Yeah, I know it feels like I've been doing allot frameworks recently, but in my weird world, playing with new frameworks and seeing how they work is "fun". Why? They let you focus on building your apps, and not worrying about the goo. Or they let you see how the library author dealt with the goo. Or you LIKE goo and want to create your own goo buster. So many opportunities for fun.

Anyway...

Cimbalino Windows Phone Toolkit

Cimbalino Windows Phone Toolkit is a set of useful and powerful items that will help you build your Silverlight applications for Windows Phone.

The Toolkit is divided in projects, regarding different Windows Phone application required capabilities:

• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit - the base project of the toolkit, containing base MVVM services, some very useful converters, helper classes and extension methods, and the bindable Application Bar behavior
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Camera - MVVM compatible services for camera access
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Controls - Controls library (requires Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit)
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.DeviceInfo - MVVM compatible services for device information access
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Location - MVVM compatible services for location access
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.PhoneDialer - MVVM compatible services for phone dialer access
• Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.UserInfo - MVVM compatible services for user information access

Note: this toolkit is only compatible with the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.x and Windows Phone 8.0!

Nuget

The packages are available thru NuGet here, with the same handles as the project names (e.g., the main package is "Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit")

Download

Please visit the download section on GitHub to download the latest release of the toolkit.

I thought one of the cool things was that it supports both Windows Phone 7.1 and 8...

While you can easily grab the binaries from NuGut, since source is part of the fun, I grabbed the latest drop. Which compiled with no problems or errors.

How do you use it? There's a couple samples in the repository... Here's the Location sample.

So okay, what else is there of interest? Just check out snaps of the main library;

That enough to wet your appetite?

Cimbalino, you ask? Here's Pedro's answer.

"Cimbalino" is the word people from Porto (my home town!) use for expresso coffee!

The name Cimbalino is a reference to La Cimbali, a popular brand for expresso machines a few years ago in Portugal.

If you'd like you can hear how it is correctly read in Portuguese.

Mangopollo

Maintaining two versions of its application can be complicated sometimes.

Mangopollo will allow you to easily take advantage of new windows phone tiles (cyclic, flip, iconic) if your application is run from a Windows Phone 7.8 or 8 as well as new launchers if your application is run from a Windows Phone 8 while remaining compatible with windows phone 7.

New

• support for Windows Phone 7.8,
• add implicit converter to CyclicTileData, IconicTileData and FlipTileData
• add Mangopollo.light.dll, compatible with background agents

Install

To install Mangopollo, run the following command in the Package Manager Console

PM> Install-Package Mangopollo

PM> Install-Package Mangopollo.Light

Features

New Tiles Type

• CycleTileData : mimic the WP8 class to create Cycle Tile
• IconicTileData : mimic the WP8 class to create Iconic Tile
• FlipTileData : mimic the WP8 class to create Flip Tile

• CreateFlipTile: create a Flip type tile
• CreateIconicTile : create an Iconic type tile
• CreateCyclicTile : create a Cyclic type tile
• CreateFromStandardTile : create a Flip type tile from a standard tile (WP7)
• ShellTileExt.Create (Uri, ShellTileData, bool) : allows to add tiles wides to your main screen

New Launchers (not included in mangopollo.light.dll)

• SaveAppointmentTask: create an appointment in the calendar of the phone
• MapTask: launch the Map app (WP8 version with vector and offline map, contrary to BingMapTask)
• MapDirectionTask : request a route using the Map app (WP8 version with vector and offline maps contrary to BingDirectionMapTask)
• MapDownloadTask : display the maps download page
• MapUpdaterTask : display the maps updater page

Useful:

• bool IsWP8() : Returns if the phone running the application is a Windows Phone 8
• bool CanUseLiveTiles() : Return if the phone running the application is a Windows Phone 7.8 or +

Benefits/costs

Advantages:

• a single application to maintain between windows phone 7 and windows phone 8
• simplicity
• the application will take advantage of the new tiles on windows phone 8 even if it's a WP7 app
• use new offline maps tasks on Windows Phone 8

The disadvantages compared to a native Windows Phone 8 application:

• Your application won't take advantage of new controls like the native panorama or native pivot
• Your application will be displayed with a black band on 720p screen (HTC 8X)
• You can't use new WP8 features like in-app purchase, WinPRT, etc..

