David Gardiner - Windows Phone

Are your photos safe?

2022-01-28T08:00:00.000+10:30

Last night I was chatting with a friend and remembering how years ago as a family we'd visited Wallaroo (on the Yorke Peninsula in country South Australia). I thought it would be nice to look at the photos I'd took when we were there. I opened my phone and used the 'Places' view to navigate to Wallaroo (figuring that would be easiest as I couldn't remember the exact date), but it didn't show any photos.

That's odd. So I then grabbed my laptop and navigated to https://onedrive.live.com (as since my Windows Phone days I've made use of the auto-upload to OneDrive feature). It too has a 'Places' view (though rather than a map, it's a list of places you can then drill in to), but again, no Wallaroo.

I then drilled in to the OneDrive folder structure (under Pictures then Camera Roll), and got a nasty shock.

All the non-iOS photos are missing.

There's basically no photos before December 2016 (looks like I have two photos from 2014 and 2015 that someone shared with me from their iPhone)

Windows Phone uses the WP_ prefix for its image filenames. There's absolutely none under that directory.

Check back to https://onedrive.live.com - same story.

Now I'm getting worried.

I fired up two of my older laptops. Neither of those had any older photos.

Before I re-installed my older laptop I did make use of the both the "File History" and "Backup and Restore (Windows 7)" system image backup. I found the external drive that was used for those backups and plugged it in.

The Backup and Restore system image backup has everything on it except the OneDrive folder! In fact it seems to be explicitly excluded from that backup.

The other problem is that all my Windows OneDrive instances have the Files On-Demand feature enabled - meaning that just placeholders are on the disk until you access the file.

Same goes for the File History - there's literally no 'OneDrive' folder there. Turns out this is because I had Files On-Demand enabled.

I also checked the Synology backups - both the full PC backup and the CloudSync I'd set up for my OneDrive.

My best guess by looking at some of the modification dates of the folders that are still there is that this might have happened quite a while ago, at least a year, if not longer. I don't look at photos that often, so I'm really not sure.

The only other backup I have are some CDs and DVDs that I've kept, back when I used to do physical backups to optical media. The newest of those I've found so far is from 2010. So I think I've probably lost a good 6 years of my digital photos.

What caused all the non iOS photos to be deleted? I honestly don't know. There are a few old photos that I found elsewhere in OneDrive (ones that I'd copied into different folders), but nothing under the 'Camera Roll' directory. Could it have been the iOS OneDrive app? I'm not sure. If I'd noticed them missing soon after they were deleted, I probably could have restored them from OneDrive's Recycle Bin, but sadly that only keeps the last 30 days, and this seems to pre-date that by quite a while.

Similarly, OneDrive also has a 'Restore your OneDrive' that let you roll back OneDrive to a previous version, but again only within the last 30 days.

Not surprisingly, I'm feeling a little sad about that - particularly knowing there was photos of the kids when they were little, that I no longer have. At least it's not all our photos from that time - other family members have their phones and separate backups to mine.

The moral of this story.

Backup your photos
Check that you're backing up what you expected.
Have a secondary (or tertiary) backup. Ideally ones that are a snapshot (not dynamically updated), and bonus points for keeping it at a separate location.
Be careful using OneDrive Files On-Demand (and understand that may affect other backup strategies)

Learn from my mistakes.

Farewell Windows Phone, Hey iPhone

2016-12-23T21:13:00.001+10:30

I’ve had my Nokia Lumia 920 phone for just over three and a half years, and it’s starting to age. It has served me pretty well, but the screen is showing a distinct yellowing and more annoyingly if someone calls me, I need to switch to hands free mode for them to hear me. (Not always convenient if I’m in a public place like sitting on a bus!)

So I’d started thinking about what’s next. I’d already decided that as much as I love the Windows Phone interface, there’s only a limited future for those phones so a change of platform was due.

