Take your partner by the hand..

If LobsterPot Solutions had a theme song, one pretty obvious choice would be Rock Lobster by The B52s.

It looks like we now have another option!

First Microsoft Partner with Gold Competency in Australia - Well done Rob, Ben, Roger, Ashley (and me!).

Also a big welcome to Ashley, our most recent Lobster to jump in the pot 😀

Select your Windows Phone 7 handset with Silverlight PivotViewer

Windows Phone 7 devices are now available in Australia. I dropped into a Telstra shop yesterday and spent a few minutes playing with their demo model. At some stage I’m hoping I’ll be able to actually purchase one of these things for myself! (A definite step up from my super-basic C3050, who’s primary reason for purchase was that it could at least play podcasts*).

Of course, the main reason I’d like a Windows Phone 7 is to play Nigel’s Word Puzzle game, but there’s also the whole “smartphone” thing of email/calendar/podcasts etc. If they can fix the “just show only the default calendar for a single email source” limitation (so that I can retrieve all our Google calendars for our family), then I reckon I’d consider getting Narelle one too, so that I could finally solve my calendar problem.

Anyway, so how to choose from the “vast array” (slight exaggeration!) of new handsets entering the market?

Why not try out a new Pivot Collection I’ve created that lets you sort and filter by your requirements – just go to http://pivot.lobsterpot.com.au/WP7/ and have fun!

Thanks to Rob for kindly hosting this on the LobsterPot Solutions site.

* – And I’m not even doing that right now as I’ve lost the earphones, and it has a silly non-standard plug so I haven’t replaced them yet. Not that I’m saying the loss of earphones alone is justification for getting a new phone!

Writing a Media Center Application in Visual Studio 2010

My ISP (Internode) provides a number of unmetered streaming radio stations for its customers. A while back I’d followed some instructions on how to set up shortcuts in Media Center to link to some of these stations. This worked pretty well, until the ISP reorganised their server and all of the shortcuts broke. I thought it would be an interesting exercise to write a simple Media Center application that could grab the current radio list from the published radio stream RSS feed, list those stations in Media Center and allow selecting a station and getting Media Center to start playing it.

1. Download and install the Windows 7 Media Center SDK. This install some samples, the SDK help file and some templates (but only for Visual Studio 2008).
2. Go to Charlie Owen’s blog and download his Addendum.zip. Amongst other things, this contains both project and item templates suitable for Visual Studio 2010. Follow the instructions to copy the templates into your Visual Studio templates folder.
3. Download and install the latest WiX 3.5 build (WiX 3.5 includes support for 2010)

Now you can start Visual Studio and you’ll see a new project template in the C# language section. There’s a few more things I needed to update to get everything working properly:

• Search for “Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A” and replace it with “Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v7.0A” (eg. devinstall.cmd)
• Search for “Windows Installer XML v3\bin” and replace it with “Windows Installer XML v3.5\bin” (eg. build.cmd)

Then it’s just a matter of getting up to speed with the intricacies of Media Center application writing!

The source code for the application (InternodeRadioMCE) is published on Google Code. It is very rough at the moment. As I get more familiar with the Media Center programming model I hope to improve it a bit!

And the photo? It’s of Rocky River (courtesy of our recent holiday to Kangaroo Island) – and the closest thing I could think of to a stream (as in streaming radio!)