Nokia recently announced plans to make Microsoft Silverlight applications available to all S60 operated Nokias. That would would mean almost the entire Nokia N-Series if I’m not mistaken which would be a huge leap forward. I am not aware of any applications that let you view or use Macromedia Flash technology on a mobile. Nokia also announced support for Series 40 devices and Nokia Internet tablets.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering next-generation media experiences and rich interactive applications. Silverlight is already powering thousands of applications around the world and organizations including Entertainment Tonight, the NBA and NBC Universal to deliver superior Web-based experiences to their customers. The arrangement with Nokia will substantially extend the reach of Silverlight by making the platform available for hundreds of millions of devices.

Personally, as a .Net Developer, this is exceptionally exciting and I cannot wait for this to become a reality. I already have an idea in mind and will start working on it ASAP and then maybe I can return this blog back to a development focused blog I unfortunately have not yet been able to find more information as to when this will be available. Having recently moved into my own apartment I have not yet replaced my ADSL connection and having to rely on a GPRS connection isn’t that great.

Good news however, I am getting a new work laptop within the next two weeks and I will be organizing a HSDPA connection so I’ll be able to post more ASP.Net related posts soon. I must however admit that the progress from Nokia’s side has truely won me back so far. Now if I could only get my hands on the Nokia N78 for a test run!

Microsoft Silverlight - http://silverlight.net/
Nokia Internet Tablet - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
S60 - http://www.s60.com/
Series 40 - http://forum.nokia.com/series40

Now as you can see in my previous post, Virgin Mobile told me that they have the Nokia N78 in stock, however, a Nokia representative contacted me this morning and it seems the N78 will only be available here from October this year. I have a sneaking suspicion that Virgin Mobile were confusing the N78 and N73 although the call center were pretty confident when I called them to inquire about the N78. However I’m going to go with what Nokia and said and I only expect the N78 to available from mid October from the major service providers in the country.

Nokia were kind enough to send me more information and images of the N78 so that I could give them to you!

Key features include:

• Integrated A-GPS
• Audio playback time up to 24 hours
• Music player with integrated FM transmitter (88.1 –107.9 MHz)
• CMOS 3.2 megapixel (2048 x 1536) autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, LED flash and up to 20x digital zoom. Automatic tagging with capture location. (GeoCoding)
• 2.4″ QVGA (240 x 320) display with 16 million colors
• Mobile broadband with WLAN and HSDPA
• Multimedia menu and NaviTMwheel for accessing content
• Take up to 1500* tracks with you on a pre-fitted 2GB memory card
• Access your images, music, podcasts and videos remotely via the web

Below are two attachments for you to have a look at:

The Official Press Release
Technical Data Sheet

I am still awaiting replies from MTN and Cell C but as I previously said, I’m going with what Nokia themselves are telling me. I’ll post more information if I get any.

Yes Steven We do have the Nokia N78 retailing for less than R5400

Time to check out Virgin Mobile!

Dear Steven

Thank you for your email communication to Vodacom.

Cellular networks do not always approve certain handset models due to the fact it does not perform as well on their respective networks. The approval of any new handset on the cellular network is determined by the test it undergoes. We cannot confirm the date when the testing will take place for the Nokia N78.

Should you have any further queries, please contact us via e-mail at customercare@vodacom.co.za.

Warm Regards

Kaashief Nassiep

Email Contact Centre

So sadly it looks like it might still be a while before we see it. Still awaiting responses from MTN, Cell C, Virgin Mobile and Nokia

Nokia:
Now Nokia and I have up and down relationship but most of my phones have been Nokias. And the one thing I must admit is that Nokias are reliable. I never had a problem with, the only problem I had with the N70 is that I felt it was so slow, other than that I cannot complain at all. They are durable and reliable phones that deliver on what they promise. I sometimes feel sorry for them since they are basically the Microsoft of the cellphone world and as such suffer unfair criticism at times. I too have been guilty of that, but as said, it was mainly because of my N70.

Nokia N78
This little phone looks brilliant! It is typical on the N-Series Nokia in that it comes with a ton of features bundled into a decent size phone. Here’s some of the awesome features in it:

1. Stereo speakers
2. ARM 11 369 MHz processor
3. HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
4. Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
5. Symbian OS, S60 rel. 3.2
6. WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML, RSS feeds
7. 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels Carl Zeiss optics
8. secondary CIF videocall camera
9. Built-in GPS receiver
10. A-GPS support
11. FM transmitter

Thats a great list of features as far as I’m concerned!

