Windows Phone Starter Kit for Schools - WP8

In start kit say : one or more project in the solution were not loaded correctly. please see the output window for details

And details :

C:\Users\Petr\Desktop\school\C#\MySchoolApp.csproj : error  : Unable to read the project file 'MySchoolApp.csproj'. 
C:\Users\Petr\Desktop\school\C#\MySchoolApp.csproj(199,3): The imported project "C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\Silverlight for Phone\v4.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.WindowsPhone71.Overrides.targets" was not found. Confirm that the path in the <Import> declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

help please

Based on the error, it sounds like you don't have the Windows Phone SDK installed. You'll need to get that from http://dev.windowsphone.com and click on the "Get SDK" link.

I want to change one of the panorama panels to show our school district Twitter feed. IS this easy to do? Can you give me any pointers? I'm trying to use your template to build a Phone8 and phone7 app for the School District of Hillsborough County in Tampa, FL

I'm finding the template very useful, but I just can't get this twitter feed to work correctly. Thanks for the starting point.

Google weather service has been discontinued. The weather page does not work anymore. Any plans to update the app to support a different service?

I have made an update to both this package and the GitHub repository hosting the source code. You'll need to get an API key from http://www.worldweatheronline.com/register.aspx, but the Starter Kit should now work.

Thanks for the prompt response and update.

when i open this template, in the errors list i get:
Error	1	The type 'localization:Localization' was not found. Verify that you are not missing an assembly reference and that all referenced assemblies have been built.	C:\TOOLS\Win Phone Dev\Starter Kit for Schools\Phone App for Schools\C#\App.xaml	13	10	MySchoolApp


And the designer will not load. I've redownloaded and unzipped to a new location, but still run into this error???

I've seen this behavior when the app is sometimes first loaded into Visual Studio.  Couple things to check:  (1) did you unblock the ZIP file before extracting it? Assembly loading can get twisted up if the ZIP is not unblocked.  Just RC on teh ZIp file and choose "Properties" then press the "Unblock" button before unzipping.  (2) did you try to recomplie? Not sure why, but this distribution sometimes wants you to recompile before it will load properly. I think it's because I'm shipping with the obj and bin directories, and I should probably stop shipping with those...  If you tried both of these and its still not working, let me know and I'll see what else I can figure out.

It pains me that I need to ask this, since it will tell you all you need to know about my developer skills, but where are font colors set in this kit?  Beyond that, this is an awesome resource.  I wanted to switch to a plain white background and use dark font colors, but now I have white on white, which isn't so good for readability.

I have a couple of other questions, but I will post separately to make questions and answers clear.

Sorry it took so long for me to get to these - did you get your questions answered already, or are you still working on this? Feel free to mail me directly at chris.koenig@microsoft.com.  For some reason I'm not getting the notifications from this site anymore...

I found where to set system resources in Expression Blend that applied the contrast foreground brush to the panorama title and the pane titles (such as "what's new", "contacts", etc.), but I cant' figure out how to also set that contrast font brush to the text in the section.  For example, in the emulator, the what's new section pulls the rss feed, but that font is white on a white background.  Any explanation directing me to the most direct solution would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the template, lots to learn from it.
A quick question, I added an RSS feed link which displays the RSS feed in the Whats new Pannorama.
When I click a feed it defaults to an error feedproxy.google.com\~r\......
What is happening here?

Can you provide the RSS feed you're using? I can try to troubleshoot for you...

First off, thanks for this template, it will save me quite a bit of time.

I am setting this up to support a local magic club. I have an RSS feed from our JOOMLA website that looks like this:

http://www.ibmring41.com/index.php?format=feed&type=rss

This format fires an exception when I replace the original code: <newsUrl>http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mainfeed.aspx?Type=BlogsOnly</newsUrl>

It appears to not like this part of the URL - ?format=feed&type=rss

I have very little experience working with feeds. Can you point me in the right direction on what I need to change to get that feed to work?

Thanks
-David

hey drswoboda,
i had the same problem. I solved it by creating a subdomain with a link to the feed. :)

Hi Quarcs,

Interesting. Can you be more specific on this. Are you saying I just need to create a sub-domain and just point it to my Joomla URL?

Thanks,
-David

Try this URL instead:

http://www.ibmring41.com/index.php?format=feed&type=rss

Note the "&" replaced with the HTML Encoding version of "&".  I just tried it against the raw Starter Kit code and it worked like a champ :-)

Cheers!
Chris

Hi Chris, thanks for the reply.

I tried your suggestion, but it failed for me with this:
In MainViewModel.cs at
var result = HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
with this error: UriFormatException was unhandled.

Now I should note that I updated the original project in VS2010 to WIndowsPhone OS 7.1. This gave me a WARNING in MainPage.xaml.cs at
wbt.URL = App.ViewModel.SelectedLink.Url;
Saying this was depreciated "Please use Uri property".

I had not addressed that warning as your original RSS link still worked. The new link for my website throws that error.

Thanks,
-David

Hi Chris, I'm going to make several posts, since the formatting of the comments make long messages hard to read. I see you updated the project files to fix a bug. Do you have a change list so we can roll the changes into our current projects? I also see you upgraded the project to OS 7.1 and now get the same warning I got. Warning	1 'Microsoft.Phone.Tasks.WebBrowserTask.URL' is obsolete: 'Please use Uri property'. Should we be concerned about this?

I solved my unHandled exception error. I got burned by cut and paste. Appears that I had a non-printing character in my new Url. After re-typing it the error was fixed. However, I still have an issue with my feeds on the "What's New" page. I now get my feed Headers loading. But, the links are broken. The long Joomla link is getting clipped. All the links end up at the browser as: "www.ibmring41.com/index.php?option=com_content". Tracing thru debug the proper link makes it into wbt.URL in MainPage.xaml.cs. But gets trucated at "wbt.Show();" Here is a screen of the error http://www.digitalrenaissance.biz/uploads/public/capture_12032011_164004.jpg This area of wbt.URL is also were the warning talks about using URI over URL. I'm a raw beginner in this area. 

I finally made some progress on this issue. I had to update our Joomla site to use SEF/SEO urls. It should have been easy to do, but the GoDaddy hosting had some issues. I still have not looked into the Uri vs Url issue. - David

When the main MainPage.xaml loads on program start, the intitial position is the last panorama item, which slides over to display the "What's New" feeds. I have seen this action on other apps in Marketplace. On other apps, the pano starts on item one. One on of my apps, it starts on panoitem1. The only difference I see from my other app, is data binding and the viewmodel. Is this the normal behavior of the Pano? For now I have added what I consider a "hack" to hide this behavior. I have added an additional panoramaitem with a black title as the last item.