Time for Part 2 of the Unified Ad for Windows Phone series. Also read part 1 for the introduction of the Unified Ad for Windows Phone. We covered the reason why we want the Unified ad for Windows Phone control and also registered for a couple of Ad Providers. Let’s start with implementing the Unified ad control in our application.

Install the NuGet Package for Unified Ad for Windows Phone

Start managing your NuGet Packages for your Windows Phone project. Search for “wpunifiedad” and click install.

Go to one of your pages, for example “MainPage.xaml” and add the following Xaml in for example the ContentPanel Grid.

<Ads:AdControl x:Name="AdBasic"
                FallbackAdProviderName="AdDuplex"
                IsTest="True"
                xmlns:Ads="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads"
                xmlns:PubCenter="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.PubCenter;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads.PubCenter"
                xmlns:Smaato="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.Smaato;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads.Smaato"
                xmlns:MobFox="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.MobFox;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads.MobFox"
                xmlns:AdMob="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.AdMob;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads.AdMob"
                xmlns:Provider="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.Provider;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads"
                xmlns:AdDuplex="clr-namespace:MC.Phone.Ads.AdDuplex;assembly=MC.Phone.Ads.AdDuplex">
    <Ads:AdControl.AdProviders>
        <Provider:GenericAdProviderForXaml XamlUri="http://remoteurlontheinternet.com/Ad.xaml?appid={0}" />
        <Provider:NoneAdProvider />
        <AdDuplex:AdDuplexAdProvider App="" />
        <AdMob:AdMobAdProvider AdUnit="" />
        <MobFox:MobFoxAdProvider Publisher="test" />
        <Smaato:SmaatoAdProvider AdSpace="0"
                                    Publisher="0" />
        <PubCenter:PubCenterAdProvider Application=""
                                        AdUnit="" />
        <!--InnerActive is not really suitable for the Ad Rotation because it doesn't have any events to react on.-->
        <!--<InnerActive:InnerActiveAdProvider App="" />-->
    </Ads:AdControl.AdProviders>
</Ads:AdControl>

Lines 12 to 22 are the AdProviders that are available for the Unified ad control. Just remove the elements for the AdProviders that you’re not using or planning to use. For now also remove the GenericAdProviderForXaml element. This ad provider will be discussed separately in a next part. Also take a look at line 3, it is now configured to be run in Test mode. Now let’s start configuring the different ad providers.

AdDuplex configuration

After you added a new application to AdDuplex you will see the App ID. Copy this value to the App property of the AdDuplexAdProvider.

AdMob configuration

When you completed the configuration of a new site/app in AdMob you will see a so called Publisher ID. Copy this value to the AdUnit property of the AdMobAdProvider.

MobFox configuration

For MobFox you should copy the Publisher ID from the app to the Publisher property of the MobFoxAdProvider.

Smaato configuration

For Smaato you should fill in both the AdSpace and the Publisher number in the SmaatoAdProvider. Copy the AdSpaceId from the application list for your application to the AdSpace property for the SmaatoAdProvider. Copy the PubisherId below at that screen to the Publisher property for the SmaatoAdProvider.

PubCenter configuration

The PubCenter configuration consist of two parts. An Application, where you need to copy the Application ID to the Application property of the PubCenterAdProvider. And an Ad Unit where you need to copy the ID of the Ad Unit to the AdUnit property of the PubCenterAdProvider.

InnerActive configuration

InnerActive can be configured, but I cannot recommend using it in combination of the Unified Ad control. Inner Active doesn’t have any events that can be listened to like: NoAd, NewAd or AdEngaged. And because of this it’s impposible to let it rotate with the other Ad Providers. When you want to configure it though, you can. Copy the App Name and put it in the App property of the InnerActiveAdProvider.

Test or not?

You can put your AdControl in production mode by setting the IsTest property to False or completely removing the property from the Xaml.

The next part will be about the Remote Ad Provider configuration.

About a month ago I started a new investigation about which Ad Provider I should use. Things I wanted.

