Well, I got a Samsung Focus S to play around with this weekend and test the windows phone 7 OS out.  Overall, I liked it, but I can't switch from iOS just yet.

UI

The "Metro" UI is actually quite nice, I found it easy to use and find everything.  My biggest gripe is lack of customization beyond just the basic moving around of things.  I can't find the battery percentage at the top, have to dig fifteen menus deep to get at it.

Email

I love the email app, finally someone gives me a way to see only unread emails, only flagged emails, only important (!) emails in my exchange outlook.  The linked inboxes are cool too, even though I finally got that on iOS.

Social

The phone is clearly aimed at social media users, and the integration is really good.  Of course its lacking any Google+ integration.  Not a big deal, but its easy to set up and easy to use.  Can easy send pictures to multiple social media sites. Only biggest issue is you can't easily switch between multiple users on different sites.

Issues

Have to use the Zune software on my computer to load music.  I hate the zune software, why can't I just copy my music over, or why can't I download music from my skydrive?

No VPN???  Really Microsoft? Really?  I can't believe you released a mobile OS without any VPN support!  This is absurd!

App prices are off the chart.  Sure I get xbox live integration, but nothing too impressive here.

No Hulu? Again, Really?  This isn't rocket science, get hulu on your OS!

Development

I'm a native visual studio user, so I found creating apps using XAML very familar, but no sockets connections!  This means any non web based connections are out of the question.  I wanted to write a simple app to query my Control4 system.  Already had a cool C# desktop app, figured it would be easy... Nope.  The SDK lacks a lot of core .NET features.

Overall

I want to like this OS, but I can't.  I like the phone, despite bad battery life.  The camera is good, the screen is ok, a bit gray in the whites for me.  Ultimately, it will be another version or two before they win me over again.  For now, I'm going back to my iPhone 4, I miss my iPhone 4.

XML Notepad 2007 is now my favorite XML editor.  This thing is so simple but so cool.  Makes editing and viewing the hierarchy  of an XML file so easy.

Even has find and replace, full namespace support, and even XML Diff support.

The killer feature, if anyone has used Visual Studio…  Intellisense based on expected elements and attributes.  No more guessing the required schema, it enforces it.

I’ve thrown some large XML files at it and it loads in seconds.  This is cool!

Best of all, its free. So if you work with XML, go download this now!

I tried installing Wordpress 2.6.3 on my dev Windows 2008 server running IIS 7 and .Net 3.5sp1 and could not get it working.

I went back to 2.6.0 of wordpress which installed just fine and then did the upgrade to 2.6.3 which worked. No idea why it didn't install, but something clearly changed between 2.6.0 and 2.6.3 to break IIS 7 installs.

Oh well, now to figure out how to get comments and other functions in Wordpress to work under IIS7, got permalinks working, but think it broke the comments feature. I love the new URL Rewrite Pack for IIS7 as well as the Media Streaming Bandwidth throttle option for IIS 7.

Can't believe I am saying this, but the last couple of months working with IIS 7 has converted me from Apache. Still wish IIS 7 could do wildcard binding without dedicating an IP and retain the web.config file across publishes from Visual Studio 2008, but oh well. I also wish that the ASP.NET Visual Studio Web Server could understand the URL Rewrite statements in the web.config file and route the links appropriately instead of having to publish to my local IIS 7 install in Vista. Also wish that IIS 7 could be installed on XP.

Oh well, at least I got Wordpress running and MySQL on it, so that means I can start testing the various Wordpress sites I have moving from Apache to IIS 7. Next up is cleaning up my Wordpress export to BlogML for Blogengine.net import. Oh well, lots to do, little time to do it.

So today's challenge was to display the Title, Meta description and meta tags on a site I am currently working on for troubleshooting and SEO reasons.

The solution I came up with was to place the following code in the code behind of the masterpage.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
HtmlHead headTag = (HtmlHead)Page.Header;
            Response.Write("Title of Page: " + headTag.Title + "");

            foreach (var control in Page.Header.Controls)
            {
                var test = control.GetType();
                if (test.Name == "HtmlMeta")
                {
                    if ((control as HtmlMeta).Name == "Description")
                    {
                        Response.Write("MetaDescription : " + (control as HtmlMeta).Content + "");
                    }
                    if ((control as HtmlMeta).Name == "Keywords")
                    {
                        Response.Write("MetaKeywords : " + (control as HtmlMeta).Content + "");
                    }
                }
            }
}

The HeadTag.Title gives us the Title of the current page.
The foreach loop jumps through each control in the header section of the current page.
Since there can be different types of controls in the header section, we need to check for the type of HtmlMeta.
Then we need to check to see if it is the Description or Keywords and return the content values.

I am sure there are other ways, but this is a really simple way to display the 3 main SEO elements, Page Title, Page MetaTag Description and Page MetaTag Keywords for all the ASP.NET pages that use this master page (or you can place it on each page code behind) without having to view the source code.

Just remember to remove this code before you launch your site :)

Today's challenge was fun.

I had added a bunch of textboxes and labels to a Grid with 2 StackPanel in my code behind.

StackPanel sp1 = new StackPanel();
StackPanel sp2 = new StackPanel();
Grid g = new Grid();
                ColumnDefinition colDef1 = new ColumnDefinition {Width = new GridLength(50)};
                ColumnDefinition colDef2 = new ColumnDefinition();
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef1);
                g.ColumnDefinitions.Add(colDef2);
gb.Content = g;
                Grid.SetColumn(sp1,0);
                g.Children.Add(sp1);
                Grid.SetColumn(sp2, 1);
                g.Children.Add(sp2);

for (int i = 1, i < = 4, i++)
{
                Label lbl = new Label {Content = "Name", Margin = new Thickness(0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(lbl, 0);
                sp1.Children.Add(lbl);
                TextBox fieldname = new TextBox {Text = "", Name = "fieldname" + i, Margin = new Thickness(0,5,0,0)};
                Grid.SetColumn(fieldname, 1);
                sp2.Children.Add(fieldname);
}

So I then wanted to get the results of what someone types into these TextBoxs.

But wait, I can't just access them like this:

string t = fieldname1.Text;

Why? Only Microsoft knows, but apparently, dynamically added controls can't be accessed this way since they don't exist in the XAML code.

So, how does one access them then? Well, that's where this cool LogicalTreeHelper function to find the control by name we use the FindLogicalNode option of the LogicalTreeHelper function

So to loop through the number of fields you added you can do the following:

List test = new List;
for (int i = 1; i < = 4; i++)
{
test.Add((LogicalTreeHelper.FindLogicalNode(Fields1, "fieldname" + i) as TextBox).Text);
}

So there you have it, a simple way to access dynamically added controls using LogicalTreeHelper and FindLogicalNode just remember to name your controls you add.