Initially I was looking at Android phones, in particular the Nexus models (figuring that they would be better supported and updated seeing as they come from Google). I was a bit concerned about a number of security vulnerabilities discovered in Android recently, and while iOS isn’t necessarily any more secure, I had been impressed with the stance Apple had taken with the FBI earlier this year. The other consideration was that the kids will all have iPads for school, so maybe iOS could make sense.

I didn’t want a huge phone, so something similar in size to the 920 would be nice. A friend recently bought an iPhone 6 and I’d helped her set it up, and I thought it looked pretty good.

So weighing all that up (combined with getting $140 store credit when I bought two iPads on Black Friday) an iPhone it is. I ended up going with an iPhone, opting for the latest iPhone 7 model.

I placed the order on Wednesday and went in to the Apple Store here in Adelaide first thing Thursday morning to pick it up. Turns out most of the people in the queue outside the shop were for service and repairs so I was in and out in about 5 minutes. A quick visit across the road to Vodafone to get a nano SIM and job done. Because of the new SIM card, it did mean I couldn’t wait until Christmas morning to open my new present!

I already had an existing Apple ID, and it has a rather complex password. It’s quite a pain to have to enter into the phone repeatedly. I soon figured out that the fingerprint reader on the phone can be used instead of having to re-enter the password, but you need to enable that as it’s turned off by default.

Next stop was to install apps. A few favourites to match those I’d used on my Lumia and a few new ones to try out.

Twitter
Facebook
BOM Weather
Skype
Dropbox
My Vodafone Australia
Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote/Outlook
Office Lens
Microsoft Authenticator
Pluralsight
Stocard
metroMATE
KeePass Touch
Feedly
Endomondo
Australian Taxation Office
SwiftKey Keyboard
Google Maps
Fing Network Scanner
Pocket Casts

Paul Thurrott has written a couple of posts for people transitioning to iOS from Windows Phone. They are informative reading:

Some app-specific notes

Stocard

I used this on the Lumia, but frustratingly the Windows Phone version doesn’t have a backup/export option, so I’ll need to re-enter all my store cards. Maybe I can scan the barcodes off of the Windows Phone app directly into the iOS one?

Microsoft Authenticator

A nice two-factor authentication app. Obviously I needed to manually transfer all my accounts over. One nice thing, I can now just ‘Approve’ when my Microsoft Account needs authentication. No idea why they couldn’t do that on Windows Phone.

Australian Taxation Office

I was able to export my data from this app on Windows Phone to OneDrive and import it into the iOS version. The only thing which doesn’t transfer is any photos of receipts.

Pocket Casts

It does cost $5.99, but a) it’s created by an Adelaide company and b) it has a lot of recommendations (including Thurrott), so I splashed out on this 😀. It can import OPML files. I had one lying around on OneDrive, though it wasn’t my current list as the default Windows Phone podcast app doesn’t support exporting OPML files. Not a big drama.

So that’s my new Christmas present! Any other app suggestions for me?

Windows 10 Mobile on Lumia 920

2015-12-09T23:27:00.000+10:30

(I wrote this post on 10th December, but was waiting for Open Live Writer to support Blogger)

So this happened.. Last week I reset my phone so that Narelle could use it for a day (hers had broken the previous day). Once I replaced hers and got my handset back, I reset it again and started re-installing all my apps. Windows Phone may not be the most popular phones around, but one of the nice things about them is that they do automatic backups, and by default save all your contacts to the cloud, so there isn’t much you can accidentally lose.

So after reinstalling everything I thought “hmm.. Maybe I should try out the Windows 10 update”. I’d resisted this urge previously as I’d read lots of reports of how unstable it was, but now the new 950/950XL handsets are out which come with Windows 10, and there’s just been an additional update since then too. Worst case I can use the support tool to reset my phone back to Windows Phone 8.1 again.

The install took a little while (maybe an hour?).

I did notice the battery seemed to run down a bit on the first day – admittedly that day included the update which would have used a bit of juice.

The trouble is it’s hard to know if that is just Windows 10, or my handset – I’ve seen it occasionally do similar things with 8.1.

