Google analytics for Windows Phone applications

Posted on October 18, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

Using an analytics solution to collect some information on your application usage is a real added value to make it a great application. Of course there are informations available on the market place but these informations are quite limited. You only have access to the number of daily download and the installation base but you don’t have information on which part of your app is most used or the time spent on each page of your application. So here I’m giving the steps required to monitor your application usage with online an analytics services like Google Analytics.

Prerequisities

Microsoft was kind enough to create a library to make this task easy. So the first step is to download and install this library. You can get the latest version of the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework here : http://msaf.codeplex.com/
You also need an analytics service provider. Here I am using Google analytics, it’s free and quite powerfull for a free product. If you want to use Google Analytics, you will need to create an account and add a website : http://www.google.com/analytics/

Code

Add references to the following assemblies by manually browsing to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework.4\WP7:

Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Helpers.Phone (Microsoft.SilverlightMediaFramework.Compatibility.Phone.dll)
Microsoft.WebAnalytics (Microsoft.WebAnalytics.dll)
Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors (Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors.dll)
Google.WebAnalytics (Google.WebAnalytics.dll)

Add reference to the following assemblies using the .Net tab in the “Add reference” dialog box:

System.Device
System.Windows.Interactivity

The documentation tells you to but DO NOT ADD a reference to ComponentModel (System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll) !!! Otherwise you will get an error about the type AssemblyCatalog beeing defined in two different assemblies.

Create service class derived from IApplicationService

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Ink;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.ComponentModel.Composition.Hosting;

namespace AnalyticsSample
{
public class AnalyticsAppService : IApplicationService
{
/// <summary>
/// Initialize the assembly catalogs for the Silverlight Analytics Framework
/// </summary>
/// <param name="context">the application service context</param>
public void StartService(ApplicationServiceContext context)
{

CompositionHost.Initialize(new AssemblyCatalog(
Application.Current.GetType().Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Microsoft.WebAnalytics.AnalyticsEvent).Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors.TrackAction).Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Google.WebAnalytics.GoogleAnalytics).Assembly));
}

/// <summary>
/// Stop the service
/// </summary>
public void StopService()
{
}
}
}

Then you will need to modify your App.xaml file:

Here are the modification:

Add the namespace for “local” (AnalyticsSample: our application namespace), “mwa” (Microsoft.WebAnalytics) and “ga” (Google.WebAnalytics).
Add the AnalyticsAppService you defined earlier to the Application.ApplicationLifetimeObjects node. The line must be typed after shell:PhoneApplicationService, the order is important !
Add a web analytics service after local:AnalyticsAppService (again the order is important), replace the “UA-12345-1” with the site id from your Google analytics account.

Done ! It takes some time to see the result in Google Analytics.

Tracking Pivot & Panorama control usage

The previous steps will correctly report information about your application usage per page, however if your application main interface is based on a Pivot or Panorama control you will not have detailled information about it’s usage. Fortunately, the Microsoft Analytics framework allows you to track your Pivot control usage. Here is how:
Add a reference to the Microsoft.WebAnaltyics.Controls.WP7 by manually browsing to “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework” with the “Add reference” dialog box.

Edit your application page and make the following modification:
* Add the namespace for “i” (System.Windows.Interactivity) and “mwab” (Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors)
* Bind the SelectionChanged event to the TrackAction behavior from the analytics framework.

<i:Interaction.Triggers>
<i:EventTrigger EventName="SelectionChanged">
<mwab:TrackAction/>
</i:EventTrigger>
</i:Interaction.Triggers>

You can also make these modifications using Microsoft Expression Blend.

Edit your AnalyticsAppService and add an AssemblyCatalog line to the StartService method previously defined:

CompositionHost.Initialize(new AssemblyCatalog(
Application.Current.GetType().Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Microsoft.WebAnalytics.AnalyticsEvent).Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Behaviors.TrackAction).Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Microsoft.WebAnalytics.Controls.HandlePanorama).Assembly),
new AssemblyCatalog(typeof(Google.WebAnalytics.GoogleAnalytics).Assembly));

The PanoramaItem/PivotItem Name or Header (if there is no Name) is then tracked in the event’s ActionValue.

Download example

A demo application is like a photo, it’s worth a million words so here it is: AnalyticsSample

Binding to a class property in XAML

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

Binding something in your XAML file to a property in your underlying partial class is pretty easy once you know the trick. You only have to name your XAML base object. For example, here is a PhoneApplicationPage declaration:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
x:Class="MyApp.MySamplePage"
x:Name="Self"
>
...
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

I always give “Self” as my object name as I find using “Self” in the binding declaration makes the binding obvious but you can use the name you want. My example is for a Windows Phone application however the same mechanism works for any XAML desktop application.

