Most interesting question gets PDP membership and Lumia 800!

[hamishwillee]

Full details on the blog post Got a Windows Phone development question?

In essence though, we'll be awarding the best question every week for the next four weeks with a PDP membership and Lumia 800. The aim is to show more people what a great service we offer here!

The winning question will be a genuine development question where the user has shown good community spirit and dibo etiquette.

[hamishwillee]

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 moderators and wider 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.

[balagopalks]

This is an interesting initiative Hamish! Lets get developers back to our Boards!!

Regards
Gopal

[hamishwillee]

This is an interesting initiative Hamish! Lets get developers back to our Boards!!

I think so too :-) Not everyone in the Windows Phone community knows what a great service we have - this is about letting more people know that we can help them (particularly with Nokia-specific questions) and also rewarding people who have good "discussion board etiquette".

[balagopalks]

Lets promote this via Social media.. I am doing it right away!

Regards
Gopal

[girishpadia]

Full details on the blog post Got a Windows Phone development question?

It seems the blog link is invalid. This may be the correct http://www.developer.nokia.com/Blogs...ment-question/

[Loukt]

Yep the Link is invalid (the date changed) here is the updated one :
http://www.developer.nokia.com/Blogs...ment-question/

[wizard_hu_]

Thanks a lot, the funny thing is that we were discussing the link update, just forgot applying it here. It is fixed now.

[hamishwillee]

The winner of the second PDP and Lumia 800 is mrudulpen for the question “Multiple Dynamic Font loading“. Great to see a happy result with support from the community.

This is updated in the blog and facebook, and should also be in twitter shortly. Thanks mrudulphen - and we look forward to other great questions this week!

[hamishwillee]

The winner of the third 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)”. We liked it because its a common use case that most developers will need to consider.

The responses 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.

This is updated in the blog and facebook, and should also be in twitter shortly. Thanks binu_ji!

[hamishwillee]

The winner of the final Lumia 800 and PDP membership 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're now at the end of the promotion (4 devices gone). I have asked the moderators to keep looking for great questions and I will confirm in the next couple of days whether we have more devices to give away!

[hamishwillee]

This has been extended for 4 more weeks - so you still have a chance to pick up your Lumia 800 and PDP just for asking a question on our Windows Phone discussion boards.

The one change, is that for the next 4 weeks we'll be looking at all forums in the Windows Phone Group (not just "WP General"). This includes interesting questions on NFC, Nokia Music Windows Phone API, and 3D Printing

For more information see the blog post.

[Kunal Prime]

Cool. I started with Nokia Music rest API's last Friday and we a contest on it started.

Regards

[hamishwillee]

Cool. I started with Nokia Music rest API's last Friday and we a contest on it started.

Regards

Great to hear - its an API that enables some pretty cool apps.

[hamishwillee]

The winner of the 5th Lumia 800 and PDP membership is Iacopo for the question Problem with ScheduledTaskAgent, RestSharp and WriteableBitmap.

The question was related to updating a tile using information from a REST API that was failing under some conditions. The issue was eventually solved by optimising the code to reduce the memory consumed, including reordering some of the tile creation activities. For more information see the blog (Winner 5).

We’ll be sending Iacopo his Lumia and PDP membership in the next few days! There are another three weeks for this promotion - and remember, you can also post your questions about NFC, 3D Printing or the Windows Phone Nokia Music API.