Tag: NHWPAD

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Apache Cordova and Windows Universal (8.1)

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the Granite State Windows Platform Users Group last night (April 16, 2015) to see my presentation on using Apache Cordova to create Windows Universal (8.1) “store apps”. 

I walked away feeling like I’d helped inspire everyone who attended…  even as an “intro” level presentation, the demos seemed to keep everyone engaged, asking questions, and prompting me to go “off-roading” to check out various features. 

We really had fun with it!

So while the best part of the presentation was the demos, the slides do have some great links in them.

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=90A564D76FC99F8F&resid=90A564D76FC99F8F%21370273&authkey=AKm8AYTLUY1iyG8&em=2&wdAr=1.7777777777777776″ width=”350″ height=”221″]
 
 

If you missed it, don’t worry too much…  I’ll keep this presentation dusted off & ready for upcoming events, as well…  I could imagine it fitting well into a Code Camp event or something akin to it in the coming year.  

Heck, feel free to reach out to me if you think this is something you’d like to know more about… I’m happy to have a chat about it.

Next month’s meeting is already scheduled…  we’re looking forward to Jim O’Neil coming to reprise his Boston Code Camp 23 presentation on Themes in Windows Universal (8.1).   Please join us!

Meetup:  http://www.meetup.com/Granite-State-NH-WPDev 



Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Lumia Problems

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I’m a pretty serious fan of Windows Phone, and especially Lumia devices.   In addition to the NH Windows Phone Users Group (now Granite State Windows Platform App Devs),  I’ve convinced everyone in my immediate family, and a good chunk of my extended family to go Lumia… 

So it breaks my heart when I see a Windows Phone that’s gone awry.  Among the many I’ve come in contact with, I’ve seen one or two develop issues that seem outside of normal hardware wear & tear.

My own device has occasionally had trouble with its SD card, occasionally forcing a restore.   These are annoyances to me, Windows Phone is a cloud car, so resetting the device and getting it back to normal is really only a mater of re-entering credentials, and the phone’s back in business.   The restore tends to re-apply start-screen layout and the set of installed apps on the device… the apps themselves are responsible for their individual recoveries, typically from their own cloud backups.   The few times I’ve been forced to do a full hard reset & restore, it’s been an ordeal that typically lasted under an hour (with a good Wifi connection).

This past week, I think the SD card flaked out again, but restoring from a backup didn’t resolve the issues.   I identified a number of odd behaviors, and was almost convinced my device was beyond recovery:

  • Power button:  the typical short-click which should toggle the device in & out of standby mode simply was not operating.   Long clicks, intended to shut the device down completely, were working, so… not a hardware disconnect.   In order to wake the phone up, I had to plug in a power source… and then had to wait for it to put itself to sleep.
  • App updates:  app updates were identified and the device would queue them, but rather than automatically downloading and installing, they’d hang in the download queue, all marked as Pending.  Occasionally one would come up with an error, but a retry would simply hang it back in Pending state.
  • WiFi internet sharing would not allow clients to connect.
  • Power saver:  on a whim, I put the device in power saver mode.  At first, it wouldn’t take the change.  Then I told it to always go in powersaver mode, and then, ironically, I couldn’t get it OUT of power saver mode.
  • Data Sense:  the app would crash and abend when trying to open it.
  • Mail sync:  would only sync manually
  • Alarm:  I missed my usual bus twice this week because my alarm failed & I overslept.

The end solution:  hard reset, but don’t restore from a backup…  just manually set up your accounts and re-download apps.  It took me a couple hours, but to get my 1520 back on track again, it was well worth the time.  In retrospect, I’m also happier because I didn’t re-install a ton of apps that I don’t use anymore, so the device is much leaner.  

The Windows Phone platform is relatively mature… it doesn’t fail often, but I think I’m going to have to pick up a better SD card.  The hard part is that I think I’ve heard rumors of some of these symptoms on devices that don’t have SD card slots.

My understanding is that it has something to do with the Cyan firmware update.  The Denim firmware may provide more stability, and that update started rolling out to devices in December with a promise that by the end of that month, it would be rolled out to the full Lumia nation.  We’re pushing into Feb 2015, and most in the US are still waiting.

[Addendum, 5/7/2015]:  My Lumia 1520 had a relapse of the above symptoms on Windows Phone 8.1.1 / Denim.   On a whim, I decided to try upgrading to the Windows 10 Insider Preview.  The problems with the SD card intensified as well.  I finally bit the bullet and replaced the SD card.  I did have to hard reset the phone back to the “stock” Windows 10 Insider Preview, but after that, not only were all the above symptoms resolved, but another long running annoyance…  a problem I thought to be related to the Lumia 1520 itself, went away.  The problem…  often, entering the unlock code, number presses would repeat so quickly that the phone would fail to unlock.  Occasionally it was bad enough to lock my phone for a minute or two.    Again, this issue is now resolved along with the other symptoms I noted in this post by replacing the SD card with a new one.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Cobbler’s Shoes

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Happy New Year! I hope you enjoyed the holidays!
 
I took time off for the holidays… not as much as I’d have liked to, but enough to enjoy it.

What’d I do?

The cobbler finally got a chance to tend to his own shoes, at least infrastructure wise.

A few years ago, I caught that MS was giving away a license to Windows System Center Core, and I realized I had enough retired hardware to cobble together a hobby-level host. I then did a Physical->Virtual on my small network of Windows 2003 based servers that I ran the NHSPUG website from.

The setup was nice, actually… all three virtual machines ran with room to spare on what was originally an old client-class PC. With dynamic RAM turned on and all three VMs cranking, they occasionally managed to consume nearly a third of the host’s 8GB of RAM.

Having recently had opportunity to get a hold of platform MSDN licensing, I upgraded my entire home network infrastructure by two platform generations across the board.

Seriously… Windows Server 2003 ->  2012 R2 64, SQL 2005 -> 2014, SharePoint WSS3 -> SharePoint Foundation 2013.

Almost all of it was build, replace, rip… build new VMs, integrate them into the domain, migrate data & config as needed, then shut down the systems they replace. The fun one was SharePoint WSS 3.0 upgrading to Foundation 2013. I had to bounce the content databases off a spare 2010 farm I had left over from a project at work. It was nice that it was possible to do that, given that the 2010 farm was a different domain. It’s amazing how much you can get done in short order when you are a one-man IT shop… the communications overhead savings alone is unreal.

The hard part is that newer software in the 64bit range uses much more system resources, so I have extended hosting not just to my System Center, but also to two Windows 8.1 Pro systems running Hyper-V, just to spread out the necessary load and provide some critical system redundancy.

With that, only obvious thing externally is that the Granite State NH SharePoint Users Group website ( http://www.granitestatesharepoint.org ) is now SharePoint 2013 based.

Internally, things generally seem a touch faster, smoother… maybe that’s just psychological, but I notice the difference, even if my wife & kids think it just functions as always, as expected.

I guess the irony in this is that my hobby infrastructure backlog is knocked down a few more notches than I thought I would ever get to… (yes, I took time off from work, and, to chill, I did some of what I do at work.) now my hobby development backlog has new possibilities and subsequently grown substantially.

One of the first things I’ve got to take care of is the few services the SharePoint upgrade has caused… the NHSPUG site still has some cosmetic issues I want to sort out. My Windows Phone apps that integrated with the WSS3 site are now broken, and I have some jiggering to do with my dev environment before I can even diagnose them. That doesn’t even cover some of the things I want to do with the NHWPAD group and my hobby/portfolio projects (e.g. Jimmy Sudoku).