Developing for the Third Screen – Windows Phone 7
For the longest time Microsoft has been talking about their “Three Screens and the Cloud” strategy but did not really have a compelling mobile story. With the arrival of Windows Phone 7, the third screen has arrived and with that the new Windows Phone developer story has arrived. During this session you will get a high level overview of the platform plus go into some of the new APIs available for Windows Phone 7. We will cover the new application model, Windows Phone 7 specific services, sensors, multimedia plus more! Come and learn how to build for the third screen, build for Windows Phone 7.

The Program – The New Windows Phone 7
Windows Phone is a new tool for personal productivity and collaboration for your employees. Learn how Windows Phone 7 provides mobile productivity without compromise, works well with your existing infrastructure, and provides a platform for compelling applications utilizing existing tools like Visual Studio & Expression Blend.  Come discover how Windows Phone 7 can help you stay productive, keep in touch, and keep that work life balance.

For more details check Mark’s blog for the Windows Phone developer session at Metro Toronto .NET User Group and Windows Phone 7 overview session at Silicon Halton.

The event overview is as follows.

Event Overview

Join us at the Developer Windows Phone 7 Briefing
Want to learn how to create awesome applications and games for Windows Phone 7?

Want to extend your existing apps onto a new platform?

Want recognition, exposure, and reach in an untapped marketplace?

Join us for an informative Windows Phone 7 Briefing to learn more about developing on Microsoft’s latest mobile platform.  The briefing will cover three sessions exploring the two application frameworks available for Windows Phone 7, where to find developer resources, how to submit apps into Marketplace, and much more!

Session 1 – Apps with Silverlight – 6:00pm – 7:00pm – Apps with Silverlight
Session 2 – Games with XNA – 7:15pm – 8:15pm – Games with XNA
Session 3 – Next Steps – 8:30pm – 9:00pm – Next Steps

The event takes place across Canada in the following Cities.

Ottawa, On – November 30, 2010
Calgary, AB – December 01 2010
Mississauga, On – December 02 2010
Montreal, QC – December 7 2010
Toronto, On – December 9 2010

If interested be sure to register in the city of interest!

A project which took almost two months in the development from analyzing the data and calculating the statistics, to the actual application design and development, six individuals from across Canada, including myself, collaborated on the design, development and deployment of Emitter.ca. Emitter.ca is a simple web application which allows Canadian citizens to search for an address, city or a postal code, allowing them to receive information and data in an understandable format about the pollutants which are released from facilities near the searched address.

The Emitter.ca project was initiated by David Eaves, one of Canada’s leaders in Open Government advocacy, and Nik Garkusha of Microsoft Canada. Nik and David brought the rest of the team in from all across Canada for taking the idea from conception to reality. The team included:

• David Eaves – a public policy entrepreneur and an Open Government advocate,
• Matthew Dance – a geospatial wiz and a MA Candidate from the University of Alberta,
• Nik Garkusha – an Open Data and Open Source enthusiast from Microsoft Canada who recently founded OpenHalton,
• Mark Arteaga – a mobile solutions expert and owner of RedBit Development,
• Barranger Ridler – a development genius with a major focus in Windows 7 mobile development,
• and myself.

Emitter.ca makes use of the Environment Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory. Throughout Canada, there are hundreds of facilities that put pollutants into our air. Unfortunately, not too many people really know what the nearby facilities are really emitting. Unless you are a chemist or some form a genius, purely looking at the raw data from NPRI won’t get you too far as they use long and complex names, with the combination of statistical data which is hard to interpret. With the launch of Emitter.ca, Canadians are now able to easily retrieve this information in various forms of representation making it easy to identify which of the local facilities are polluting the most.

Through the use of emitter.ca, I am sure that many will be surprised about what their local facilities are polluting, at least I know I was. Knowing that, we have integrated a third party service from a British Columbia developer, Cory Horner. The service known as How’d They Vote, has an API which allows other applications like Emitter.ca to retrieve data and information about the Members of Parliament. In Emitter.ca, we have leveraged the power of Cory’s API to include information about the MP which the facility is located within his or her riding, allowing users to directly contact the elected official.

