Office 365 ActiveSync fail, again

When Office 365 launched the mobile server address was m.outlook.com. This was a great address: easy to remember, pretty short, etc. A couple months ago my phone stopped syncing my mail. I went to the Office 365 forums and found that for some reason m.outlook.com was now broken and everybody had to switch to an address found by going into Options -> See All Options -> Settings for POP, IMAP, and SMTP access… Mine was pod51009.outlook.com. Then last night it went down again. I checked…

Silverlight 5 + Internet Explorer 9 using old Content-Type from POST in a subsequent GET

We’ve been running into a super annoying problem at work. After our Silverlight application makes it’s login POST the next GET that we send fails with a NotFoundException. This only happens when using the Silverlight 5 runtime and only happens in Internet Explorer 9. I have tested now with Silverlight 4 as well as Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari, and IE9/SL5 is the only bad combination. Here are the headers of our login POST: POST /login HTTP/1.1 Accept: application/xml Referer: http://localhost:8080/censored.xap?timestamp=1326148328000 Accept-Language: en-CA Content-Length: 38…

Canadian investing made lazy

It’s Easy One of the most common complaints that I hear about investing is that it’s too complicated and that people don’t have time to learn about how to do it. The good thing is, it pays to be lazy in investing! Canadian Capitalist – Lazy Man’s Portfolio Almost every stock or mutual fund will lose to it’s respective index. The concept of the “lazy” portfolio is just to buy something as similar to the index as possible. This way you will go up and…

Localizing a Silverlight DatePicker control, a study in pain thresholds

For shame Microsoft. There is currently no way to localize a DatePicker. Instead of letting us simply specify a format string or any of the other beautiful conventions we are forced to basically re-template the entire control. In our application, at my day job, we support many different languages/cultures. This was becoming a mess with the various date formats so we decreed that all dates would be in the ISO standard format (yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss). Styling everything in the app was a 10 minute job, until…
logo-mango-app

Mango App Challenge winner!

So a little bit ago my second Windows Phone app was approved. http://blog.shuttr.com/2011/11/20/shuttr-photographers-now-have-a-windows-phone-app-too/ Here are my two apps up on the Windows Phone Marketplace: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-CA/publishers/Shuttr Once the approval came through I filled out the form on the Mango App Challenge page. https://www.microsoft.com/canada/offers-promotions/mango-app-challenge/Default.aspx I didn’t hear anything back for a while, so I contacted Paul Laberge (@plaberge) on Twitter.  He got back to me immediately and before long I was declared a winner!  The phones that they were offering were a bit disappointing, so I have…
WP7-App-Hub

First Windows Phone 7 application published!

Well, my first application has been published. http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=e995f3ee-9fd4-4e60-bdba-a30168099cd1 My first attempt was a bit of a probe to see what the process is like. I whipped the app together in about an hour and it was quite basic. I wanted to see: If I would be rejected What I would be rejected for What the timelines are like Turns out I was rejected in about 2 or 3 days for two reasons.  I had no error handling in my data requests so it would crash…

Writing a JSON API in ASP.NET MVC 3

Here is a snippet of the source for the current API on Shuttr. The repositories are bound using Ninject so that our code is unit testable. As you can see, the actual call is pretty simple using LINQ, anonymous objects and the new JSON helpers in .Net.
WP7-App-Hub

Windows Phone AppHub Developer Account Update – Day 4

Here’s the day 4 update on my Windows Phone On Friday I applied for my developer account.  Filled out a couple pages of forms, paid my $100 fee, etc.  I was then emailed to verify my account, I clicked that link and it said my account would be fully verified shortly. On Monday I got an email saying that Shuttr wasn’t found in their business database and that I needed to submit additional paperwork to verify my business.  I emailed them back my registered trade name…

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