Hi everyone!

Has been a long time since I published something here. So, I am trying to make a comeback.

I have some posts ideas which I need to polish and finish writing.

But meanwhile, allow me to introduce ElectoG Calendar.

If you are like me and:

• use Google G Suite for work
• do not like to have multiple tabs open in your browser
• got used to having a separate email/calendar app (e.g. Outlook) but do not like the default apps on your standard OS of choice.

Then look no further, Electro-G is an Electron wrapper around Google Calendar.

I wanted to check what Electron was about and decided to use it in solving this usability issue I had.

Hope, somebody finds it helpful.

Download

Disclaimer: The following article does only apply for Windows Phone 7.1 devices. Windows Phone 8 should have no constraints regarding playing multi-resolution streams.

I believe everyone who tried to create a video streaming app for Windows Phone, found rather frustrating that the Smooth Streaming Media Element did not support multiple resolutions. If you were using a manifest with variable resolutions on your desktop application, you could certainly be sure that this manifest will not work on your Windows Phone app out of the box. You had to handle the ManifestReady event and then use the RestrickTracks method to play only the tracks that had the same resolution.

However, I never really understood why the Multi-Resolution support was not provided in the Smooth Streaming Media Element Client for Windows Phone.

Recently for one of my projects at work we needed a fast and easy to use JSON Serializer and I immediately remembered a tweet from Jeff Atwood with a link to a list of open source projects that they had at Stack Exchange. Among them they had and amazingly fast JSON serializer ServiceStack.Text.

So, I decided to give it a try. However after I downloaded the project and tried to use it in a sample Windows Phone  project, I found out that ServiceStack.Text was lacking Windows Phone support. However it did support Silverlight 4&5, Xbox and Mono.

For one of my projects I needed to retrieve the exact connection type used on the device. I needed to know exactly, if the user was using a 3G or 2G cellular connection.

So, after a quick search I found the following link: Microsoft.Phone.Net.NetworkInformation Namespace.

I guess most of you have used the DeviceNetworkInformation class and especially its NetworkAvailabilityChanged Event, which tells us when a connection has been established or lost. Also, this class allows you to determine if Celular and WiFi data are enabled.

However, I needed more information than this class can provide.