Here's a couple snaps of it running on my notebook.

First in the 7.1 emulator;

Next in the Windows Phone 8 emulator;

Remember this is the same solution, same code.

In short, it helps you build adaptive Windows Phone apps, letting you build for 7.x and if run on 8, take advantage of the extra features there!

And best of all you get the source to the library, so you can all exactly what's going on and how...

• [0:24] Coding4Fun Toolkit v2.0.0, Coding4Fun Toolkit
• [1:33] Create, Connect, and Publish using Visual Studio with Git (Andy Lewis)
• [2:08] WSALs + Guidelines and Requirements for Windows Store Apps Development (Anything about WinRT)
• [3:24] Check your code portability with PCL Compliance Analyzer (Vagif Abilov)
• [4:11] Cross Browser Debugging integrated into Visual Studio with BrowserStack (Scott Hanselman)
• [5:17] Simultaneous Editing for Visual Studio with the free MultiEdit extension(Scott Hanselman) , MultiEdit extension for Visual Studio
• [6:40] Setting up your Development Environment for Office365 & Azure Development (Steve Fox)
• [7:32] Developer interview: DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS (Rohan Pearce) [Found Via: OSNews - DOS is (long) dead, long live FreeDOS ]
• [8:47] How to Sequence Visual Studio 2012 in Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 SP2 (J.C. Hornbeck), How to Sequence Visual Studio 2012 in Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 SP2 (Arnab Biswas)
• [10:40] Team Foundation Server 2012 and System Center 2012 Operations Manager Integration Virtual Machine and Hands-on-Lab / Demo Script (Brian Keller)

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[12:03] Surface Pro
• Mark's Pick of the Week:[12:46] The sound of the dialup, pictured

If all these things have already been mentioned before why revisit them? Because today's post is an hour long session that gently introduces you to the world of augmented reality, doing AR on Windows Phone 7.1(5), and two sample code projects too.

Recording of “Programming Augmented Reality for Windows Phone”

As promised here’s the recording of the webcast session I did for AT&T on Augmented Reality with Windows Phone.

It was great going through this stuff and hopefully inspiring more people to think beyond with their apps and bring in the real world to augment users experiences!

Items that were covered in the session were:

• Recap on what it means to have Augmented Reality
• Review of the different types of AR solutions
• A High level description of what sensors and inputs you can use to augment your solution
• A Run down of the top 3 AR toolkits for Windows Phone in both Silverlight and XNA
• A code walkthrough of a Silverlight solution using SLARToolkit
• A Code walkthrough of a 3D SilverXNA project also using the SLARToolkit
• Q&A

from Vimeo.

The source for the two mentioned projects are available here, Programming Augmented Reality for WP Source. If you grab these sample projects and run into an error where the "SLARToolKitWinPhone" project cannot be found, there's a couple fixes.

What I did was just grab the latest source from the SLAR Project (http://slartoolkit.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets), unziped it and replaced that project with the one in \trunk\SLARToolKit\Source\SLARToolKit, SLARToolKitWinPhone.csproj.

Or you can download the SLAR binaries (http://slartoolkit.codeplex.com/releases/) and use them.

The important thing is that Simon spends an hour with us, talking about AR, challenges and just the fun things you can do with it on Windows Phone.

Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• SLARToolkit
• How about a little physics in your augmented reality?
• Augmented Reality Comes to Silverlight
• (YASL53DP) Supercharging Silverlight 5 3D projects with the Babylon Toolkit
• Augmented Reality, 3D, Web cam, Silverlight 5 beta and you.

