you to a new page with more details about that facility. The data is displaying using the ‘pivot’ control, so you can swipe left or right to pan to each section.

Specific facilities include male/female toilets, baby change and showers. Other facilities will be added in future versions (e.g. accessible toilets etc).

The opening hours are also displayed. Some locations might be open 24 hours, others (eg. in a shopping centre) only during certain times.

These details vary for each facility and are only as accurate as the data supplied to the database by the organisations responsible for each toilet (e.g. Councils, State government agencies, transport providers, shopping centres, service stations and food outlets). The app’s database in the initial release is current as of January 2011.

To install Aussie Toilets on your Windows Phone 7 device, go to http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=dcf35aa5-3829-e011-854c-00237de2db9e (Opens in Zune)

Future plans

• Detect and allow database updates to be downloaded as they become available from the government site
• Nice icons for facility details
• Display more of the facility details as included in the database
• Improve performance of database access
• Investigate ways to provide feedback and improve data quality

Footnote

I took quite a while to settle on the name ‘Aussie Toilets’. I’d had a few other good suggestions – things like ‘Dunny Directions’, ‘Loo Locator’ or ‘Aussie Loos’. In the end I decided I’d stick with a nice obvious self-explanatory (if slightly more pedestrian) name.

Sharing code between two WP7 projects

So you want to publish a free (aka ‘lite’) as well as paid versions of your Windows Phone 7 app? Ideally you can do this with a minimum of duplication between the two projects. This is how I’ve approached the problem.

Create second project

Assuming you’ve got a solution with a working WP7 project (I’ll refer to this as ‘primary’). Add a new WP7 project to your existing solution (referred to as ‘secondary’). In the new secondary project, add a reference to the primary project.

Move resources into resource dictionary

If you have any resources defined in your App.xaml file, you should move them to a separate xaml file and use a ResourceDictionary to reference them. Here’s a cutdown version of my Styles.xaml. This lives in the primary project and has a build action of ‘Page’.

<?xml version=”1.0” encoding=”utf-8” ?>

App.xaml for primary

I’ve been using Caliburn Micro framework so the bootstrapper property has to be moved inside the nested ResourceDictionary.

App.xaml for secondary

In this file, we need to fully specify the path to Styles.xaml

In my case, the secondary project has it’s own AppBootstrapper class that inherits from the primary project’s similarly named AppBootstrapper. There’s more info on using ResourceDictionaries with WP7 in this StackOverflow question.

Make page navigation Uris fully qualified

If you have any NavigationService calls to navigate to other pages in the primary project, they will need to be fully qualified so that they continue to work when called from the secondary project.

_navigationService.Navigate( new Uri( “/Primary;component/SettingsPage.xaml”, UriKind.RelativeOrAbsolute ) );

Fully qualify the value of the NavigationPage attribute in the WMAppManifest.xml file

Assuming you want the same page to load at the start in the secondary project, you’ll need to change the reference in the NavigationPage attribute in the WMAppManifest.xml file.

Bear in mind that if you edit the application properties through the Visual Studio project properties interface, this will revert the NavigationPage value back to just “MainPage.xaml”, so you’ll need to update it again.

Add links to existing files for all ‘Content’ files and application bar images

Any files in your primary project that have a build action of ‘Content’ will need to be added to the secondary project. Add them as existing items and choose the ‘Add as link’ option so you just reference the existing file. Update the build action of all of these files to be ‘Content’. Common examples of these files would include ApplicationIcon.png and Background.png. Likewise, if you have any application bar icons, you’ll probably need to do the same.

Conclusion

Following these steps produces a nice lean secondary project like this: It’s hard to see from the icons (as Mercurial has overlaid green ticks on top), but the only unique files to the project are App.xaml, AppBootstrapper.cs and the contents of the Properties folder. All the others are linked to ones in the Primary project.