Unfortunately I cannot find an exact local release date yet but I have sent emails to Vodacom, MTN, Cell C and Virgin Mobile as well ofcourse to Nokia themselves. As soon as I have any feedback I will post it.

I have recently moved into my own flat and I do not have ADSL or HSDPA yet so now prime blogging and research time is gone, that should change in a few weeks or so hopefully. Other than that, I have discovered that trying to plan a wedding is in fact hectic. A lot more hectic than I had ever imagined.

Work is finally starting to get challenging since I the software side of the department here is breaking away to form a new company. I am FINALLY going to be working in ASP.net again and the ideas being thrown around are absolutely awesome! To top everything off I am probably getting my laptop soon and I’m starting to look into various options. I will finally be able to work from home or the nearest Mugg and Bean

Personally I’m gonna love this cause I can’t always watch the cricket but now the cricket is going to come direct to my GTalk client which means I won’t miss a thing! Well done to whoever had this idea, it is an inspired one and something many of us will use!

If you haven’t joined up with Twitter yet then now is the time! Follow the Pro20 here: http://twitter.com/Pro20

EDIT: Marc Forrest will be covering the cricket and posting the updates

EDIT: This is the brainchild of Mike Stopforth. Thanks Mike!

The interesting part of all of this is that it seems MS is returning to the “coding style” of classic ASP with inline HTML coding very prominent. So seeing a default page I decided to run the project and view the default page. To my surprise this default page is fully styled. Thats when I saw it. A reference to a CSS file! So I opened the CSS file and checked it out and yes, it was good.

It honestly blew my mind. I will hopefully be posting more on the MVC framework soon, work and personal life willing

For those of you that have no clue what OpenID is, imagine creating an account on 1 website and simply being login into multiple websites using these credentials! A perfect example of this would be registering on http://www.myopenid.com/ and then simply just logging into http://altdotnet.org/ without having to register on altdotnet as well.

Whats seriously disappointing for me is that not even Microsoft have tried incorporating OpenID into their community portals.

For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to get Visual Studio working correctly again without having to format my computer. After numerous re-installations I gave up and started setting up VMWare on my machine and I’ll run VS through that.

My favorite excuse for being quiet however is this. I had an awesome idea for a website. Something that currently does not exist to the best of my knowledge. Now although I am ASP.Net developer, I am a terrible designer. So I have been working as hard as I can on a design for this site that doesn’t suck. I have however now given up on this for now to do as Tyler Reed said to me, “Get it out there THEN make it look good”.

The more I think about this the bigger my ideas become. More news to follow on this soon!

Yesterday however I got the new Nine Inch Nails album entitled “Ghosts”. Its an amazing 36 track instrumental album and its awesome! So I tried to fire up iTunes and got an unhandled win32 exception and then iTunes promptly closes itself before its even really started.

After many hours of un-installing and re-installing many different applications without success I finally realized when the last time was that I opened up iTunes successfully. It was *before* I installed Visual Studio and the .Net 3.5 framework.  Now I realise that Apple and Microsoft don’t exactly have the best working relationship but seriously guys, this just sucks.

I have made sure I have the newest and most up to date Quicktime and iTunes installations. So now I need to format my entire machine just to get iTunes working again, so I can get the NiN album onto my iPod. Hopefully once I install Visual Studio again iTunes won’t break :-/

Liv.Tv, an introduction:
What is LIV? Here’s the introduction straight from their own website:

LIV is a service that enables the capturing and sharing of user generated videos via the mobile handset. The application is downloaded onto the handset and allows users to capture video content and upload it onto a server. Users can then view the uploaded content but cannot download the content for storage. You also have access to content via your mobile device and website which enables you to view the uploaded videos from your PC or mobile device.

Basically, if you record a video of your dog doing something stupid or funny and you want to share this video with your friends (and the rest of the world), you can simply upload the video and they can watch the video on their cellphone or computer!

As previously mentioned, I have been anticipating something like this for a while now and I’m glad to see we have it up and running here in South Africa.

It must ofcourse be mentioned that LIV is still in its BETA phase so you can except some bugs and several changes I’m sure. Unfortunately, as with all things there are restrictions. Personally I use a HTC P4350 PDA style phone that runs windows mobile so I can access the website and the application BUT I cannot view the videos since my phone cannot play .3GP video files and I cannot submit videos since my phone does not support the requirement video formats needed to upload.

What I do like about LIV so far is that they cater to almost everyone! They have the website, where you can upload and watch videos, there’s a JAVA applet to download onto your phone to do these things OR you can access the Liv.Tv/WAP site and do these things as well!

