Cardiff–WPUG #2

On June 1st we had the second user group meeting in Cardiff.

It was quite an impressive turnout and I would like to say thanks to all those who came along. We do have a nice group of people building who share a passion for the Windows Phone platform. It can only go from strength to strength.

Thanks to Nick Ajderian from www.hattjoys.co.uk for providing a very entertaining and passionate talk on getting data from Twitter and chucking it on a map – Shame that the internet connection was poor and Nick had to resort to well prepared backup plans. Next time we won’t leave everything to the venue.

Thanks also to Iestyn Jones for demoing his good looking application Welsh Kitchen. Iestyn has actually published 4 applications to the market place (search for ‘Bugail’ in Zune) and received his XBox from the Think.Dev Rewards program.

For those of you looking to follow up from some of the items mentioned in my talk here are some links:

Preemptive runtime intelligence:

http://www.preemptive.com/wp7

IP address to location conversion:

http://www.hostip.info/

http://api.hostip.info/get_html.php?ip=X.X.X.X&position=true

One thing that I failed to mention was the alternatives to the Preemptive analytics. There is an Analytics library on Codeplex that supports Windows Phone 7 and different analytics (that’s way too many uses of the work in one paragraph) services such as the one provided by Google.

The library can be found here:

http://msaf.codeplex.com/

And René Schulte (@rschu on twitter) has written an article on how to get up and running:

http://kodierer.blogspot.com/2010/11/tracking-sales-statistics-with.html

We have lots more planned for upcoming meetings (the next likely to be mid July) so watch this space.