Reflections

Once i submitted my app, this is the error I got from store. Was upgrading my app from windows 8.0 to 8.1 a bad idea? The issue told in all blog posts was that i cannot use "background location tracking" if i am creating windows 8.1 silverlight phone apps. Even after I removed all code for background processing, the error still persisted.  Finally, the answer was in the "WMAppManifest.xml" file. I had created the app in Windows phone 8.0, but when app was upgraded  to 8.1, Visual studio forgot to remove the following lines from the xml.  <Tasks>       <DefaultTask Name="_default" NavigationPage="MainPage.xaml">         <BackgroundExecution>           <ExecutionType Name="LocationTracking" />         </BackgroundExecution>       </DefaultTask>   Once it was manually removed, the store accepted my app. Here is the final xml. <Tasks>       <DefaultTask Name="_default" NavigationPage=...

Windows phone deployment to Windows store requires a lot of images which are very specific in terms of image size. You can generate all the images you require (from your own single image source file) from the following website. http://wat-docs.azurewebsites.net/Tools   I have used it and it is really cool! All the images are generated and you can download all the images as a zip file for free.    

I found redcritter as one of the apps under microsoft webmatrix. Searching for this software revealed on its own terms "RedCritter Tracker is ideal for software projects or other projects that require a "what's next" type of approach. It works for multiple teams or even individuals. RedCritter Tracker is the only project management service with badges, rewards, leaderboards and real-time Twitter-style feeds" Webmatrix gives me an option to publish it from my local computer. The second option is to publish it from the cloud. The local setup The installation was a breeze. I am creating my first account. Email: manoj.tharayil@gmail.com Username in gmail. Uploading to an azure website, does not seem to be complicated. The azure website was created easily. http://manojagile.azurewebsites.net/ This software gives me rights to add only three users in the free version. This is nota good idea!! Time to move on to something else!!

When you use a tool like facilius to export your test cases from TFS to Excel ( Usually it is a client requirement), you will be faced with exported Excel containing a lot of html tags. Example below. 1. Login to CRM with valid credentials 2. Navigate->Marketing->Marketing Plan 3. Click New Ribbon button 4. Enter the following data : Name, Description, Financial Year, Business Entityand click Save and close button To remove all these html tags in one shot, we can use the following regular expression. ]*>(.*?) I have tested the above in notepad++ and it works fine. (Control+H for find and replace) In excel, I could not find the search and replace using regular expression. So i went with individual find and replace and removed most of the tags like , etc. For the cells which did not match with the majority of the tags, I copy pasted the cell contents into notepad++ and used the above regular expression to remove all the tags. In replace all, keep it blank and the in...

http://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csikszentmihalyi_on_flow?language=en#t-801325   Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."