- Best eCPM

- Best Fill Rate

- Easy to use

Some of the things that are causing problems is the Ad Availability per Country. Depending on where your app is used more or less localized ads are used. So we know that the Microsoft PubCenter has a high eCPM for the US, it is low for The Netherlands. There are more of those problems with other Ad Providers. I heard there was a solution for this problem. Use the Ad Rotator for Windows Phone 7 which can be found on Codeplex. I did give it a try but at that moment AdMob was not supported (mostly because there were some AdMob specific problems) and also MobFox and Smaato weren’t supported. Those were the specific Ad Providers I was interested in.

My initial though would be, let’s try to modify the source a little bit, to get support for MobFox and Smaato in. But after looking into the source I was warned, almost all the code was in the Code Behind for the AdControl. While I am not against the usage of the Code Behind, I’m pro extensibility. The code I saw was far from maintainable and extensibility is done by adding more code. So when more AdProviders will be added code will be less and less maintainable.

Unification

When I look at the differences between the AdControls, they more or less do the same, but in a different way. All of them have a TestMode, but enabling the testmode is different for each AdControl. Same for the events they have. I want to have a unified ad control that does handle these ‘Complexities’ for me and the rest of the world. There isn’t such a control yet, so why not use the good parts of wp7adrotator (the remote configuration, multiple adproviders) and create something that suits my needs better. So I did.

The Windows Phone Unified Ad control is universal in the following ways.

Properties:

- Country – Will be passed to all the AdProviders that support Country or Location as input

- IsTest – Will be pass to all the AdProviders that support a way of TestMode. Some have a simple boolean field, others require to set the PublisherId to be set to a specific value.

Events:

- NewAd – When a new ad is available this event will be fired, even though the different AdProviders have different events to notify the user, like: NewAdAvailable, AdLoaded, ControlAdRefreshed.

- NoAd – When no ad is availabe this event will be fired, even though the different AdProviders have different events to notify the user, like: AdFailed, ControlErrorOccurred, AdError.

- AdEngaged – When an ad is engaged or clicked this event will be fired, even though the different AdProviders have different events to notify the user, like: AdClick, ControlAdEngaged, ControlIsAdEngagedChanged, AdLeavingApplication. 

Best Fill Rate

To get the best fill rate the Windows Phone Unified Ad control supports ad provider rotation. As soon as an Ad Provider is not providing an ad the next Provider will be asked to provide an ad. This will enable you to get a higher fill rate compared to using just one ad provider. You can even roll in your own custom ad based on Xaml.

Best eCPM

Every single Ad Provider changes it’s eCPM from time to time. But they even have different eCPMs per country. Same as they might have, or might not have ads for a particular country at all. To get the best of both worlds Windows Phone Unified Ad control supports AdProviders per Country. Similar to the wp7adrotator, but instead the Country is used and not so much the full culture. If you already have configuration files for wp7adrotator you can use those as well, they are supported in the Windows Phone Unified Ad control as well.

Supported AdProviders

All Ad Providers that currently have an Ad Control for Windows Phone 7 are supported. Register with the ones you like best. Inner-Active support is experimental because they have no way to find out there’s an ad displayed or not, yet.

There are two special Ad Provider implementations.

- None – This ad provider is used to not show an ad at all. Can be very handy during testing phase, when testing the application and not the advertisements. But could also be used to show no ads for a certain percentage of the app usage.

- GenericAdProviderForXaml – This ad provider is used to show some custom Xaml that’s loaded from a remote url. Can be very handy to market your own applications within your own applications.

What’s next?

Next part will be about the basic usage of the Windows Phone Unified Ad Control. If you can’t wait? You can find the source and an example project with the Windows Phone Unified Ad control on codeplex. If you want to start right away you can add the NuGet Package called WPUnifiedAd. Also the homepage contains a basic guide that will help as well.

Part 3 will be about using the Remote Ad Provider Configuration. Future parts will come on how to make use of the GenericAdProviderForXaml

It was a day after I submitted an update to one of my apps to the marketplace where I found out about a bug. This was a functional bug which didn’t affect Marketplace testing. I already knew that I couldn’t cancel a running submission, so I already learned the Hard Way to never Auto Publish, but do a Manual Publish after successful testing.

Tip: Do a Manual Publish after successful testing. This makes sure you are in control!

Alright, what happened to me recently is that I made a small code change that causes problems a Background Task for about 50% of the time. I didn’t find this during initial testing. A small case of using the less than sign instead of the greater than sign. I found out about this bug after I submitted the app to the marketplace. So I waited until the submission was successful (or failed).