Then you define a property in your class, for example

namespace MyApp
{
public partial class MySamplePage : PhoneApplicationPage
{
public String MyStringProperty { get { return "Binded string"; } }
...
}
}

Now, you can use some binding magic in your XAML file to map a node property to a class property :

And Voilà !

Using Silverlight charting control in Windows Phone

Posted on October 1, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

I’m currently working on a small app for Windows Phone. I wanted to add some simples charts to the application and found silverlight contained a charting control. As a reminder for me and as an helpfull example for you, here are the necessary steps to display a simple chart in your Windows Phone Application. The example below was tested against the Windows Phone SDK version 7.1.

Prerequisities

First, you need to install the silverlight libraries from http://silverlight.codeplex.com/

Silverlight Phone toolkit
Silverlight 3 (not 4 ! not 5 !): It’s an old version but unfortunately, newer silverlight versions are not supported. In fact, Windows Phone SDK is build around Silverlight 3 with some addition from silverlight 4.

Next, you need to add manually the references to the silverlight toolkit by browsing to the Silverlight install folder:

System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit.dll (should be in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Toolkit\Nov09\Bin)
System.Windows.Controls.dll (should be in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client\)

Code

We need to add the namespace for the charting toolkit, here named “chartingToolkit”:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
x:Class="ChartDemo.MainPage"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
xmlns:chartingToolkit="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Charting;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.DataVisualization.Toolkit"
mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="768"
FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}"
Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"
SupportedOrientations="Portrait" Orientation="Portrait"
shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">
...
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

Then we add the control to our application page :

<chartingToolkit:Chart x:Name="ChartControl" Title="My chart">
<chartingToolkit:Chart.Axes>
<chartingToolkit:LinearAxis Orientation="Y" ShowGridLines="True" />
</chartingToolkit:Chart.Axes>
<chartingToolkit:ColumnSeries IndependentValueBinding="{Binding Name}" DependentValueBinding="{Binding Value}" />
</chartingToolkit:Chart>

Note the binding parameters, they are linked to the data object we defined to hold chart data :

public class ChartData
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public double Value { get; set; }
}

We also need some data so we generate some :

List<ChartData> data = new List<ChartData>();
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
data.Add(new ChartData(){
Name = String.Format("data {0}", i + 1),
Value = i
});
}

The final step is to set the data source of the data serie:

ColumnSeries series = ChartControl.Series[0] as ColumnSeries;
if (series != null)
series.ItemsSource = data;

Troubleshooting

If you link your project with the wrong silverlight version you might get the following errors :

“A first chance exception of type ‘System.InvalidOperationException‘ occurred in Microsoft.Phone.dl”: You probably forgot to add the reference to System.windows.control
“A reference to a higher version or incompatible assembly cannot be added to the project”: You probably linked against Silverlight version 5 dll

Source code

In case it may help, here is the source code of the demo application: ChartDemo application source

Flash.bin build tool for LG KS 20

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

This is a command line tool to extract content from a flash.bin file and rebuild a new one using other file parts. Click on the link below to download the tool.

Latest version : LGFlashMuncher Version 0.2

Usage :

LGFlashMuncher.exe [options] path [output]
  EXTRACT Options ---(at least one option required)-----------------------------
        -r      : extract Raw data
        -h      : extract header
        -m      : extract MBR
        -p      : extract partitions
        -t      : trim extracted partitions
        -l      : output layout informations to file 'flash.xml'
        -o      : output OS.nb compatible file
        output  : path to output directory (must exists)

  CREATE Options  ---(all options required)-------------------------------------
        -c file : create new flash.bin outputed to 'file'
                  (MBR and fat partition are taken from original flash.bin)
        -e file : use 'file' for header
        -0 file : use 'file' for partition 0 (boot)
        -1 file : use 'file' for partition 1 (rawfs)
        -2 file : use 'file' for partition 2 (imgfs)

  COMMON Option  ---------------------------------------------------------------
        path       : path to flash.bin file

Next, how to extract data from a flash.bin to a directory named output :

LGFlashMuncher.exe -htmlp FLASH.bin output

How to rebuild a new flash.bin :

LGFlashMuncher.exe -c newflash.bin -e header.bin -0 part_0_BOOT.bin -1 part_1_RAWFS.bin -2 part_2_IMGFS.bin FLASH.bin

WCF : WS-Security Hell

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

dotnet Lastly, I had to build a client to consume a web service. This task seems a bit trivial at first, but the service required an authentication mechanism based on WS-Security. Nothing really complex, the only requirement was to send a username and a password in plain text.

As usual when I build this kind of application, I used Visual Studio wizard to create the proxy to the web service, and after some tweaking in the app.config file, my application was ready to consume this web service !