Windows 10 Mobile looks quite nice. The upgrade kept my icons on the start screen, though the layout needed tweaking as the size of the icons seemed to have changed slightly.

Some of the apps are updated (eg. News, Mail, Calendar). Actually I think I prefer the 8.1 News app, but the new one is ok. I have two mail accounts on my phone, and they ended up being combined. Not sure if there’s a way to un-combine them.

Some pluses – they finally have an Australian keyboard option (Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!). The browser is also the latest Edge version.

Some minuses – possibly due to my older handset – I find the response time for various things quite slow. Even just turning the phone on and unlocking has a noticeable delay. The opposite is true of scrolling. It seems a bit too sensitive, and I often end up scrolling way further than I intended.

I’m going to stick with it for a little while and see how I go. If the battery does prove to be a problem then reverting back to 8.1 might be the best option.

Windows Phone Podcast apps

2015-07-27T08:11:00.000+09:30

It seems such a simple thing to want:

A podcast app
One that doesn’t crash (too much)
Can list and play episodes in most recent order
Can download in the background

You’d think?

Way back in the day, Windows Phone 7 to be specific, podcasts were supported natively in the operating system. Except if you didn’t live in the USA. For some never explained reason, they never enabled this feature for non-US phones. Bizarre.

If I recall correctly, the original Windows Phone 8 was no different, but then eventually Microsoft released the Podcast feature as a separate app – “podcasts”.

It is a very basic app. Unfortunately I think that some of the developers of alternate podcast apps seemed to have given up when the official app came out – even if their own efforts had more features.

Carboncast

One of the first apps I tried on WP8 was Carboncast. The layout and design still impress me, but sadly it proved quite unreliable (and no background downloads). Unfortunately the developer apparently lost interest too – the last update was December 2013.

Podcaster

This was my next app of choice for a fair while. It aims to be more like the original built in app (as it was released before that app was made available to the rest of the world).

Background downloading was added in later versions, though I had occasional trouble with corrupted downloads.

Podcast+ Pro

I then moved to this app – Podcast+ Pro. Pretty good, but no background downloading.

Podcast Lounge

I came across this one earlier this year (I think someone recommended it on Twitter) and had been using it until recently. It is quite good, but alas it didn’t do background downloads. A recent release supposedly added this feature, but the implementation appears to be buggy as it never worked for me.

A few issues also with strange ordering of episodes and frustration with episodes previously ‘marked as played’ reappearing as unplayed. Feedback emails were sent, but no responses.

Castcenter

And so, another search of the store to see if there was anything else worth trying and I came across “Castcenter”. A free app, but you need to pay (in-app purchase) to unlock managing more than three podcasts. You can create custom playlists, and it does background downloads.

So far so good.

If you’re into podcasts and have a Windows Phone, let me know what app are you using?

Windows Phone app download stats

2015-02-01T19:03:00.001+10:30

I’ve installed the Windows 10 preview build on my laptop, and one side-effect of this is that I can’t get the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK bits to work (they won’t install). Hopefully they will be supported eventually in later (or the final) versions of Windows 10, but for now it means I can’t do any 7.1 builds of my phone apps using my laptop.

I thought it would be interesting to find out how many 7.1 users are still downloading the app, to gauge whether I should still try and support the older devices. I took a look at the download data for one of my apps (Aussie Toilets) for the last 3 months:

So, just over half of the downloads were using 8.1 and a third are still on 8.0. Only 13% are still on 7.1

What about handset manufacturers? No surprises there – Nokia with 90%.

And the same for country/region – Australia with 89%. I assume the other countries were just curious, international travellers or possibly even immigrants who preferred their original country’s settings.

And finally just out of interest, age groups:

That’s a nice even spread across the various age groups.

So that might mean that for now I’ll have to leave the 7.1 users high and dry. If support for installing the old SDK is fixed, then I can look at giving them a few more updates in the future. Alternatively I might be able to convert my old system image into a VHD file and then I can boot the laptop back into the old Windows 8.1 image. I’d have to trim down the VHD file so it can fit onto the 500GB SSD I’ve got in my laptop though (that may not be that easy as the original image that’s still sitting on the old non-SSD drive was also 500GB).

