Is Santa bringing you a Microsoft Band 2 this Christmas? Well knowing you all, the first thing you're going to want to do is start some Band coding! (Which is why I love you guys and gals... :)
Here's two things that will help.. One from Friend of the blog, Mads Kristensen and the other, also a Friend of the Blog, Peter Paukintis
Microsoft Band Tools
A Visual Studio extension that provides additional tooling for writing Web Tiles for the Microsoft Band.
See the changelog for changes and roadmap.
Features
The extension provides extra tooling for the manifest.json file which is used to create Web Tiles for the Microsoft Band.
- Intellisense
- Based on the schema
- For custom icons
- Validation
- Against the schema
- Icon file paths
- Undeclared icons
Intellisense
Schema based
You get full Intellisense for the manifest.json file due to the automatic schema resolver in this extension.
Custom icons
Get customized Intellisense for the icons you have already registered.
Fake Microsoft Band
Along with my colleague at Microsoft, David Gristwood I have been working on and off on an IOT reference architecture using data from the Microsoft Band. Dave focuses on the Azure side of things and I am traditionally a more client-side developer so we teamed up to create the Band on the Run project. More about that project at a later time but for now I just wanted to share some of the client-side code for developing a band app without connecting up a physical band. This has proven to be fairly useful for us as it has allowed us to generate band data without the need to ensure we had charged up our bands / left our bands somewhere else, etc. More importantly, it has allowed us to prototype an app which consumes data from more than one band easily.
The official Microsoft Band SDK (https://developer.microsoftband.com/bandSDK) has been designed making use of interfaces, for example
...
The IBandService can easily be faked as can all of the other functionality exposed by the SDK. I have generated fake concrete classes for all of the interfaces I needed for the Band on the Run app and have added the source to a git repo here https://github.com/BandOnTheRun/fake-band . Those that I didn’t need throw NotImplementedException for the time being. If you use this project please feel free to fill those implementations as you go! The library is also available as a nuget package (Install-Package FakeBand) I was mainly concerned with the real-time sensor data so I used an Rx timer to simulate the data updates. Here are some screenshots of the Band on the Run client app in action:
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For reference the code consuming the fake implementations is all here https://github.com/BandOnTheRun/ms-band-azure
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