The Marketplace team successfully tested my application and I was in control (see tip). What can I do?

• Publish the application:  I obviously don’t want this, there’s a bug in the app.
• Edit catalog details: Doesn’t help me either.
• Edit product details: That should help…

So I went for “Edit product details”, but sadly that didn’t work, because it helped me to Step 2 and not Step 1 where I could upload a new Application Package.

Alright, time for some hacking I would say. It might be risky, so use it at your own risk.

1. Start with the Edit catalog details url, copy the applicationId and the parentApplicationInstanceId.

2. Replace the applicationId and the parentApplicationInstanceId in the following url.

https://windowsphone.create.msdn.com/AppSubmission#/PageUpload&mode=Update&applicationId=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000&parentApplicationInstanceId=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000

3. Then follow that link. But do nothing else.

4. Go back to the original page where the “Edit product details” didn’t go to step 1, but to step 2. In my situation it did suddenly go to step 1 and I was able to upload a new Application Package.

I’m now waiting again for the Marketplace testing. I hope this will help some people who have a similar problem.

A lot of Windows Phone developers probably already know, but some might not. There is a very interesting tool in the market to monitor your application for Downloads, Ranking and Reviews: Distimo Monitor. You can for example compare your application with your competition and conquer the world. Besides that Distimo also shows you when your application was featured in the Marketplace. A couple of the apps I created have been featured so far, but let’s look at Fokke & Sukke app and the target market (The Netherlands).

Is my app featured?

You can watch closely how the marketplace looks either on the Phone or in Zune to see if your app is featured.

But in the end, this is not very doable. Don’t forget that your app can be featured in every market separately. So what else? We have the distimo monitor which shows events for your application. You can see when a new version was released and when your app was featured.

The featured periods are:

• 12/10 – 18/10
• 02/11 – 08/11
• 30/11 – 06/12

My app is featured, now what?

It’s cool to see that this app has been featured that often, but what does it mean? Let’s take a look at the Ranking in those periods.

You can easily see the areas when the app was featured by the green regions. But more important, you can see that in the first and third period being featured meant that the ranking went up immediately.

To some of us it may sound like a strange question, but developers which are used to Silverlight or Windows Phone development know why I ask this question. In both Silverlight and Windows Phone Gif images aren’t directly supported. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know why. Luckily Silverlight and Windows Phone developers are helped by an open source project called Image Tools which enables support for Gif and Animated Gif.

Windows 8 – HTML5 + JS

For a starter I just downloaded an ordinary gif-image from the internet and with no knowledge about how to add an image to a Windows 8 application I used my web-knowledge.

<img src="/images/window.gif" />

And yes it does work. What about an animated gif? So I recall an interesting animated gif on Shawn Wildermuth’s blog, his head-shot. So without do anything else than changing the source of the image tag I created it started working. A surprise? Not really I already heard that the rendering engine for Windows 8 applications that are build in HTML5 + JS is based on IE, so this is what I did expect.

Windows 8 – XAML + C#

So I used my Silverlight knowledge to do in XAML what I did in HTML5, add an image.

<Image Source="/Images/window.gif" />

A really fast surprise it started working in the design view of the xaml document even before I ran the project. And also after running the application it seems to work perfectly. And the animated gif? It appears in the designer as well, but doesn’t animate in there. Also when running the application the animation doesn’t work.

Just a quick thought: Silverlight doesn’t support gif at all, what about WPF? After some googling it seems that WPF does support gif images, but not really the animated gifs. But there are people who created solutions that should work to enable animated gifs in WPF. So let’s see how much of that is possible in Windows 8.

The solution for WPF makes use of the GifBitmapDecoder which isn’t there in Windows 8. But I found something that sounds similar the BitmapDecoder. I tried to get the a small proof-of-concept working, but failed so far. I invite you to solve this Animated Gif problem using the information I’ve given. Please share your solution with the readers of this post.

Conclusion

We all know WinRT isn’t finished, we are just looking at a developer preview. If I recall it correctly WinRT should have the same features in XAML+C# as in HTML5+JS. Will this small difference in features be tackled in the final release?