• [1:04] Windows 8 gets a date, Windows 8 will be available on… (Brandon LeBlanc)
• [2:05] Entity Framework and Open Source (Scott Guthrie)
• [3:48] Office 2013 Preview
• [4:28] Microsoft Office 2013 Links, Guides and Resources (Richard Hay)
• [4:39] Build apps for Office and SharePoint
• [8:15] Introducing “Napa” - Office 365 Development Tools (Jason Zander)
• [10:06] Office 2013 Issue: Installing Office 2013 breaks Visual Studio 2012 (Martin Hinshelwood)
• [10:36] Roaming your app data (Dave Bennett)
• [12:49] Testing Metro style apps in Windows 8 (J. Kalyana Sundaram, Ashwin Needamangala, Mete Goktepe)
• [14:58] How to cook a complete Windows 8 application with HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript in a week, Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5 (David Catuhe)
• [16:21] Windows 8 Metro Apps: The 8 Must-Know Tricks! Day 2 (Samidip Basu)
• [17:14] Channel 9 Highlight: Developers for Developers (Dave Isbitski)
• [18:50] Channel 9 Highlight: PerfView Tutorial Series (Vance Morrison)
• [23:27] 20+ Free Windows Phone 7 Mockup and Wireframing Resources (Igor Ovsyannykov)
• [24:34] 2 Minute Magic Videos for WebMatrix 2 (Vishal Joshi)
• [25:04] Service Bus 1.0 Beta (No Azure Required), Introducing Service Bus for Windows Server (Service Bus 1.0 Beta) (Manoj Talreja )

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[28:06] NASA partners with Microsoft to launch its first console game
• Nic's Pick of the Week:[31:48] Status Symbols: Microsoft IntelliMouse

Devphone Toolkit

Devphone toolkit is a collection of Windows phone Controls and tools built for and by the Windows Phone developer community. This release include open source code , samples & docs, plus design-time support for the Windows Phone platform.

Project Description

The Devphone Toolkit is an open-source project built on top of the Microsoft Windows phone 7.1 and .net framework 4.0. The goal is to deliver a high quality product with the code auditing FXCop - All Rules and provide facilities to control behavior and presentation. Please review the Quality Bands for information on the support and quality level of the components.

MVVM Ready

The Devphone Toolkit is the first set of controls designed to work with the MVVM pattern allowing a loose coupling and exposing the methods of control / services through interfaces, which allows test automation in the View layer-model without dependence on the mobile environment.

evphone Features

UI Controls

WindowsBox Service
Show modal windows with orientations, scroll in box message, custom content and methods MVVM ready.

DatepickerBox
Represents a control that allows the user to choose a date (day/month/year) using WindowsBox Service and options colors and icons

TimepickerBox
Represents a control that allows the user to choose a time (hour/minute/am-pm) using WindowsBox Service and options colors and icons

ListpickerPage
Implements a page list-picking item with selected template, page header template, page template and options colors.

CheckpickerPage
Implements a page CheckBox list-picking many items with selected template, page header template, page template and options colors.

Calendar Control
Show a calendar with minimum and maximum value , mark color dates, disabled dates and change by gestures.

DropDown Control
Show a container that can collapsed and expanded with selected items.

Expander Control
Show a container that can collapsed and expanded.

UpDown Control
Input a ranger vaues that can be between minimum and maximum value. Speed change with hold press.

Attached Properties

Zoom attached property
Earn Accessibility: Zoom Text in any control.

Html attached property
Show Html string directly in the browser control.

Clip attached property
Clip to Bounds in any control.

As I mentioned there's a complete sample app that lets you play with all these controls/properties and their properties

For example, the Calendar control;

Or the WindowsBox control;

So how do you get started with this?

Get Started

• Download the Devphone for Windows Phone Toolkit
• Available on NuGet

Now this toolkit in and of itself is cool, but the best thing is that the source for the it is available too!

Here's a snap of the Solution and the primary projects

And a snap of the Sample app;

If you've been looking for these kinds of controls or examples of how to build like ones the Devphone Toolkit and source is wait for you...

That's cool, what's even cooler is that this project takes a HTML5 project we've covered before,XNA Platformer, HTML5 Style and using the magic of PhoneGap puts it on Windows Phone...

How to create HTML5 apps on Windows Phone with PhoneGap

We will first see in this article what the added values of PhoneGap for HTML5 applications are. We’ll then discover how to create our very first project where we will retrieve the accelerometer’s values from our JavaScript code. At last, we will review a complete HTML5 gaming sample almost ported as-is to PhoneGap to use the accelerometer available on the Windows Phones.

