[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.…

Update: I’ve published the code for this post on github. Get the code here. Have you ever wanted to create a transparent tile for your app that mimics the way the built in Messaging and Mail apps work on your Windows Phone? I’m going to provide specifics on how to mimic the style and do it all on the phone. Prior to Mango, there were only a couple ways to do this and both were nasty.…

Merry Christmas! To enhance your holiday, I present the North Pole Photo Booth! Using the live camera feed from your Windows Phone, take a picture of your friends and family and watch as Santa’s hat appears. You can change hats or add more accesories to complete your holiday look. Already have a picture that you want to make Christmas card worthy? Just choose one from your media library and watch the magic happen.…

In response to a question in the comments on how to do a PutAttribute on SimpleDB, I’ve put together this post. These are fragments of code and not a complete source file. Hopefully if someone is looking for information, this can help as a guide. This code was written for Windows Phone 7 (i.e. Silverlight). To implement this fully, you’ll need to fill in the methods named CalculateStringToSignV2 and HmacSign. It is done via a GET method so all of the data is sent in the query string.…

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.…

The first thing to know about the SDK provided by Amazon for .NET (AWSSDK) is that it does not work on Windows Phone. You can’t reference the DLL because it hasn’t been compiled as a phone class library. If you try to put the source code in and compile it yourself, it won’t compile. This is because the SDK contains a lot of code that just doesn’t exist in the subset of .…

My latest app has been certified. I’ll publish in a couple days and do a post that talks all about it.…