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Last week Nokia announced her Windows Phone 7 devices: Lumia 710 and 800. They are very nice devices, but enough to change the game? Let’s be clear: I think Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is best platform available today, superior to iPhone and the ‘iPhone-Clone’-Android. Sure, if you don’t like the Metro design, you stick with the other platforms, but if you are interested in ‘get the things done’ and stability, WP7 is your device.

So why is WP7 not taking off, like Android? My thoughts about that are:

• Microsoft isn’t cool.
  So Microsoft needs to convince the buyer and seller, that there’s a new cool device out which has nothing to do with the old Windows Mobile 6.x platform. There are rumors out, that even sellers are not willing to promote WP7 devices.


• WP7 has no press coverage.
  For every little iPhone feature you will have a “two page”-article, written by Apple devotees, praising the greatness and I think: ‘This feature, I have on my WP7 since a year”. But not often you see such an article for WP7, and when yes, afterwards are there comments that this article is paid by Microsoft. Many times they are only speaking of iPhone and Android, with only short side remark of WP7. This is the most difficult piece to change.


• WP7 hasn’t a broad range of devices, from cheap to expensive.
  They are planning to offer cheaper devices like the Lumia 710, but where are high level devices? For example there are no devices out with more than 16GB, iPhone 4S has up to 64GB. I was hoping the Nokia Lumia 800 will offer a SD-Memorycard option, but no. If you use your phone as music player, as podcast player and application and game center, you are running out of memory the first day. And I’m not speaking of watching movies on the phone.


• WP7 still missing some important apps.
  With the Mango release, it’s now possible to implement Skype-style and nice AR apps, etc. So there no technical limitations anymore.

What are your toughts? For feedback, you may contact me by twitter @bluesware

Microsoft is throwing tools after tools on the market. Many developers are confused and frustrated. It should be easier to choose a technology or tool for a certain task. If not, developers will avoid Microsoft and solve the task with another technology or tool. So I developed a small (not to serious) tool, to help you finding the right way.
Take the test and find your way to the newest tool called WebMatrix. But don't get lost, it's not an easy task. This tool is written in Silverlight, another Microsoft Technology.

If you are looking for applications for the new Windows Phone 7, here are some useful links to browse the marketplace in a different way:

• With Zune Software on your PC
• Bing Visual Search Top Windows Phone 7 Apps
• Bing Visual Search Windows Phone 7 Games
• Marketplacebrowser
• FreewarePocketpc.net
• Wp7AppList.com
• Windows Phone 7 Apps
• Windows Phone 7 Games
• Senova Pivot Browser

My goal was to get a feeling how difficult it is to build a Pivot demo and to show the usefulness of a such a view. From a simple list to a graphical and selectable view. This demo uses the data at www.parlament.ch, for getting the online data I wrote my own collection builder and parser. So it’s really easy to rerun the builder and update the data. I was thrilled when I saw the result. More comprehensible and more joy to use. It shows the power of the Microsoft Silverlight PivotViewer Control and it brings the visualization to a new level.

For using the PivotViewer, you need to install Microsoft Silverlight 4.0. Silverlight runs on Windows in most of the browsers. Silverlight 4.0 isn’t yet supported on Linux (Mono Project ‘Moonlight’). Here is the link to the my pivot demo (with German localization): Swiss Parliament

Setting up the PivotViewer in Silverlight is really straight forward. My problems began when I started to use the collection tools. After some problems installing the Excel Tool, I could create my first collection. But this only works for maintaining a small collection (until 50 items perhaps). So I switched to the command line tool ‘pauthor.exe’ and with CSV-files. I could create the collection, but the tool isn’t ready for globalization. When I create CSV files in UTF8, the tool couldn’t read all the characters correctly. It doesn’t matter if the file was written in UTF8 with or without BOM. It seems to be a problem with the used CSV-reader (an OLE provider). This provider has also some problems on a 64Bit Windows. After contacting ‘Microsoft Live LabsPivot’, Andrew Miner suggest to use the pivot library directly. So I wrote my own data parser and Pivot builder. This was the right way to go, and I got my own collection builder. Another task was to localize the Pivot control to German.