Resolving XMind can’t open after updating to JRE7

 

I recently noticed that XMind stopped working after updating to Java Runtime Environment (JRE). It gave an error stating

A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) must be available in order to run XMind. No Java virtual machine was found after searching the following locations: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre6\bin\javaw.exe

I solved it by simply making a copy of the JRE7 folder (default installed underneath C:\Program Files (x86)\Java ) and renaming that copy to JRE6.  Worked like a charm.

 

Technorati Tags: XMind,JRE,Java

Some quotes from actual performance appraisals

"Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig."
"His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity"
"I would not allow this employee to breed"
"This employee is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definite won't be"
"Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap"
"When she opens her mouth, it seems that it is only to change feet"
"He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle"
"This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot"
"This employee should go far, and the sooner the better"
"Got a full 6-pack, but lacks the plastic thing to hold it all together"
"A gross ignoramus - 144 times worse than an ordinary ignoramus"
"He certainly takes a long time to make his pointless"
"He doesn't have ulcers, but he's a carrier"
"I would like to go hunting with him sometime"
"He's been working with glue too much"
"He would argue with a signpost"
"He has a knack for making strangers immediately"
"He brings a lot of joy whenever he leaves the room"
"When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell"
"If you see 2 people talking and one looks bored, he's the other one"
"A photographic memory but with the lens over the cap"
"A prime candidate for natural deselection"
"Donated his brain to science before he was done using it"
"Gates are down, the lights are flashing, but the train isn't coming"
"Has 2 brains, one is lost, the other is out looking for it"
"If he were any more stupid, he'd have to be watered twice a week"
"If you give him a penny for his thoughts, you'd get change"
"If you stand close enough to him, you can hear the ocean"
"It's hard to believe that he beat out 1,000 other sperm"
"One neuron short of a synapse"
"Some drink from the fountain of knowledge, he only gargled"
"Takes him 1 1/2 hours to watch 60 Minutes"
"The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead"

Technorati Tags: Fun,HR,Employee+reviews

Belgian Windows 8 contest : App race

 

Only 31 days left for the Belgian Windows 8 contest: App race. For more info check out



http://aka.ms/race

 

Mental note: Windows Phone 7 backup location

By default, Zune makes a backup of your Windows Phone 7, prior to the update procedure. This is so that, in case of failures, it can revert back the phone to its previous state. The backups are automatically stored on the rive where Windows is installed, in the folder Users\Your User Name\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Phone Update.

Technorati Tags: WP7,backup,zune

Functional stupidity and the corporate rebel

The prestigious Journal of Management published an article in November 2012 called “A stupidity-based theory of organizations” which defined a new interesting term: functional stupidity. Functional stupidity can be defined as follows:

Functional stupidity is organizationally-supported lack of reflexivity, substantive reasoning and justification by hierarchically structured organizations to avoid disintegration (or at least avoid internal friction) and it refers to an absence of reflection and refusal to justify certain decisions, forms of stupidity management repress or marginalize doubt and block communicative action. Members of these organizations are only allowed to work within well defined boundaries and are encouraged only to focus on specific tasks without questioning why.

This seems to be quite contradictory with the contemporary view upon organizations which claims that modern organizations are knowledge intensive and that organizations can only survive when they get the best out of their key asset, their employees.

“Short-term use of intellectual resources, consensus and an absence of disquieting questions about decisions and structures may oil the organizational machinery and contribute to harmony and increased productivity in a company,” Mats Alvesson, professor of organization studies, and one of the co-authors, writes. “However, it may also be its downfall.” One of the consequences of functional stupidity is killing innovation and evolution through learning.

The articles also outlines a number of behaviors which are typical of functional stupidity. It also seems that larger organizations are more prone to it. I think this has to do with the fact that they typically boil down their objectives into specific targets which should be attained without question. These objectives and they way of working is often backed by hierarchies, bureaucratic rules and a extremely well documented processes.

I think that at times it is a good thing to question the obvious, be a corporate rebel (Check out www.rebelsatwork.com for some interesting insights and thoughts or read the Rebels at work: motivated to make a difference e-book) and stir up new ideas that often are uncomfortable for the powers that be. Rebel for the ideas that you believe will make a difference because it is all to easy to find a reason not to change.