1. Introduction
2. PhoneGap: a framework filling the gap
3. Let’s create our first PhoneGap project
4. Getting the accelerometer’s values from JavaScript
5. Review of a complete sample with the HTML5 Platformer game
   1. Forcing the landscape orientation
   2. Handling various resolutions
   3. Loading the levels with calls to the file system instead of using XHR
   4. Modification of the gameplay to use the accelerometer
   5. Screenshots of the result and FPS on some phones
   6. Complete Visual Studio Solution to download
6. Conclusion

The article provides a good getting started guide and gets you quickly up and running with PhoneGap. One thing to note is that the PhoneGap project moves very fast. The current version is v1.7.0 and while this article is only a few months old it's on v1.3.0. The good news is that everything pretty much works, no matter the version.

PhoneGap: a framework filling the gap

While waiting on real standardized specifications, we don’t have the choice: we need to create some bridges between JavaScript and the native code of the targeted platform to have access to its capabilities. The idea is then the following one: taking the native languages of each platform (C#, Objective-C and Java) and creating a framework with these languages that will expose interfaces to the JavaScript developer.

This is exactly what PhoneGap is doing. Let’s take the Windows Phone case which is the main topic of this article. A Windows Phone’s PhoneGap project is simply a Silverlight application hosting the WebBrowser control (and thus IE9) as well as a Silverlight Assembly written in C# which does the job to access to the accelerometer, GPS, contacts, camera and so on. In this way, as a JavaScript developer, you will use a DLL named WP7GapClassLib.dll (the PhoneGap core runtime) without even knowing it via the usage of the code embedded in the phonegap-1.3.0.js file. This DLL contains some C# code which does calls to the Silverlight runtime available on the phone. As the runtime has access to all the capabilities of the phone, the JavaScript will do also. The JavaScript library will then act as a gateway between both worlds. Moreover, the good point of using this library is that your code will most of the time works as-is on the PhoneGap versions of Android or iOS. PhoneGap offers then an interesting form of portability.

Please note by the way that the PhoneGap support for Windows Phone is now totally complete since the recent 1.3.0 version:

The article then moves onto a "Hello Phone" app, showing you how to start your first app and how to get started using the accelerometer.

Let’s create our first PhoneGap project

Prerequisites

Here are the very first steps you need to follow:

1. Download the Windows Phone SDK: Windows Phone SDK
2. Download the last version of Phone (1.3.0 today) on their site: http://phonegap.com/
3. Unzip the downloaded file
4. Copy the PhoneGapStarter.zip and PhoneGapCustom.zip files into \Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates

File->New project

Once the previous steps are done, you will be able to create your first PhoneGap project. Start Visual Studio 2010, select the "Visual C#" templates and filter them via the "Gap" keyword. You should then see a new type of project named PhoneGapStarter:

...

Getting the accelerometer’s values from JavaScript

We’re going to see here how to get the values sent back by the accelerometer (of the emulator or the real device) in a very simple way.

Open the "index.html" page and change its default body by this one:

...

Then, best of all, starts talking about the port of the HTML Platformer game, including tweaking it to use accelerometer to control the movement (i.e. tilt the phone to the left to run to the left, right to run to the right).

Review of a complete sample with the HTML5 Platformer game

Let’s now review a more complex sample. My idea was to start from the game I’ve written before. It’s exposed in this article: HTML5 Platformer: the complete port of the XNA game to <canvas> with EaselJS . I wanted to see what I should do to make it works on the phone.

First step is to simply copy/paste the different .js, .png, .css files into the "www" directory and to mark them as "Content". Here are the others steps to follow.

...

Complete Visual Studio Solution to download

You’ll find the complete source code of the HTML5 Platformer for PhoneGap here: HTML5GapPlatformer.zip

Other useful resources

• Full Support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone is Now Complete!
• PhoneGap on Windows Phone Tips from Glen Gardon who has written several very interesting tutorials to follow
• Lot of good tutorials in the Wiki section of PhoneGap: http://wiki.phonegap.com/w/page/35501397/Tutorials

Conclusion

PhoneGap offers interesting perspectives to help you writing applications on the phone. It lets you using your existing skills in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. PhoneGap won’t necessary cover all the scenarios currently available with the native development stack (Silverlight or XNA). But this could be something to have a look to if you’d like to capitalize on the HTML skills of one of your team. You will have to pay attention to properly identify the kind of project to work on.

