Heading for TechDays via Amsterdam

Thunderbird Three at Humberside Airport. Who knew?

Thunderbird Three at Humberside Airport. Who knew?

We are having a day or two in Amsterdam before heading off to TechDays in The Hague. So we hopped onto to the plane at Humberside and headed off to Schipol. After a quick train journey we checked into our hotel and then headed out for a walk. Of course I took the camera.

There are a lot of bikes here

There are a lot of bikes here

Tooltip from Amsterdam...

Tooltip from Amsterdam...

I really do like it here. 

TechDays 2013 Sessions Now Online

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If you want to see a proper Gadgeteer session, not in rhyme, but with working demos and a lot more detail, then you can get hold of my TechDays session on gadget development by clicking on the above image. If you want to see all my Channel 9 sessions (including the ones on Windows Phone Agents and Windows Phone Speech) you can find them here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/Rob-Miles

Speechifying Windows Phone 8 at TechDays 2013

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This is the final audience of my TechDays sessions as they arrived.

Today I did the last session for TechDays 2013 NL. We were making Windows Phone talk to us and make sense of what we were saying. Another splendid audience and another bunch of files that you can download with the presentation and all the source code. Heading home this evening, once I’ve spent the afternoon playing with my latest “Gadgeteer idea”. That rhymes, which is useful.

Windows Phone Agents at Tech Days

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Today I was up bright and early to fly out to the Netherlands for TechDays 2013. I’m doing some sessions on Windows Phone and Gadgeteer. I’ve been doing sessions in TechDays for quite a while, they have a great atmosphere at the conference and the audiences are always great.

Today was no exception. You can tell the quality of the audience by the questions that you get at the end, and in this session I got some really good ones. One of which I couldn’t answer at the time. The question concerned the behaviour of application created alerts. A Windows Phone program can create alerts which will appear at some point in the future. These are useful because you get them whether the application is running or not. When the alert fires the user can drop back to the application and do something. I made a program for timing eggs which causes an alert when the egg is ready. What the delegate wanted to know was what happened to the alert if the phone is displaying the lock screen, or powered off.

I’ve done some experiments , and now I think I know the answer. If the phone is locked the alert will appear on top of the lock screen, just like any other appointment would. If the phone is turned off, you don’t seem to get the alert displayed when it is powered back on though. Hope this helps.

You can find the slides and the sample code (including the egg timer) here.