To finish of, a quote from Marc Buelens, professor at Vlerick Business School, which he added to his article in Trends magazine (Functioneel onwetend, de aantrekkingskracht van veilige paden, 21 maart 2013):

Functional stupidity provides a lot of comfort to management, but together these useful idiots can do quite a lot of stupid things.

Technorati Tags: functional+stupidity,organizational+theory,management,corporate+rebels,change+agents

Why setting a control Height and Width to 0 is not the brightest idea inside a Windows Phone project

I am doing this small post because I have battled the whole morning with this bug and finally got it and it might save you some time if you read it and have the same problem. 

Scenario: Pivot with two items and at some point the swipe on one of the items doesn't work anymore. Putting a button on the PivotItem that doesn't swipe I can still change the selected item and the second item still swipes correctly.

Cause: I was setting the Height=0 and Width=0 on a control inside the PivotItem (in my project I don't want my control to be collapsed). The problem presents itself if you set any of the controls inside a PivotItem to Height and Width = 0 when the PivotItem is selected. If on the other hand you set the Height and the Width to anything >1 the PivotItem continues to swipe correctly. Even more strange: if the PivotItem is not selected when  you set the Width and Height to 0 and swipe to the control's PivotItem everything will still work correctly. So pay attention better not use set Width and Height =0 on UI controls. 

If you want to test it yourself and maybe tell me what really happens I am attaching a small project created from a Windows Phone Pivot application where I've added a menu that will set the Height and Width of the list inside the first PivotItem to 0. I also set the background of the first PivotItem to green so you will see that it is still expanded. 

How to reproduce the problem: If you execute the menu command with the first PivotItem selected you will see that the pivot doesn't swipe anymore. If you change the values to 1, run the app again and execute the menu with the first PivotItem selected you will see that the pivot still swipes correctly. If, on the other hand, you let the values set to 0 but when executing the menu you have the second PivotItem selected you will see that the first item stil swipes correctly. Bug? Feature? Just pay attention to setting controls to Width and Height 0 because you might have problems with the UI and you won't know what is causing it.

SOURCE CODE

NAMASTE

How to launch the Marketplace in the Windows Phone 7 application

 

In this post I am going to show you How to launch the Marketplace programmatically.

follow the below mentioned steps:

Step-1 Create a new Silverlight Windows Phone Application
Step-2 In your MainPage.cs and add a using directive to the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace.
Step-3 Add the following in the constructor of MainPage.cs after calling the InitializeComponent() method:

  1: var task = new MarketplaceHubTask();
  2: task.ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications;
  3: task.Show();

Step-4 Run the application by pressing F5 Key.

 

Happy Codeing

Fix Panorama layout when upgrading your project to OS 8.0 SDK

  This will be a really short blog post but might save you some time if you have an OS 7.1 Panorama project and decide to upgrade the project to 8.0 SDK. After the upgrade you might see that the layout of your old page changed and you have less content available for the items and also the header looks different. Don't try to fix the problem by changing the margin of the control on the OS 8.0 SDK. The reason why this happens is because the Windows Phone SDK team decided to "tweak" a little bit the default style for the Panorama control, to be more precise the TitleLayer part of the style.

  On Windows Phone OS 7.1 projects the TitleLayer looks like this:

 <controlsPrimitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CacheMode="BitmapCache" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="187" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-76,0,9" Grid.Row="0"/>  

while on OS 8.0 we have:

 <Primitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CharacterSpacing="-35" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="170" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-34,0,0" Grid.Row="0"/>  

You can see that not only the margin have changed (the reason why on OS 8.0 version we have less space in the content -44px ), but also the font size changed from 187 to 170 producing these visual differences:

The solution to this problem is pretty simple: extract the old style of the Panorama control (the easiest way is using Blend) and apply to both WP7.1 and OS 8.0 versions of your project. This way the UI will be consistent between the two versions of the app. If you don't want to use Blend I am attaching the default OS 7.1 style so you can directly copy/paste it in your project and apply it to your Panorama control.