The other messy part is that you can’t easily develop within a single version of Visual Studio for Windows Phone 7.1, 8 and 8.1. Visual Studio 2012 was the last to support 7.1 and also supported 8.0. Visual Studio 2013 can do 8.0 and 8.1 and Universal Apps (sharing code with desktop Windows).

Lumia 920–Stuck in ‘headphones’ mode

2014-06-10T22:52:00.001+09:30

Last month after watching the demos from the Microsoft Build conference on the updates to Windows Phone, I decided to take the plunge and update my phone to Windows Phone 8.1. All was going well and some of the new features were really nice – improved keyboard, the notification centre, and VPN support to name a few.

Then all of a sudden a few weeks later my handset wouldn't acknowledge that my headphones were no longer plugged in. It thought they were always plugged in, so didn't play audio through the speaker – making receiving phone calls tricky as you either had to switch the call to 'hands free', or to quickly plug the headphones back in.

A few others seemed to be in the same boat, but subsequent updates for 8.1 didn't resolve the issue. The original reporter then sent his phone off to be checked under warranty. I decided to do the same – for while the problem happened after I'd upgraded to 8.1, there don't seem to be heaps of people with the same problem, so maybe it was more a coincidence and just a regular mechanical fault with the headphone jack.

The only tricky bit was proving to Nokia that it was my phone (I'd won it from Microsoft so I didn't have a receipt). After a bit of email tag and a few phone calls they were finally convinced and I posted my handset off to Sydney.

Before being sent off to Nokia Care, I was asked to use the Nokia Software Recovery Tool. This had the interesting effect of downgrading the firmware and OS back to 8.0 (and didn't fix the audio problem, which increased my suspicions that the problem was not software-based)

Here's the details before it was posted off:

Today I finally got it back. They'd replaced the audio jack and the USB jack. Looks like they re-flashed the firmware with the Australian ‘country’ variant of the Lumia Black Update (3051.40000.1349.0007) – Probably better to have ‘RM-821_apac_australia_new_zealand_304’ instead of ‘RM-821_eu_euro1_425’ I suppose.

And yes, the audio is now working!

While my phone was being serviced, I dug up my trusty old Samsung 'dumb' handset and after visiting Vodafone to get a normal-sized SIM I at least was contactable on my mobile (if not online). Conveniently, Vodafone now give out SIMs that you can pop-out the middle to get a micro-SIM, so I didn't need to go back to the Vodafone shop a second time.

Also, thanks to the Windows Phone Backup feature, I am restoring all my apps and settings so my phone is basically back to how it was before all the dramas started! Very convenient.

Next step, to the latest Windows Phone 8.1 release. With a new audio jack fitted, I'm hoping there will be no more issues.

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Aussie Forecast

2014-05-09T21:51:00.001+09:30

My latest app for Windows Phone is now available in the store – Aussie Forecast [Broken link]!

Windows Phone 8 supports apps displaying custom information on the lock screen. The Bing Weather app is a nice example, but I was frustrated by the inaccurate forecast data that it was using. Not the first time I've seen this problem.

So I thought I'd create my own app that uses the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's data to display the forecast for a selected location. You can optionally choose to have the forecast displayed on your phone's lock screen, and a background task runs at regular intervals to keep the information current.

Future enhancements will include allowing a user-selected photo for the background image or the daily Bing Photo.

If you've got a Windows Phone 8 device, then please try it out [Broken link]!

[Broken link]

Using BugSense for Windows Phone with Caliburn.Micro

2014-05-04T21:45:00.001+09:30

BugSense is a 3rd party service I came across recently being promoted on Nokia's (now Microsoft's) DVLUP site. They provide aggregation and reporting of errors from your apps.

All of the usual platforms are supported, and conveniently they provide NuGet packages to facilitate integrating with Windows Phone 7, 8 and Windows Store apps.