You can also think about mixing both environments to create hybrid experiences: the main branch would be written using "HTML5" and some specific parts into native code. Using this idea, some plug-ins have been created to push a bit further the integration into the Metro UI: PhoneGap Plug-ins for Windows Phone . You’ll find for instance one of them allowing a JavaScript code to update the Tiles.

At last, PhoneGap and HTML5 could allow a relative portability to other platforms… with some limitations. But this is a vast subject with passionate debates that would need a complete dedicated article.

If you're thinking about developing app's for Windows Phone 7, but are also interested in other mobile platforms and are not afraid of HTML5 and JavaScript, then you should check out PhoneGap today...

Here’s a few more links you might find interesting:

• PhoneGap
• XNA Platformer, HTML5 Style
• Simply create a PhoneGap application for Windows Phone 7.5 in Visual Studio 2010

The Metro interface has the potential to change how a lot of people use computers. You've started seeing it in the Windows Phone. More if you have downloaded the Windows 8 consumer preview. In this session, we will demonstrate how the power exposed by Metro (through live tiles, push notifications, immersive user experiences, etc.) can be harnessed to provide a usable and intuitive application.

This Session's Experts

Atley Hunter (Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog)

This session was recorded live at ObjectSharp's annual "At The Movies" event - May 1, 2012, Scotiabank Theatre, Toronto, Ontario.

• [0:41] Announcing MSDN Profile Integration (Geoffrey, karstenj, Mike Sampson)
• [1:26] .NET 4.5 Improvements for Cloud and Server Applications (Soma Somasegar)
• [2:27] My Favorite Features: Improved Tooling in Visual Studio 11 for JavaScript Developers (Jason Zander)
• [5:29] Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta SDK
• [5:50] ASP.NET Web API: Introducing IApiExplorer/ApiExplorer (Yao)
• [7:23] Being productive when your Win8 Metro app is offscreen (Hari Pulapaka)
• [8:58] Windows 8 Camp in a Box, Consumer Preview Edition, http://devcamps.ms/windows 
• [10:12] Array Visualizer VS Extension (Amir Liberman)
• [11:39] Microsoft Research Face SDK Beta for Windows Phone [Found Via: Alvin Ashcraft's Morning Dew - Dew Drop – May 16, 2012 (#1,328)]

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week:[12:35] Pixar studio stories - The movie vanishes (full)
• Dan's Pick of the Week:[13:54] Building Battling Bots with DumbBots.Net

With Windows 8 and Metro a common question is, "How hard is it to re-use, re-purpose or port a Windows Phone 7 app to a Windows 8 Metro Style app?"

Den's stepped up and answered that very question...

Porting Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone to Windows 8 Article Series

Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone is an open-source application that aggregates Channel9 Visual Studio Achievements to a Windows Phone device (couldn’t have made it more obvious).

I ported this application to Windows 8 as a general learning experience and made the notes available for the public. You can familiarize yourself with the process I followed by reading the articles below:

• Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Layout and basic bindings
• Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Minor problems and data acquisition
• Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Getting primary user input
• Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Serialization and Storage
• Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Viewing and Sharing
• Porting a Windows Phone application to Windows 8 - A Look from 10,000 Feet Above

If you would like to share some feedback and similar experiences, feel free to do so.

The series starts at the very beginning,starting with a Windows Phone 7 app and then through completing it and documenting lessons learned.

Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 - Layout and basic bindings

One of the great features that is currently highlighted for Windows 8 and specifically WinRT is the low barrier of entry for existing Windows Phone and Silverlight developers in general. There was already a case of an existing Windows Phone application being ported to the new OS, but I decided to actually document the entire porting process in its core.

Let's start with the very basics and assume that I have no code whatsoever on my local machine. I am heading over to the CodePlex page and download the source ZIP. OI course, you might want to choose a version control system and pull the source that way, but I will leave that at your own discretion. The default solution is of course opened in Visual Studio 2010. Your solution contents should resemble this:

Now let's working on the actual new project. Launch Visual Studio 11 Beta and click on New Project. Select Visual C# > Windows Metro Style and finally - Blank Application. Give a unique name to the project. I personally used VSAW8. Open BlankPage.xaml - this is the main work page that will display all necessary user information. For convenience purposes, I renamed it to MainPage.xaml.