 <Style x:Key="PanoramaStyleWP71" TargetType="controls:Panorama">  
                <Setter Property="ItemsPanel">  
                     <Setter.Value>  
                          <ItemsPanelTemplate>  
                               <controlsPrimitives:PanoramaPanel x:Name="panel"/>  
                          </ItemsPanelTemplate>  
                     </Setter.Value>  
                </Setter>  
                <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"/>  
                <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"/>  
                <Setter Property="Template">  
                     <Setter.Value>  
                          <ControlTemplate TargetType="controls:Panorama">  
                               <Grid>  
                                    <Grid.RowDefinitions>  
                                         <RowDefinition Height="auto"/>  
                                         <RowDefinition Height="*"/>  
                                    </Grid.RowDefinitions>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningBackgroundLayer x:Name="BackgroundLayer" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Grid.RowSpan="2">  
                                         <Border x:Name="background" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" CacheMode="BitmapCache"/>  
                                    </controlsPrimitives:PanningBackgroundLayer>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningTitleLayer x:Name="TitleLayer" CacheMode="BitmapCache" ContentTemplate="{TemplateBinding TitleTemplate}" Content="{TemplateBinding Title}" FontSize="187" FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyLight}" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="10,-76,0,9" Grid.Row="0"/>  
                                    <controlsPrimitives:PanningLayer x:Name="ItemsLayer" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Grid.Row="1">  
                                         <ItemsPresenter x:Name="items"/>  
                                    </controlsPrimitives:PanningLayer>  
                               </Grid>  
                          </ControlTemplate>  
                     </Setter.Value>  
                </Setter>  
           </Style>  

NAMASTE

Type forwarding and XAML sharing between WP OS 7.1 and 8.0 projects

    This post is about a new feature available in Windows Phone OS 8.0 SDK called Type Forwarding.

    Have you ever wondered how does the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK handles the fact that the Panorama, Pivot controls changed the namespace and the assembly from OS 7.1 SDK to OS 8.0 SDK? (80% that you haven't :) ). I recently had to migrate an OS 7.1 project to OS 8.0, but also keep the old one (duplicated the old project and upgrade the duplicated one).

    Here is the story of what happens when you upgrade an OS 7.1 project that uses Panaroma or Pivot to OS 8.0:
    If you start a new Windows Phone Pivot App with the target OS 8.0 inside MainPage.xaml the prefix "phone" is used for the Pivot control where "phone" is:

 xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"  

    If, on the other hand, you create a new Windows Phone Pivot App with the target OS 7.1 inside MainPage.xaml the prefix "controls" is used for the Pivot/Panorama control where "controls" is:

 xmlns:controls="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls"  

    The real "magic" happens when you upgrade the Windows Phone 7.1 project to OS 8.0. The MainPage.xaml page doesn't change (you will still see the "controls" tag is kept in order to be able to better share the code between the versions), but instead a reference to Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll is added to the OS 8.0 reference that is not used if you create a new project with target OS 8.0. If you wonder if by adding this reference you use the old version of the controls the answer is NO. What this assembly does is that is uses a really neat and new  feature of the .Net compiler called Type Forwarding. This feature can be used when you move a class from one namespace/dll (assembly) to another and you don't want to recompile the application to reference the new dll but you will only deploy the two dlls where the first one (the one that the application already knew uses the Type Forwarding to tell the application that a certain class/es moved to another assembly). In the case of Windows Phone OS 8.0 SDK the usage is even "cooler" as it enables you to use the same XAML for both OS 7.1 projects and OS 8.0 ones. Inside AssemblyInfo.cs of Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll OS 8.0 version we have all the declarations needed to forward the types to their new locations:

 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Panorama))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanoramaItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(Pivot))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotItemEventArgs))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(AnimationDirection))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningBackgroundLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanningTitleLayer))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PanoramaPanel))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotHeaderItem))]  
 [assembly: TypeForwardedTo(typeof(PivotHeadersControl))]  

I am attaching a small project called TypeForwarding that implements the same functionality as Microsoft.Phone.Controls.dll OS 8.0 version.