Issues I have encountered:
As previously mentioned, this is still a BETA release of the website and so these guys need our input! Here are a few things I found:

• After searching for a video and watching it, to get back to the main page you need to find a small image on the bottom left of the screen that says “* Liv” and click on that. Unfortunately I don’t feel that many non-tech savvy folks will find this. I would rather recommend linking the LIV.TV image in the banner as its big and commands your attention.
• With me personally, the quicktime plugin in the pages tends to crash me browser after watching 1 or 2 vids. This may not be a LIV.TV problem as such and might be a problem with my Quicktime installation but I feel that LIV.TV should “force” users to run the latest version of Quicktime and/or any related Quicktime plugins.
• Although LIV.TV only supports 3GP and MP4 video formats. I can understand why they did this though as all the phones on their compatibility list supports these formats but I would like to see them expand this selection later.
• Although you can create and join groups, you cannot see which videos these groups have uploaded.

This is still a BETA so these issues don’t worry me too much but they need to be seen to!

Conclusion:
I can see Liv.TV doing exceptionally in the future especially among the university students! I am however worried that inappropriate content is going to find its way onto LIV. I realise there is content like this on all video sharing websites, but it MXiT attracted the flak that it did, I have a funny feeling LIV are going to get even more trouble. All in all, awesome idea and I will definitely be watching LIV with a lot of interest! Here are some links to get you started

• Liv website: http://www.liv.tv
  
• Liv WAP: http://liv.tv/wap/
• Liv blog: http://blog.liv.tv
• Facebook FanPage: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Livtv/7224928963?ref=s

How you found any bugs and problems with LIV.TV? Post them here as comments and I will forward them onto the team at LIV.

His tips are as follows:

1. Generate new encryption keys

When moving an application to production for the first time it is a good idea to generate new encryption keys. This includes the machine validation key and decryption key as well as any other custom keys your application may be using. There is an article on CodeProject that talks about generating machineKeys specifically that should be helpful with this.

2. Encrypt sensitive sections of your web.config

This includes both the connection string and machine key sections. See Scott Guthrie’s post for some good references. Note that if your application runs in a clustered environment you will need to share a custom key using the RSA provider as described in an MSDN article.

3. Use trusted SQL connections

Both Barry Dorrans and Alex Chang have articles which discuss this in detail.

4. Set retail=”true” in your machine.config

This will kill three birds with one stone. It will force the ‘debug’ flag in the web.config to be false, it will disable page output tracing, and it will force the custom error page to be shown to remote users rather than the actual exception or error message. For more information you can read Scott Guthrie’s post or the MSDN reference.

5. Create a new application pool for your site

When setting up your new site for the first time do not share an existing application pool. Create a new application pool which will be used by only by the new web application.

6. Set the memory limit for your application pool

When creating the application pool, specifically set the memory limit rather than the time limit which is set by default. Asp.net has a good whitepaper which explains the value of this:

By default IIS 6.0 does not set a limit on the amount of memory that IIS is allowed to use. ASP.NET’s Cache feature relies on a limitation of memory so the Cache can proactively remove unused items from memory.

It is recommended that you configure the memory recycling feature of IIS 6.0.

7. Create and appropriately use an app_Offline.htm file

There are many benefits to using this file. It provides an easy way to take your application offline in a somewhat user friendly way (you can at least have a pretty explanation) while fixing critical issues or pushing a major update. It also forces an application restart in case you forget to do this for a deployment. Once again, ScottGu is the best source for more information on this.

8. Develop a repeatable deployment process and automate it

It is way too easy to make mistakes when deploying any type of software. This is especially the case with software that uses configuration files that may be different between the development, staging, or production environments. I would argue that the process you come up with is not nearly as important as it being easily repeatable and automated. You can fine tune the process as needed, but you don’t want a simple typo to bring a site down.

9. Build and reference release versions of all assemblies

In addition to making sure ASP.NET is not configured in debug mode, also make sure that your assemblies are not debug assemblies. There are of course exceptions if you are trying to solve a unique issue in your production environment … but in most cases you should always deploy with release builds for all assemblies.

10. Load test

This goes without saying. Inevitably, good load testing will uncover threading and memory issues not otherwise considered.

Kyle has awesome content on his blog and I think there’s something for everyone there. I have sat reading different posts for the last half an hour or so. I habe already added his blog to my Google Reader. So go check out his blog now!

Top 10 Best Practices for Production ASP.NET Applications on http://daptivate.com