...

Porting a Windows Phone Application to Windows 8 - A Look from 10,000 Feet Above

I managed to successfully port my Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone to Windows 8 - it now fully works in the Metro environment with absolutely the same capabilities as its mobile counterpart (the Windows 8 version is mobile to some extent too, since Windows 8 will be used on tablets). This article represents a general overview of the process.

Time

As long as the application is well-designed, it should not take much time to port it to Metro. So if you have a good separation of concerns and files are structured well in a solution, you can just copy and paste the necessary components, adjust the namespaces, update references and you are ready to go in a lot of cases. There are exceptions, that I will be talking about later in this article, but generally the most time-consuming part of the process is the threading model reorganization.

Recommended reading: App Porting to Windows 8 Already Possible

References

There is not much trouble with modifying references either. As I was moving code files from the Windows Phone project to the Metro one, I had to do slight modifications in the JSON parser that is now accessed through Windows.Data.Json, which is much nicer than its Silverlight counterpart, by the way, and I was not sure how I should reference it.

...

Bottom Line

The overall porting experience is straightforward and easy to the point where parts of it could be automated. Should a developer create applications that are released both for Windows 8 and Windows Phone? Yes. Can most of the code base be reused? Yes. Do both applications have to provide the same experience? The consistency of the UI is a given as long as you are following the general conventions, but you might also consider building a Windows Phone application that is a companion for its Windows 8 counterpart instead of a duplicate.

If you have a Windows Phone 7 app today and are wondering what it would take turn it into a Windows 8 Metro Style app, or are just interested in seeing a Windows 8 Metro Style app being built, this series is a must read...

• Gerbil Physics
• Home Depot
• iStunt 2
• WeeMee
• SniperBoy

Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

Hyper-V PowerShell on Technet Radio [01:50]

Wordament is Alive on Xbox LIVE [07:19]

Nook joint venture with Microsoft  [12:30]

Microsoft cleans up Windows Phone Marketplace and Windows Live Branding  [17:30]

Watch the full episode >>

Host Jonathan Rozenblit goes through the monthly developer news:

• Canadian Developer Connection Windows Phone App (Windows Phone Marketplace)
• TechDays TV - May 8 - WIN280 - Metro in Windows 8 and Windows Phone
• TechDays TV - May 22 - DEV281 - Visual Studio 11 and .NET 4.5
• Windows 8 Mini Camps
• Windows Azure Workshops
• Developer Movement: Windows Phone Apps - due May 20
• Developer Movement: Windows Azure - The Cloud is Strong in This One

D³: LIVE & INTERACTiVE
In case you haven't heard about the show, Developers, Developers, Developers: LIVE & INTERACTIVE (D³) is a monthly show hosted by Jonathan Rozenblit. The show airs live every first Wednesday of the month at 12:00 PM ET and features the latest updates on what's new and exciting in the world of development; featured presentations; and guests. LIVE and INTERACTIVE means that you'll be part of the show – You're invited to interact with us; ask questions and get them answered; and share your thoughts and opinions.

Join the Canadian Developer Connection LinkedIn group  
Follow @devsdevdevs
Like D³ on Facebook
Subscribe to podcasts via iTunes, Zune, or RSS

More D³: LIVE & INTERACTIVE >>

• Civilization Revolution
• Baconit
• Symmetry
• Wikitude
• Falling Birds

Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

• Monster Island
• DODONPACHI MAXIMUM
• Crazy Kitties
• Keymon Goes Fishing
• Starbucks Finder

Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

Live Q&A with Erez Harari.

WIN380 - Push Notifications and Live Tiles in Windows Phone
In Windows Phone an application does not have to run in order to communicate with the user, rather the Push Notifications and Live Tiles features can be used in order to present live and dynamic information to the user over the pinned applications' tiles and by prompting pop-up notifications over the phone screen. In this session we will go through the concepts of Push Notifications and Live Tiles in Windows Phone applications and see how easy it is to create and use them from your own code.