Other usages that I can thing of:

• Flurry SDK changes the name of the namespace for the Api class for WP7SDK to WP8SDK (bad choice when you need code sharing). If you want to keep the same code for the OS 7.1 and the OS 8.0 version of the app you will have to use conditional compiling for every file where you use the Api class. Much easier would be to create an OS 8.0 library project with the default namespace WP7SDK and forward the Api class to the WP8SDK added as a reference to the library project. This way the old WP7SDK will continue to work as it was on the OS 8.0 using the OS 8.0 version of the Flurry SDK.
• MVVM Light. If you use inside your XAML the EventToCommand this is not xaml shareable between OS 7.1 and OS 8.0 because the assemblies changes from GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Extras.WP71.dll to GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Extras.WP8.dll. The easiest approach in this case (an open source) would be to recompile the dll and use the same name for both versions of the dll. But if you don't have access to the source code of the dll you could use type forwarding.  Also a third approach would be to derive your on class like MyEventToCommand and use this inside the xaml.

Keep in mind this neat feature because you might need it. I would also love to see, in the next version of the SDK, the possibility to use MarkupExtension this way we could conditionally compile parts of the XAML depending on the version of the SDK the app is running on. Have a look at this blog post that explains how it works on WPF projects.

SOURCE CODE

Till next post NAMASTE and have fun coding for Windows Phone!

Community Day 2013 – Building search driven Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps with SharePoint Server 2013

I will be delivering a session at Community Day Belgium – registrations will open up next week – there is a great lineup of sessions – so don’t hesitate.

Session abstract: Combine the power of Windows 8 with the flexibility and interoperability of SharePoint 2013 search. This session will walk through building Windows 8 applications using SharePoint 2013's REST-based search API to build rich, compelling user experiences. We will leverage the new people and social search capabilities in SharePoint 2013 to build both a Windows 8 client and Windows Phone 8 client.

If you have a specific scenario that you want to see in this session, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: sharepoint,windows8,development,search,rest+api,sharepoint2013,sps2013,vs2012,wp8,comdaybe,community

SharePoint Saturday Belgium 2013 slidedeck– Building the SharePoint hot or not app

Enable Azure Mobile Services for "pure" Windows Phone 7.1 Xna Games

     Recently somebody asked me for an advice on what library should he use to communicate with an Azure Mobile Service for an Windows Phone OS 7.1 and Windows 8 Xna game. My answer was, of course, the Windows Azure Mobile Services client library available on NuGet as I remembered that the prerelease version works also for Windows Phone OS 7.x applications.

The "problem" is that the library will not install if the game is a pure Xna Windows Phone project.

There are 2 (maybe 3 :) ) solutions to this problem:

1. Migrate your XNA project to an "Windows Phone XAML and XNA App" and on this type of project the client library will install correctly.

2. You could use a small hack in order to force NuGet to install the Azure Mobile Services client library on your XNA project. The hack is pretty simple:

• open the YourProject.csproj file with an text editor (like Notepad) and add these 3 line (not sure if all 3 of them are needed but doesn't matter as it is only done to force the library to install):

 <SilverlightVersion>$(TargetFrameworkVersion)</SilverlightVersion>  
 <TargetFrameworkProfile>WindowsPhone71</TargetFrameworkProfile>  
 <TargetFrameworkIdentifier>Silverlight</TargetFrameworkIdentifier>  

•  Visual Studio will see that the project has been modified so it will ask to Reload the project. Reload it (don't try to build the project as it won't), open the Package Manager Console and write:

   Install-Package WindowsAzure.MobileServices -Pre   
  

  the package should now install.
• Reopen the .csproj file in Notepad and remove the 3 lines we've previously added, save and reload the project in Visual Studio. The project should compile correctly and you should be able to use the Azure Mobile Services client library.

The only thing that doesn't seem to work is make Visual Studio recognize the await keyword for the XNA project. You will have to use the ContinueWith syntax:

 void TestAzureMobile()  
     {  
       todoitem item = new todoitem { Text = "Awesome item XNA" };  
       ms.GetTable<todoitem>().InsertAsync(item).ContinueWith((task)  
         =>  
       {  
         //do what you need here  
       });  
     }  

3. Came to me while writing the post. Guess the most "elegant" way is to add an Windows Phone Class library to your project, add and use the Azure Mobile Service client library from the class library, reference the class library from your XNA project. Tried this one but the MobileServiceClient seems to fail initialization with 'System.TypeInitializationException'.

Take in consideration that the Azure Mobile Services client library is still a pre-release version in this moment so for the release they might fix/enhance it and you could install it on XNA projects without any hack needed (it is a PCL library).