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A Gathering of Small Number Systems Conversions and Operations for WP7

Posted on February 6, 2012 by WP7 0

* UPDATE: I have found many bugs and issues with this original code of this library. For an expanded (and working version) you can look at WP7NC.

I know its not too much but I gathered about 16 number-conversion operations and few logical operators in a small DLL for Windows Phone devs who might need it. The functions are:

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function Dec2BinStr(ByVal Dec As Long) As String[/crayon]

Converts a decimal number into a binary number in the form of string  (ex: 10 becomes “1010”)

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function Dec2BinAry(ByVal Dec As Long) As Integer()[/crayon]

Converts a decimal number into a binary number in the form of an array of ones and zeros.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function BinStr2Dec(ByVal Bin As String) As Long[/crayon]

Converts a binary number in the form of a string into a decimal number.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function BinAry2Dec(ByVal Bin() As Integer) As Long[/crayon]

Converts a binary array into a decimal number.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function HexStr2Dec(ByVal Hex As String) As Long[/crayon]

Converts a hexadecimal number int he form of a string into a decimal number.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function Dec2HexStr(ByVal Dec As Long) As String[/crayon]

Converts decimal number into a hexadecimal number in the form of string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Shared Function HexStr2BinStr(ByVal Hex As String) As String[/crayon]

Converts a hexadecimal number in the form of a string into a binary number, also in the form of string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function BinStr2HexStr(ByVal Bin As String) As String[/crayon]

Converts a binary number in the form of a string into a hexadecimal number, also in the form of string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function BinStrAnd(ByVal Bin1 As String, ByVal Bin2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise AND operation between two binary numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function HexStrAnd(ByVal Hex1 As String, ByVal Hex2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise and between two hexadecimal numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function BinStrOr(ByVal Bin1 As String, ByVal Bin2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise OR operation between two binary numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function HexStrOr(ByVal Hex1 As String, ByVal Hex2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise OR operation between two hexadecimal numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function BinStrXOR(ByVal Bin1 As String, ByVal Bin2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise XOR operation between two binary numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function HexStrXOR(ByVal Hex1 As String, ByVal Hex2 As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise XOR operation between two hexadecimal numbers in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function BinStrNot(ByVal Bin As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise NOT operation to a binary number in the form of a string.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Public Function HexStrNot(ByVal Bin As String) As String[/crayon]

Perform bitwise NOT operation to a hexadecimal number in the form of a string.

* UPDATE 02-12-2012: I have found out many minor mistakes in some of the conversion function. Thus, I have removed the file and re-written the library as an open-source project. More details can be found here.

Here is the download link:

NumberSystem.DLL v1.0 (10 kbytes)

 

If you have a suggestion to expand this library, please write it down in the comments or tweet it to me, and I’ll try to include it.

How to Handle the User’s Refusal of the License Agreement/Privacy Policy in WP7 Apps

Posted on February 3, 2012 by WP7 0

Its a good idea to put the apps privacy policy, or license agreement or whatever you need the user to agree on before using the app, in a separate page and navigate to it in the first run.
There are two scenarios to do this, you either set the privacy policy page as the default and check if the user agreed on it on every run using the IsolatedStorageSetting. If the user did agree, the app navigates to the MainPage. Personally, I do not prefer this way because the privacy page is loaded on every run.
The more feasible scenario is to load the MainPage and during its loading, check if the user have agreed on the policy or not. If not, the app navigates to the policy. Sounds simple, doesnt it? No its not.
What should happen if the user reject the agreement? The app should close itself, right? Sorry, this can not happen in Silverlight apps (its possible in XNA though). There is not single command in Silverlight that gets the app to shutdown.
There is a possible solution to go around this. First of all, we will be using the second scenario where the app’s MainPage is loaded first and after checking the IsolatedStorageSettings, the app navigates to the privacy policy page. If you are not familiar with IsolatedStorageSettings, there is a very simple tutorial that was put together by the good folks at WindowsPhoneGeek.