Unfortunately, there is a security behavior in WCF that prevent from using plain text message based authentication over unsecure transport : i.e. you cannot send a clear password if you are using HTTP as the transport layer instead of HTTPS. That would have been nice of Microsoft to give us a way to override this mechanism easily, but they didn”t (and they didn”t bother to add an explicit error message in the thrown exception…)

So, if you want to send a plain-text username and password using WCF, the only way I found was to stuff the corresponding soap header when sending the request.

Here is my code, use it at your own risks…

public class SecurityBehavior : MessageHeader, IClientMessageInspector, IEndpointBehavior
{
private string m_sUserName;
private string m_sPassword;
public override string Name
{
get { return "wsse:Security"; }
}

public override string Namespace
{
get { return ""; }
}

public string UserName
{
get { return m_sUserName; }
set { m_sUserName = value; }
}

public string Password
{
get { return m_sPassword; }
set { m_sPassword = value; }
}

public void AfterReceiveReply(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message reply, object correlationState)
{

}

public object BeforeSendRequest(ref System.ServiceModel.Channels.Message request, System.ServiceModel.IClientChannel channel)
{
request.Headers.Add(this);
return null;
}

public void AddBindingParameters(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters)
{

}

public void ApplyClientBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, ClientRuntime clientRuntime)
{
clientRuntime.MessageInspectors.Add((IClientMessageInspector)this);
}

public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(ServiceEndpoint endpoint, EndpointDispatcher endpointDispatcher)
{

}

public void Validate(ServiceEndpoint endpoint)
{

}

protected override void OnWriteHeaderContents(XmlDictionaryWriter writer, MessageVersion messageVersion)
{
writer.WriteAttributeString("xmlns", "wsse", null, "http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd");
writer.WriteStartElement("wsse:UsernameToken");
writer.WriteElementString("wsse:Username", m_sUserName);
writer.WriteStartElement("wsse:Password");
writer.WriteAttributeString("Type", "http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-username-token-profile-1.0#PasswordText");
writer.WriteValue(m_sPassword);
writer.WriteEndElement(); //wsse:Password
writer.WriteEndElement(); //wsse:UsernameToken
}
}

DZExtract LG DZ file format and extract tool lg ks20

Posted on September 27, 2012 by Jean-Pierre Thomasset

Everything is in the title, just click on the link below to download the file.

Latest version : DZ Extract Version 0.2

Some details about the various format found in the DZ file.

DZ File format
Offset	length (byte)	Description
0x0	0x8	Magic code “MSTXMETX”
0x8	0x2	Unknown, same value in all files (value 0x01)
0xA	0x2	Separator ? (value 0x0)
0xC	0x2	Unknown, same value in all files (value 0x0B)
0xE	0x2	Separator ? (value 0x0)
0x10	0x6	Unknow, value differs from file to file
0x16	0x2	Unknown, same value in all files (value0x01C8)
0x18	0x8	String, phone model ? (value “KS20”)
0x20	0x50	String, file title ?
0x70	0x1C	Two null terminated string concatened (“[chipmodel]\\0[osname]\\0”)
0x8C	0x80	String, DZ filename
0x10C	0x20	Separator (filled with 0xFF)
0x12C	0x10	Header MD5 hash
0x13C	Variable	Concatened subfiles (see Subfile format)
—	0x78	Offset Table, unknown useage
—	—	Optionnal data, present in some DZ file (unknown)

Subfile format
Offset	length (byte)	Description
0x0	0x4	Magic code “SSTX”
0x4	0x2	Unknown, same value for all subheaders (value 0x01)
0x6	0x2	Separator ? (value 0x0)
0x8	0x2	File Type ?
0xA	0x6	Separator ? (filled with 0x0)
0x10	0x4	Data length
0x14	0x80	Filename, null terminated string
0x94	0x10	Separator (filled with 0xFF)
0xA4	0x10	Uncompressed data MD5 hash
0xB4	0x10	Subheader MD5 Hash
0xC4	Data length	Gzip compressed data

File type
Type	Filename	Description
0x3	amss.mbn	AMSS modem
0x8	partition.mbn	Partition table
0xA	qcsblhd_cfgdata.mbn	QCSBL header
0xB	qcsbl.mbn	QCSBL
0xC	oemsblhd.mbn	OEM boot header
0xD	oemsbl.mbn	OEM boot
0xE	amsshd.mbn	AMSS modem header
0x13	appsboothd.mbn	APPS boot loader header
0x14	appsboot.mbn	APPS boot loader
0x15	FLASH.bin	Windows CE flash.bin
0x16	apps.mbn	APPS

frenchcoder

love the code

Google analytics for Windows Phone applications

Prerequisities

Code

Tracking Pivot & Panorama control usage

Download example

Binding to a class property in XAML

Using Silverlight charting control in Windows Phone

Prerequisities

Code

Troubleshooting

Source code

Flash.bin build tool for LG KS 20

WCF : WS-Security Hell

DZExtract LG DZ file format and extract tool lg ks20