With the recent launch of Netflix in the UK it was about time I gave streaming another chance to prove itself as viable alternative to Blu-ray & DVD rentals. I watch films using a projector (720p, 80” screen) so heavily compressed video is no good.
This post details my completely unscientific test of four of the major players; Lovefilm, Netflix, iTunes and Zune.
Lovefilm
A Lovefilm subscription has been my main source of films …
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Microsoft has done a lot of work to ensure background agents are useful without disrupting the user or wiping out their remaining battery power. However, it is still important for you as a developer to do the right thing and think about the user when implementing periodic agents.
Give the user control and understand their intention
Unless the background agent is critical to your application (from the users point of view, not yours) you should always give the user the choice of whether they want to use thi…
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With the new multitasking and fast app switching functionality in Windows Phone 7.5 apps are often kept in memory and no longer tombstone as they did with Windows Phone 7. As long as you build your app with the WP 7.1 SDK you get this free as a developer, it just works.
However, there are times when your app may tombstone, therefore it's still important to handle (and test) the activated and deactivated events.
In order to test your tombstoning code you can force your application to be tombstoned instead of kept i…
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I’ve just published a minor update to Pingdom Pulse for Windows Phone. Pingdom Pulse is a simple Pingdom client to help you monitor your servers wherever you are.
The biggest change in this release is the addition of an outages pivot. This shows the date/time and duration of all outages for a particular server over the last 30 days.
I have plans to add more functionality to Pingdom Pulse and I’d love to hear what you think is missing, you can contact me from within the app or find me o…
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The latest version of My Lovefilm Mobile for Windows Phone was published today so I wanted to run through a couple of features that have been added since launch.
Trailers
Today's update added a watch trailer button to the app bar in title views. You'll see this whenever you view one of the titles you have at home, in your list or when you search/browse for a title.
Unfortunately not all titles will have trailers (Lovefilm don't provide API users with access to their vast trailer library). …
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Update: The information in this post is no longer relevant, the Windows Phone tools and Fiddler work well together now.
If you're reading this you're probably wondering why Fiddler no longer works with the WP7 emulator. I can't answer that question, the beta release made a change that stopped it from working, however explained below is a workaround.
Before you read the rest
You will need 2 computers
This works but it's not ideal because it means routing all your traffic through a proxy (the second…
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