Watch >>

This Session's Expert

Erez Harari (Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog)

This session was recorded live on TechDays TV - April 24, 2012. Join host Jonathan Rozenblit every 2nd and 4th Tuesday at 12:00 PM EST for live TechDays presentations on the very latest in technical training topics.

In Windows Phone an application does not have to run in order to communicate with the user, rather the Push Notifications and Live Tiles features can be used in order to present live and dynamic information to the user over the pinned applications' tiles and by prompting pop-up notifications over the phone screen. In this session we will go through the concepts of Push Notifications and Live Tiles in Windows Phone applications and see how easy it is to create and use them from your own code.

Watch the Live Q&A with Erez Harari >>

This Session's Expert

Erez Harari (Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog)

This session was recorded live on TechDays TV - April 24, 2012. Join host Jonathan Rozenblit every 2nd and 4th Tuesday at 12:00 PM EST for live TechDays presentations on the very latest in technical training topics.

• [0:24] ASP.NET Open Sourcing Discussion with Scott Hanselman (Brady Gaster, Scott Hanselman)
• [2:22] PowerShell Scripting Games, All in One Page, Registration Information, The Announcement, Top 10 Reasons for competing in the 2012 Scripting Games, The judging criteria (Ed Wilson)
• [3:35] Using NuGet PowerShell to Replace Missing Macros in Dev 11 (John Robbins)
• [4:49] FIX: April 2012 Update for Visual Studio 11 Beta, April 2012 Updates to Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta (x86 and x64) - (English) on MSDN Subscriber Download [Note direct link may not work due to MSDN Subscriber site architecture. If not, should be listed in New downloads or our can search for it]. POST SHOW UPDATE: Since the recording of this show more information has been released as well as downloads for the public. Please see this blog post Improving how we update Visual Studio for more information.
• [5:46] Talk: What's new in VB11 & Talk: Async Part 1 - the message-loop, and the Task type (Lucian Wischik)
• [8:31] Quick Tip: Show WinRT XAML Binding Errors (Shawn Wildermuth)
• [9:41] Installing enterprise metro apps without using Microsoft Store (Lee Stott), TechNet 's How to Add and Remove Apps (aka Sideload)
• [10:42] Optimize [WinPhone7 App] Startup Time(Mike Battista)
• [12:17] 10+ powerful debugging tricks with Visual Studio (Ivan Shcherbakov)

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week: [13:39] Windows Phone Proposal- The Ultimate in Romance
• Dan's Pick of the Week: [14:25] KMotion Capturer, the 3ds Max Script generator

• [1:01] Visual Studio Ultimate Roadmap (Jason Zander), What's New in Visual Studio 11 Beta Unit Testing (Peter Provost)
• [3:44] ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source (Scott Guthrie), ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) now all open source with contributions (Scott Hanselman), http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com
• [5:52] Build on the Team Foundation Service [TFSPreview] (Aaron Bjork)
• [6:48] Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update Now Available (Cliff Simpkins)
• [8:43] Extending the Visual Studio 11 Web Browser Chooser and Browse With Menu to include Developer Profiles (Scott Hanselman)
• [9:59] Windows Azure for the ASP.NET Developer Series (Peter Laudati)
• [11:15] Metro XAML and HTML Control Sample Packs (Two downloads, bunches of controls sampled, lots of code examples, hours of...) (Greg Duncan), XAML controls sample pack, HTML controls sample pack
• [12:20] Activating Windows 8 contracts in your app (Windows 8 app developer blog)
• [14:28] 5 1/2 F# features every C# programmer should lust after (Mindscape)
• [16:57] Schema Compare Improvements (Bill Gibson)
• [18:05] AdventureWorks2012 now available for all on SQL Azure (Jamie Thomson)
• [18:52] Techdays 2012 the Netherlands, Using Windows Azure with Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Windows 8 (Nick Harris)

Picks of the Week!

• Brian's Pick of the Week: [19:24] Porting Visual Studio Achievements for WP to Windows 8 (Den Delimarsky)
• Dan's Pick of the Week: [20:05] Make Mayhem

• Toy Soldiers Boot Camp
• Flashlight-X Pro
• BuildDown
• MealTimer
• Puzzle Time

Please leave suggestions for hot apps that should be featured in the comments section, thanks!

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