Flash App wins Best of the Best Developer Showdown
First, Congratulations to the winner of the recently held Best of the Best Developer Showdown sponsored by Microsoft and Smart Communications, the winning team was Triumvirate. Check the details of the project below, it was created in Flash and asp.net. :D
Projects: P.E.T.S. (Pets Enthusiasts Tourney Smash!)
The project is about having a digital community wherein users can nurture their own digital pets and use them to interact with other users within the network by means of battling, pet interactions, sharing, buying and trading of items. Interactions will be done through mobile phones and an online widget to greatly improve users’ experience.
1. Ricardo Monteverde
2. Marc Phennee San Diego
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It has been a while that I didn't update my blog here due to a lot of things that I need to do at work and add to that, we just joined that showdown... though we didn't win, we got he People's choice award. :D (Thanks for the new phones). Since this is a blog about Azure, might as well discuss the entry we had. The system was created gearing towards using the latest Microsoft technologies (Azure and Silverlight, plus Windows Mobile 6 support). It might help other guys who would be developing on it.
Our system, though it was not well described in this site is a system that would enable users to update all their Social Networking sites account Status or Upload Images using SMS/MMS Technologies (Of course we just did a work around for it since Smart doesn't have open API for their SMS and MMS). That is basically, send once, upload/update to all. Thus supporting all possible mobile users (Even not smart / talk n text users, hehehehe).
Technical, it could be nice to share the issues/learnings we encountered to the community and share the solutions we did.
Item #1 Uploading Images to Windows Azure storage direct image upload is not possible since it is not giving you the client path. (Courtesy of Ogie Chu)
Solution: You need to use the Filebytes property of a fileupload control and save the bytes in the Azure storage then when you try to retrieve it, you just need to convert the bytes to bitmap. :)
Item #2 Secured Wifi Router (authenticating using web session) is disrupting the connectivity of a windows mobile emulator to different WCF Services / Web Services.
Solution: Fix the connection of the WM Emulator to connect to the right segment of IP Addresses. :D You could check some blogs fixing this, might update this soon.
Item #3 Silverlight connectivity to Azure is good. :D
Reason: Silverlight could directly interact with the tables in azure since azure tables doens't have relationships and it is running on client side. For security reasons, this is the best option rather than using flash. :)
Item # 4 No internet connection for 5 hours (SMX Admin shut it down, not well coordinated)
Solution: Go down, Smoke, and create a video of your team. Listen to the organizers singing. Talk to other people, and make friends. Lastly, SMILE... *wink* *wink*
It was a fun (in a way) experience for us, though we only got the People's Choice award, it strengthened our team's use of the latest Microsoft Technologies. Since competions like this aims to utilized latest technologies, like harnessing what Microsoft Showcased during the Web Ramp Up Event last March.