Emitter.ca was launched as a BETA release as we know there are bugs, but there are also additional features which we would like to add, along with including additional data sets which we hope to also ‘mashup’ with the NRPI data, along with friendly descriptions of chemicals. If there is something that you would like to see in Emitter.ca, feel free to contact any one of the team members as we would be more then happy to assist.

Furthermore, being the developer of this application was something amazing. Sure there is still work to be done (you will see it is BETA) at the moment, but what was more interesting was working with both Microsoft Canada’s Open Source team, David Eaves and RedBit Development. The combination of expertise, collaboration and different timezones was something that I am truly amazed at. What was most interesting about this application was the fact that we leveraged both open source technologies like PHP and Microsoft’s proprietary systems like SQL Server 2008 to create a powerful application for the Canadian population.

I am truly excited about this project for many of reasons, but one that stands out is that the collaborative effort of the team across Canada has demonstrated in a proof-of-concept like form to Canadian citizens and our Federal Government that there is something exciting happening within the Open Government, Open Data and Open Source space. Emitter.ca also demonstrates what can be achieved with Federal data sets.

Please note that this article was originally posted at amcgowan.ca.

Emitter takes the pollution data and converts it into a format that is easy to read by humans and by software.  For humans, type in your riding, address and you will get a map showing the various factories in the area.  The team wanted to give citizens an easier way to find out what is happening around them and a simpler way to get engaged.  For software, all data is stored on Windows Azure using the  Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) to open up the data and allow other developers to use the data in their own applications.  The data is hosted on Datadotgc.ca which is a site dedicated to opening up public data. 

RedBit founder, Mark Arteaga, talks about the whole reason behind the project and why produce a product like this.  The entire RedBit team was involved on the project in some way or another.  Barranger talks about his experience with OGDI and Azure.  Aaron also talks about his experience with OGDI and PHP.

Emitter is a collaborative effort by various people across Canada to help make pollution data easily accessible, searchable and readable and not just the RedBit team.  This would not have happened with out the help of

1. David Eaves – Open Government activist and envisioned the Emitter.ca concept and helped bring it from start to finish
2. Matthew Dance – The ‘brains’ behind the Emitter.ca methodology, graduate student at University of Alberta and responsible for interpreting/analyzing the pollution data and allowing us to present in useful ways
3. Nik Garkusha – Open Data enthusiast and Open Source Strategy Lead at Microsoft Canada.  Nik took role of architect and helping to envision Emitter and most importantly providing funding and hosting for Emitter at the Microsoft Open Lab

Emitter was a collaborative effort for the good of all.

Here are some links to others that have written about Emitter and Open Data initiatives

• Barranger Ridler – OGDI Brings Joy to Developers Everywhere
• Aaron McGowan – Working with Microsoft’s OGDI, from a Developer’s Point of View
• Port25.ca – Emitter.ca 
• ITusiness.ca – Why Government Open Data Initiatives are Boon for Business
• Edmonton Journal – Website Tracks Local Pollution Levels
• London Fuse – How Polluted is your Neighbourhood?  Find out With Emitter
• London Free Press – Area Dirt Easy to Dig up on Web (added Nov 12 2010)
• Aaron McGowan – Aaron talks about the Emitter project (added Nov 12 2010)
• Inside Halton – Neighbourhood Polluters at your Fingertips (Added Nov 19 2010)
• Standard Freeholder – Website Allows Public To Check Air Pollutants (Added Nov 19 2010)

If you are a developer and want to know how to access the data please go to the Datadotgc.ca OGDI instance to access the data.  For the benefit of the developer community we will also be releasing tutorials on how to access the pollution data in your applications.

