On Wednesday 1st June the 2nd Cardiff Windows Phone User Group was held in the bay-side bar Terra Nova.  The venue provided a plush arena for the event, though problems with their internet connection caused a few difficulties.  Event organiser and host, Sequence’s Mike Hole, knocked up a backup solution in the form of an Android phone (Sssh! Don’t tell Microsoft ;) acting as a wifi hotspot.  Sequence’s sponsorship of the event extended to a bar tab and Terra Nova’s on tap Peroni proved to very popular however.

In the first session of the evening, Mike Hole demonstrated the application usage tracking facilities that are available to Windows Phone developers.  The statistics provided by the App Hub are rather limited basically just showing downloads by region.  Mike showed us how to use the dotfuscator tool to hook analytics recording into function calls within an application.  Whenever a user then activates that method within the app, the event is logged via a monitoring web service.  The reporting for these events, provided by PreEmptive Solutions is infinitely more useful than the standard App Hub reports.

Following on from this, Mike demonstrated how you can record user activity whenever the apps make a call to any supporting web services and, by using their IP address and the Hostip.info service, how you can record their geographical location.  Handy stuff.

Next up was the app demo and Iestyn Jones demonstrated a Welsh recipes app.  Starting with a panorama view, the application shows recipes categorised by type, featured recipes and a search which enables recipe selection by its name or ingredients.  The individual recipes use a pivot view providing the recipe steps, the ingredients, etc.

All very impressive, but next he showed us a second version of the app with a much more “Metro” design, which he developed having viewed Megan Donahue’s mix session. Iestyn had also added integration with facebook & twitter, as well as recipe sharing via email.

Iestyn began developing his apps UI by hand-coding the xaml but then switched to Blend and found it gave him great benefits in development speed.   Another useful tip was provided in that when you display a details page following the selection of an item in a list, that item is still selected when the user goes back to the list page.  In this situation you need to implement code to de-select the list item otherwise it is no longer selectable.

In the final session for the evening Nick Ajderian showed us how to plot tweets on a Bing map within your phone application.

He started with the WebRequest object calling the twitter atom REST service and retrieving data showing the lat/long of the tweet’s origin.  This xml was used to hydrate an ObservableCollection of “FeedItem” objects which encapsulated the tweets and their locations.  Finally, this was linked up to a Bing Maps control and the demo was shown in all its glory – at least, once Nick hacked in some dummy data to overcome problems communicating with the twitter API over the emergency internet connection.

All in all, it was an informative and successful evening, despite the connectivity issues, and I’m looking forward to the next session which will be held mid-July.

If you were there and are aware of any interesting bits I’ve missed, please add them to the comments or let me know via twitter @jonstoneman .