You can create a setting called “AgreedToPrivacyPolicy” and assign to it a “TRUE” value after the user agrees to it. The main trick here is that on the policy page you should put only one button “I Agree”. Do not put an “I Don’t Agree” button because there is no command to handle it straight forward. To facilitate the use of the IsolatedStorageSettings in the application, identify the settings in the “Partial Public Class MainPage” like this:
[crayon lang=”vb”]Partial Public Class MainPage
Inherits PhoneApplicationPage
Private appSettings As System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSettings = System.IO.IsolatedStorage.IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings
‘the End Class comes at the end of the app code
[/crayon]
In the MainPage_Loaded sub put the code:
[crayon lang=”vb”]
Private Sub MainPage_Loaded(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles Me.Loaded
If appSettings.Contains(“AgreedToPrivacyPolicy”) = False Then
NavigationService.Navigate(New Uri(“/PrivacyPolicy.xaml”, UriKind.Relative))
GoTo Jumpiiii ‘Yes I love to use GoTo in VB
End If
If NavigationService.CanGoBack = True Then NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry()
Jumpiiii:
End Sub[/crayon]
Line 6 is very important, and I will explain to you why later on.
After navigating to your privacy policy, the user clicks on I agree and in the button_click sub you add the lines:
[crayon lang=”vb”]
appSettings.Add(“AgreedToPrivacyPolicy”, “True”)
appSettings.Save()
NavigationService.Navigate(New Uri(“/MainPage.xaml”, UriKind.Relative))
[/crayon]
If the user wishes to reject the privacy policy, the user will hit the back button. This would navigate the app to the MainPage and the checking that we added earlier will be invoked again, and again this will navigate the user to the privacy policy page, where it should in fact take the user out of the app. This can be easily achieved by adding the following code to the PrivacyPolicy_Loaded sub:
[crayon lang=”vb”]
Private Sub Page1_Loaded(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As RoutedEventArgs) Handles Me.Loaded
NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry()
End Sub[/crayon]
Line 2 here removes the MainPage from the back list such that when the user presses back, the user goes directly out of the app without invoking an exception. This is, in my opinion, the best way to exit and application.
One more thing is the case where the user accepts the agreement and then the app navigates to the MainPage. What happens if the user presses back from there? Will the user be navigated back to the PrivacyPolicy page? The answer is NO. Because we covered that already in line 6 in the first code snippet in this article. We told the MainPage to check if there is a previous page in the Back Stack and if there is, erase it.

Sending Error Reports from Windows Phone 7 Application

Posted on February 2, 2012 by WP7 2

Sometimes it impossible to test for ALL possible exceptions. Sometimes you test on a device and it works, and another device gives a certain exception. In most cases, it is useful for the developer to receive error reports from users. This, of course, happens with the user’s will to cooperate by sending an email containing the exception details.

The simple code I put together is in VB (yes I am an antique-collecting dude who just loves VB), prepares an email for the user to be sent to your support email. Sometimes I am really frustrated how almost all WP7 development article give C# codes.

[crayon lang=”vb”]Private Sub Application_UnhandledException(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As ApplicationUnhandledExceptionEventArgs) Handles Me.UnhandledException
Dim a As MessageBoxResult
a = MessageBox.Show(“An error has occured, if you like to send a report about that error to the developer to improve the app?”, “Oops”, MessageBoxButton.OKCancel)
If a = MessageBoxResult.Cancel Then GoTo Refuse ‘YES we can use Goto in VB
If a = MessageBoxResult.OK Then
Dim errormessage As String
errormessage = Date.Today.ToString + Key.Enter + e.ExceptionObject.Message.ToString + Key.Enter + e.ExceptionObject.StackTrace
Dim email As New EmailComposeTask
email.To = “support@YOURAPP.com”
email.Body = errormessage
email.Subject = “YOURAPPNAME Anonymous Error Report”
email.Show()
End If
Refuse:
If System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached Then
‘ An unhandled exception has occurred; break into the debugger
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break()
End If
End Sub[/crayon]

this code goes into “App.xaml.vb” to handle all unhandled exceptions by displaying a messagebox to the user asking him/her to send the details of the error to the developer.

You have to put this as the first line in your App.xaml.vb :
[crayon lang=”vb”]Imports Microsoft.Phone.Tasks[/crayon]
Afterwards, you’re good to go.

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