Today I was made aware that in my series on Amazon SimpleDB for Windows Phone, I had mentioned that part 4 would contain some code samples and talk about encryption. I was confused for a second because I knew there was no part 4 and I thought the series was done. The series is not done. This is part 4 where we’ll show how to decrypt the credentials sent from the TVM.…
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/38281098 w=640&h=360] Just in time for St. Patrick’s Day on Saturday, I’d like to announce the release of St. Patrick’s Photo Booth on the Windows Phone Marketplace. Similar to the highly popular North Pole Photo Booth, this springtime version features St. Patrick’s Day and other Irish themed props. It uses the same face detection to automatically place a hat on your photo which you can easily swap out for others.…
North Pole Photo Booth Download GraphWhat you see is a graph of the downloads of the North Pole Photo Booth for its first month on the Windows Phone Marketplace (actual download numbers have been removed as they are not relevant to the discussion). Since this app was intended as a Christmas holiday themed app, this graph is perfect as it shows the effective lifespan of an app from launch to the main event – Christmas.…
While working on a new app, I came upon a scenario in which I wanted the phone to support both Portrait and Landscape orientations, but I didn’t want the content on the page to rotate. I wanted the user to feel that they had rotated the phone, but the particulars of my app would make rotating the content nonsensical. What advantages are there for this? First, from the user perspective, if your app has an app bar and supports multiple orientations, the app bar rotates the icons and the menu items fly in from the sides.…
One important aspect of accessing SimpleDB on a Windows Phone directly is that it isn’t going through another service that can handle securing the credentials needed to access SimpleDB. SimpleDB, like most (if not all) AWS services, requires two pieces of information to secure a request of the service: AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key. These are two pieces of data that I would rather not put on a device that people carry around with them.…
Almost immediately after writing the code to connect to the SimpleDB, I started running into HTTP error codes. No 200’s for me. Since my code is directly working with HttpWebRequest objects and their corresponding HttpWebResponse objects, I could just look through the response object and its properties to see what went wrong. But if you want to see what actually went over the wire, both on the way out and back in, there’s such a better way to do it.…