As a developer, you know you’ve had this experience:

Some government agency announces that they are finally embracing open data.  The wheels upstairs start to turn dreaming up all the cool apps you’re going to build with this new found bounty. But then it happens, you get to the part of the announcement that describes the format, and all the wind comes out of your sales…flat file.  Your dreams of building apps that would make you the envy of your peers, would get you written up on TechCrunch, and discussed at length on YCombinator are now being replaced by thoughts of the hours it’s going to take to set up the database and worries about scheduling the update process to ensure your data is even close to up to date.  Your fast lane to fame and fortune just became the traffic jam heading to cottage country on the Friday of a long weekend.

OGDI goes a long way to solving this problem.

The fine developers of the Open Government Data Initiative have obviously been through this headache enough times that they decided to do something about it.  The open source project (hosted on codeplex) allows any government agency the ability to not just publish their data, but actually provide developers of all types real tools to access it.  Exposing a RESTful service, producing many different output formats including XML, KML, Json and Jsonp, the Azure backed framework saves developers countless hours and dollars by, in many cases, providing everything that the client developer needs from the server tier.  Not willing to leave good enough alone, the OGDI framework provides an interactive SDK that allows you to set up any of the queries that you need while seeing the results of said queries, while also providing example code for multiple different programming languages.  Given all this, I certainly expect OGDI to quickly become the defacto standard for the public sector to engage the development community.

Once the correct decision was made to move most of the data to OGDI (using DataDOTgc’s instance), I was tasked with migrating the data.  Most of the hard work had already been done by the rest of the team (especially Matthew Dance) in shaping the data into the normalized format that we required.  Armed with a SQL Server database full of data and the many tools that are available for moving data into the cloud, all it took was a couple of hours to successfully upload all of the data.  Once it was up, all the features provided by OGDI worked like a charm.

To show you exactly what I mean about how easy OGDI makes app development, in the very near future I’ll be blogging throughout the entire process of porting the emitter.ca project to Windows Phone 7, Stay tuned…

this article originally published on 4MK Mobile.com

• Overview of the developer platform
• Marketplace and deploying apps
• What types of software can be delivered for the phone 

There will also be a session on an overview of the phone more for end users.

The event will be held at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters in Mississauga, Ontario.

Date: Tuesday, November 16th
Time: 6:00pm – 8:30pm
Location: Microsoft Canada Inc.
1950 Meadowvale Blvd.
Mississauga, ON L5N 8L9

Be sure to attend the event and get a first hand look at this new and exciting phone!  Be sure to register for the first Windows Phone 7 User Group Meeting in Toronto!

When we first bid on the project, we came up with the following mock-up to give project sponsors and idea of what exactly is Windows Phone 7.  At the time there where no devices and no way for customers to really get an idea of what is possible.  Mock-ups truly did help the customer visualize what was possible.

As we went through design iterations, we decided to use the pivot experience as this provided a cleaner and simpler user experience when using the actual hardware device.  We also found it allowed users to get to their ‘destination’ within the app faster.  Here is the final screen layout for the app.

Working on both The Globe and Mail project and the MTV News project was a great experience and being one of the first companies in Canada to help large Canadian brands get onto the phone is an even better feeling.   The app is now available in marketplace and is free! 

So what did we deliver?  We delivered an MTV News Hub which took data from all different places and put it into one hub.  Similar to the people hub or the picture hub.  MTV News audience now have the ability to connect with news hosts via twitter, get up to date news stories and even get video streamed straight to their device.

Here is a mockup of what the app would look like on Windows Phone 7 and we got almost exactly the same out put on the device.

And here is an animated GIF of the actual screen shots on the device.

As you can see, it’s almost exactly the same!  That’s the power that this phone gives you, it allows you to help customers properly represent their brands on the phone and create a fantastic experience on the phone for their users.  If you have a Windows Phone 7 device be sure to download the app, it’s free!  Soon we will have some videos showing the experience of the app on the phone, seeing pictures don’t see the entire experience of the app.

_{This article also appears on Mark Arteaga’s Blog}

It’s a new start for Microsoft with Windows Phone and a new fresh start for RedBit.   Here is to new beginnings and successful ventures!