THIS PROMOTION IS COMPLETE (9 April 2013)
This promotion is now complete! Thanks to all of you for asking such an interesting questions, and for the community and discussion board moderators for your answers.
Winners
Winner 8. Our 8th and final winner is AxelF for the question “Bluetooth Pairing of Nokia Lumia 820 (WP8) with Microchip RN-42 fails“. Axel’s Lumia and PDP membership should be sent this week!
The problem was about how to pair a Lumia 820 with RN-42 module using Bluetooth – when connecting the Lumia displays “connected” and then back to “not connected”.
The community pointed to several examples showing successful pairing does work in in this case – it looks like the Bluetooth module is not working (it doesn’t stop blinking) but calling “ConnectAsync” allows the app to connect. The problem being that WP8 does not show a successful pairing if connecting using an unsupported Bluetooth profile.
This was the last question in this promotion – thanks AxelF for making it a good one.
Winner 7. Winner 7 is Mehul Raje for the question “Application update simulation“. Mehul’s Lumia and PDP membership should be sent this week!
The problem was how to fully test application update scenarios prior to releasing the app on the store. A number of options were suggested, including using multiple beta versions of the app on marketplace. One of the best suggestions was to use the Windows Phone Power Tools which allow you to test install, uninstall and update scenarios.
There were other good questions this week, but we liked this one because updating is an important scenario to get right, and the suggestion to use Windows Phone Power Tools makes it so much easier.
Winner 6. Our 6th winner is Kunal Prime for the question “Handle low storage space condition“.
This question asks the best way to ensure that your application has enough storage memory to write it’s data – so that it can fail gracefully or ask the user to free up more space.
We liked this question as it discussed a number of approaches and highlighted some differences between .NET on desktop on mobile devices. The discussion is still ongoing and we’ve kicked off an article to capture it’s key findings here.
We’ll be sending Kunal Prime his Lumia and PDP membership in the next few days!
Winner 5. Winner 5 is Iacopo for the question “Problem with ScheduledTaskAgent, RestSharp and WriteableBitmap“.
The problem was with updating an app tile using a scheduled task – with JSON data retrieved using a REST API. This worked fine on Windows Phone 8 but mysteriously only updated on Windows Phone 7.8 when connected to the debugger (strongly indicating an issue with memory, execution time or cpu usage, since these are not enforced in WP7.5 with the debugger attached).
The issue was eventually solved by optimising the code to reduce the memory consumed, including reordering some of the tile creation activities.
There were other good questions this week, but we liked this one because we think this is likely to be a common problem with the release of Windows Phone 7.8. We also liked how Iacopo had the persistence to work though the problem, with support and suggestions from the community.
We’ll be sending Iacopo his Lumia and PDP membership in the next few days!
Winner 4. The final winner is Windows Phone Developer for the question “XNA games for WP 7 have problems on some WP8 resolutions? “.
The question asks how to ensure that your Windows Phone XNA game will scale properly on the new Windows Phone 8 resolutions. The answer to the original question ended up being fairly simple: detect if you are running on 720p devices using reflection and change back buffer dimensions to 800×450. Now you will not feature any black bands on either side.
We’ll be sending “Windows Phone Developer” their Lumia and PDP membership in the next few days!
Winner 3. The winner of the PDP and Lumia 800 is binu_ji for the question “Creating a Trial App with usage limit“.
The question itself is straightforward, in essence: “what is the simplest and most robust approach to limiting an app to a certain number of uses (trial)”. The answers explore both solutions for the specific problem asked, and also looked at other business models/approaches that the developer could use to better monetise their application.
Winner 2. The winner of the second prize pack is mrudulpen for the question “Multiple Dynamic Font loading“. Great to see a happy result with support from the community.
Winner 1. The winner of the first prize is vinayppatil. Vinay’s question “Saving data before exiting in PeriodicTask” points out that some tasks may take more than 25 seconds to complete and asks how you can be sure that your task is complete / how you can be notified before it completes. The question is ongoing, but there has been some excellent feedback from the community.
We chose this question not only because it is interesting, but because the author “did their research” before sharing the problem with the community.
Background
We’re going to award membership of the Nokia Premium Developer Program along with a brand new Lumia 800 device to the most interesting and genuine question we get on the Nokia Developer Windows Phone discussion board in the coming week(s).
Judging will be done by the moderators. Most of all, we’ll be looking to award people who have come with genuine problems, not people who have made up a heap of questions in order to win the award!
We’ll also be looking for good discussion board citizen behaviour:
- Search to see if your question has already been answered before posting.
- Ask specific questions and explain what you’ve already tried. Remember we’re not here to create your whole app for you, but to help with stumbling blocks
- Ask development question. This discussion board is not the right place for end user questions or to make comments about Nokia’s platform choices! This discussion board is for developers
The competition will run every week for the next four weeks. Good luck, I think we can help you, and you may well get a prize too!
Frequently asked Questions
Why should I post my questions on Nokia Developer?
The Nokia Developer Windows Phone discussion board is one of the best places you can go to ask Windows Phone development questions. With most questions answered by our community members within only a few hours, this is true whether you’re asking about programming using Nokia APIs (like the Nokia Music API) or more general questions covering Windows Phone development.
If the service is so great, why do you need this promotion?
We want to continue to build our community. That can only happen if developers like you try the service, find out what a great team we have working with you, and come back.
Discussion boards are one way that we use to communicate with developers and find out your real development problems and concerns. Through longer term engagement the discussion boards help us find the next generation of community leaders, and to recruit new moderators and Champions.
Why are you rewarding questions and not answers
This award is to help spread the news that there is another great place to ask questions if you need help with Windows Phone!
We already have a great moderation team and community answering questions, and a mechanism to reward them. This month’s “Poster of the Month” “Vineet Jain” received a Nokia Lumia 820 and promotion through our social media channels (you can see the announcement here).
When does this start
Now! The first week will be extra long – we’ll select the first winner in just over a week on February 18th.