I like using Caliburn Micro (CM) for most of my Windows Phone apps to help with using the MVVM pattern, and one of the requirements for using CM is to strip out the contents of the App.xaml.cs file's constructor, leaving just

public App() { // Standard XAML initialization InitializeComponent(); }

The BugSense instructions however assume you're using a regular Windows Phone project that has the original App.xaml.cs contents. The workaround I've settled on is to add the BugSense code to the body of the Configure method in the CM AppBootstrapper class.

First, add the BugSense namespaces:

using BugSense;
using BugSense.Core.Model;

Then initialise BugSense (replacing API\_KEY with the key displayed when you click on 'Help me integrate' on the BugSense site:

protected override void Configure()
{
    // Initialize BugSense
    BugSenseHandler.Instance.InitAndStartSession(new ExceptionManager(App.Current), RootFrame, "API\_KEY");

You might also wish to add logging of handled exceptions too:

catch (Exception ex)
{
    BugSenseLogResult logResult = BugSenseHandler.Instance.LogException(ex);

    // Examine the ResultState to determine whether it was successful.
    Debug.WriteLine("Result: {0}", logResult.ResultState.ToString());

    Debug.WriteLine(ex);
}

In a future post I hope to describe logging exceptions for background tasks.

var article = new State();

2014-04-06T08:10:00.001+09:30

What an interesting time to be a .NET developer!

In the last week, Microsoft held its now annual Build conference and announced a whole bunch of new product offerings and features. For most of us who can’t get there in person, downloading and watching the session videos is almost as good. All of the keynote and session videos are (or soon will be) available on the Channel 9 Build 2014 event page

Build doesn’t just focus on .NET – it tends to cover developer topics that relates to any Microsoft technology – Windows desktop, Phone, Web and Azure (cloud).

Open sourcing

I remember having a conversation with Dan Shearer many years ago. Dan is a big advocate of open source software. I surprised him at the time by telling him about this XML-based installer software that Microsoft had made open source and hosted on SourceForge (10 years ago). I think this was still when other parts of Microsoft were still quite anti-open source. 10 years on, things have changed quite a lot.

We have not only the OuterCurve Foundation, but now just announced at the Build conference, the .NET Foundation to promote and ‘steward’ a collection of open-source technologies for .NET. Curious that they created a second foundation, but what ever gets the job done I guess.

The biggest thing in this area for me was the announcement that the new .NET C# and VB compilers (aka ‘Roslyn’) would become open source. They’re up now on CodePlex - http://roslyn.codeplex.com/ (and yes, they’re taking pull requests too)

My how things have changed!

8.1

Windows 8.1 Update 1 is out, and Windows Phone 8.1 is coming in the next few months. Apart from the new phone features, I think the big news here is the new “Universal” applications that make it simpler to develop a single app that works on both Windows Phone and Windows Store (aka Metro). Laurent Bugnion has more info on his blog. This is nice – though it only works for 8.1 so it doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of supporting older platforms (eg. Windows Phone 7 or the current Windows Phone 8 before the upgrade is released)

Azure

Watching the Day 2 keynote with Scott Guthrie impressed me with how much is going on in Azure land. I feel like I really need to get more familiar with this stuff.

Other highlights

TypeScript 1.0 announced
Cortana – like Siri but supposedly better
.NET native compiler
Seeing an iPhone and a Mac both used in demos – I don’t particular care about these devices but I know a lot of people do.

That will do for now – I’ve got some more videos to watch (if our monthly internet quota doesn’t get used up – I already managed to lose all my phone’s data quota when it decided to use 3G instead of the home wireless to stream the keynote 😢

Aussie Toilets–Featured WP8 store app on 2nd July

2013-07-01T23:56:00.001+09:30

In it's 2 and a bit year history, this is the first time I've ever seen Aussie Toilets listed as a featured app in the Windows Phone 8 Store!

It's one of the featured apps for 2nd July 2013. Nice! 😀