How to display international characters in the WebBrowser control for Windows Phone 7.1

Hi everyone, this is my first developers oriented post :). I will talk about a concrete problem we had recently in the Windows Phone version of Deed and will show how we solved it. In this post you will see how to display international (non-English) characters in the WebBrowser control for Windows Phone. More specially, how to pass HTML containing international symbols to the NavigateToString method.

Note that this post applies only to Windows Phone 7.1. In WP 8.0, it seems that MS have fixed this issue and you should be able to display international symbols without any additional processing.

Deed for Windows Phone v1.1 is now available

Hello deeders 🙂

I would like to announce that version 1.1 of Deed for Windows Phone is officially available !!!

What’s new?

• Displaying links and formatted text (rich content visualization) in the challenge description.
• Share challenge on the social networks. You can go and share any challenge on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn with a single click.
• Exception handling improvements. This is something I will talk about in future posts. Basically, the application is designed in a way that when an exception occurs, a proper message is shown to the user, with the option to send back email with the exception (e.g. stack trace and additional context information). The heart of the application is the communication with the Deed Web API Service. When I am not able to get data from the service, I am throwing an exception with some specific information and the exception handling layer takes care of the rest. Well, since the release of the first version, we have received around 10-15 emails with errors. And all of these errors are from incorrect response returned from the Deed Web API Service. Basically, the improvement in this version is that now I am appending the response content to the context information. So we will be able to further investigate the errors.
• Updated splash screen. The splash screen of the application is now with better quality and a link to the web site is added as well.
• Bug fixes and other minor improvements.

Deed for Windows Phone is now available

Hello folks, this is my first blog post. So, it won’t be developers oriented 😉

I would like to announce Deed for Windows Phone (iOS and Android are coming soon :))!!! The application is officially live in the Windows Phone Store.

For those who are not familiar with Deed, this is a pretty awesome and interesting platform. Basically, it is an online playground for real life challenges. You can create, send and complete challenges or dare your friends to. For example, you can go and take the Stair Climbing Challenge, which is one of the most difficult challenges, especially if you live on the 11th floor :).