It’s getting close, I can feel it!

There’s only one troublesome issue: that tombstoning has proven to be a bit of a puzzle!  Whenever I am trying to return the user to the pivot they were on when they tombstoned it hasn’t been working the way I thought I coded it.  But it is only tonight that I discovered that the pivot Selection_Changed event is firing before the Page_Loaded event!  I hadn’t even known it was firing at all until the user made a pivot selection.  Evidently, the Selection_Changed is fired because the act of painting the page trips it.  At least that is what it looks like.  And since the Selection_Changed event was being used by me to memorize the new user location (i.e. which pivot the user was in now), of course it took the default, and thus overrode what had been set before the tombstoning.  I’ll figure a way around that shortly.  That’s actually the last significant “thing” holding me back from submitting the app.  So I am very sure that I will submit it to the Marketplace tomorrow.

I had a really bad time getting an important part of the navigation working with the Set Exam selection, which was originally done using a ListBox.  I found that when clicking on the MainPage selection button from Score page’s Return pivot, it would definitely try to send you to the MainPage, and would even start to display it (the AppBar would pop up briefly), but you’d find yourself on the Set Exam page instead.  Very odd behavior, and I bet it is a bug.  But, wanting to not screw around with it any further I changed out the ListBox selection for a bunch of buttons.  The odd behavior vanished with that.  Once I get this app submitted, I will definitely fire the ListBox/Navigation thing over to Microsoft to see if there’s some kind of bug going on in there.

So, after this I’ll be using this completed app as the template for the other two Ham licensing exams, and so as soon as I get the question pools ironed out they will go in as well.  I’m doing this at an awkward time for one of the exams, the middle one (General license class) because the current question pool expires at the end of June.  I have the new question pool, but it won’t be valid until July 1.  And by the time I’d be ready to submit that app it would be way close to the expiration date on the old exam.  So, I may delay that one and do the third exam (for Amateur Extra class) right after this current one goes in.

I was thinking to doing some more Ham Radio-related apps, but my wife wants me to start working on a game after I get these three apps submitted, so that’s the next goal — her thought (and I concur, actually) is that games have a better income potential, especially if they are ad-supported (See Elbert Perez’s blog).  I had a game in mind: a version of a VERY old arcade game favorite of mine: Lunar Lander.  Not under that name of course.  But I checked the Marketplace and there’s several games under that concept in there already — with much better graphics than I had planned to do.  I was going to go for the original vector graphics look and feel.  So, I don’t know.  I’m sure I could come up with something else. 

Maybe the Marketplace needs one more Sudoku app?  🙂  No?  I didn’t think so.