Monthly Archives: July 2010

I’ve got some Windows Phone 7 work lined up so thought I’d run through the most recent setup for SDK, Toolkit, and other such items needed for development.

I’m working based on the assumption that Visual Studio 2010 is already installed. I’m also assuming the following items are installed, if not, install these before moving to the next items. I’m not 100% sure they’re needed, but I installed them first to make sure and for previous Silverlight 4 Development.

Next make sure uninstall any existing Windows Phone 7 SDK or other software you might have already installed previously. It is usually best, even if MS suggest no need to uninstall existing software, to do it anyway.

Next check out the major download for Windows Phone 7 development;

Install each of these in order. To verify that you have installed them successfully you can check the Programs and Features. To do a final verification I always like to start a project with each of the templates installed and do a build of each. That way, without doubt the appropriate assemblies and other items have been installed and registered in the GAC.

Windows Phone 7 Project Templates

Open up Visual Studio 2010 and verify that these project templates are available (Click on the image for a full size screenshot). Click on new project from the menus and look at the template on the left hand side. Under the Silverlight for Windows Phone there should be three new templates:

Windows Phone Application
Windows Phone List Application
Windows Phone Class Library

Under the XNA Game Studio 4.0 there should be the following project templates:

Windows Phone Game (4.0)
Windows Phone Game Library (4.0)
Windows Game (4.0)
Windows Game Library (4.0)
Xbox 360 Game (4.0)
Xbox 360 Game Library (4.0)
Content Pipeline Extension Library (4.0)
Empty Content Project (4.0)

Windows Phone 7 XNA

Out of all of these XNA templates, the only truly phone related items are the first two. But the others come along with the installation.

To get a feel for what is installed, select the Widnows Phone List Application. This is a great starter just to get an idea of how the IDE works.

Windows Phone 7 List Application

Once you’ve entered you project name and everything take a look at the solution explorer. Inside the project you will see that there is a break out of the ViewModels, Images, and SampleData into folders. Below that is the standard Silvelight File App.xaml. By default this project template also lays out a MainPage.xaml and a DetailsPage.xaml. To the far left hand side of the screen you can see the actual list application interface, and in the center the xaml code or C# is displayed.

Once you’ve checked that out give it a run, click on F5. You’ll see the following application starting come up.

Windows Phone 7 Application Starting

Application List Main Screen

The first screen on the phone to popup should be the list application itself. If you click on the windows button at the bottom of the phone screen emulator you’ll get back to the startup screen with the IE browser prominently displayed. If you click on the arrow to the right of the screen you will see an application list. There you can click on the application list to return to your list application. Check out the screen shots below, as always, click on em’ to get the full size screenshot.

Windows Phone 7 List Application Screens

Windows Phone 7 Main Screen

Windows Phone 7 Application Screen

That’s it for this entry. I’ll be adding some more Windows Phone 7 development how-to, random blurbs, and my 2 cents in the coming weeks.

Aggregated Web Services Pt I

July 28, 2010

Architecture

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I’ve been working through an architecture scenario recently. This is what I have so far. Multiple external web services, some SOAP and some REST, and some data sources in a SQL Server Database, Azure Table Storage, and flat files of some sort. All of these sources need to be accessed by a web site for read-only display. In the diagram below I’ve drawn out the primary three points of reference.

The services that are external; Contract, Table Store, Document, Search, and Help Desk Services.
The Website Web Services Facade, which would be an aggregated layer that then provides the various services via an internally controlled services layer.
On top of that will be the web site, accessing the services from the aggregated layer with jQuery.

Basic Three Tiers

After creating this to get some basic idea of how these things should fit together, I moved on to elaborate on the web services aggregation layer. What I’ve sketched in this diagram is the correlation to architectural elements and the physical environments they would prospectively be deployed to. Again, broken out by the three tiers as shown above.

Website and the respective jQuery, AJAX, and Market/CSS for display.
Web Services, which include the actual architecture breakout; Facade Interface, Facade Aggregation Component, Cache & Non-cached DTOs (Data Transfer Objects), Cache Database/Storage, Caching Process, Lower Layer Aggregation Component, and the Poller Process for polling the external services.
The cache is intended to use SQL Server, thus the red call out to the physical SQL Server cluster.
The last tier, which isn’t being developed, but just providing data is the External Services, primarily shown to provide a full picture of all the layers.

Aggregate Web Services

I primarily drew up these diagrams for discussion of the architecture, poke holes in it, or otherwise. Which speaking of, if any readers have input, question, or are curious please type up a comment and I’ll answer it ASAP.

As the effort continues there are some other great how-to write ups I will be putting together. Everything from unit testing, mocking (with moq), how to setup test services, test services, and other elements of the project. I’ll have all this coming, so keep reading & let me know what you think of the design so far, subscribe via e-mail (look to the metadata section below), or grab the RSS for the blog (see below also).