What has Coding4Fun been up to for the past few weeks?  We've been creating a bunch of neat, free, open source applications for Windows Phone 7!  hey range from simple to complex and each shows off how to do an interesting concept with the phone.

Our current released applications are:

1. Fake Call by Clint Rutkas
2. PicFx by Rene Schulte
3. Where's my car by Arian Kulp
4. Currency Converter by Pedro Lamas
5. Dice Shaker by Mark Jourdan
6. How much is this meeting costing us? by Clint Rutkas

All will have their source code released, most will have an article associated.

What is even cooler is this is just the tip of iceberg!  We have even more applications being developed by Dan Fernandez, Brian Peek, and others as well!

LifeHacker recently reviewed the book and found it worth recommending, saying “it's difficult to write books for teenagers that don't fall into the ‘trying too hard to be cool’ trap, but Microsoft has done an admirable job.” Glowing praise indeed!

You can grab a free copy for yourself from here.

As you may imagine, this new program provides web developers and designers with copies of Microsoft web design and development software. The list includes Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, Expression Studio 3, Expression Web 3 as well as processor licenses for Windows Web Server 2008 or R2 (when available), SQL Server 2008 and DotNetPanel, a third-party web site control panel.

To qualify, web development and design companies with up to 10 employees and owners can participate for three years with no up-front cost on their part. At the end of the term, only a $100 fee is due, but there are no other costs or obligations. So in other words, you’re getting a ton of software for only $100.

That on its own would be great, but the program also provides professional support and training during the three year period. Of course the end goal here is to sell potential customers on the Microsoft platform, but as TechCrunch recently noted: “Who cares” because “frankly, their developer tools have long been the best available.”

Those interested in learning more or enrolling can do so here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/websitespark.

The nice thing about AT&T’s Wi-Fi is that it offers auto-authentication. That means as long as you have Wi-Fi turned on, it will automatically connect you. The service will kick off with Samsung smartphones on the 14th and then, over the coming weeks, other phones will follow including all 6.5 devices.

- Nic Fillingham’s Flickr photos from the 5-year anniversary cake

- Where Dan, Brian and Charles were five years ago

Developer News
- Download SQL Server 2008 SP1

- Velocity Team - Velocity CTP3 now available(Download)

- Jesse Liberty – VideoWiki Open Silverlight 3 Project

- Jeroen Ritmeijer - Integrating TextGlow (Silverlight Open XML viewer) into Sharepoint

-  Yochay Kiriaty – Walkthrough of the Windows 7 Taskbar .NET Sample Library
- Update to free Azure Services Training Kit and Azure Services Management Tools

- Mohammad Khosravi – CodeProject Range Finder app, via Greg Duncan

- Jon Galloway - Troubleshooting an intermittent .NET High CPU problem

- Bill Ramos - SQL Management Studio Tips Part 1 and Part 2

- Adam Kinney – Video demo of Silverlight Spy to Visually Debug Silverlight applications

- SourceGear - DiffMerge available (free)

- RedGate offers Illustrated C# 2008 eBook for free, via Stefano Mapelli

Picks of the week
- Charles's pick of the week: Jonathan Shapiro, creator of EROS and BitC projects, was hired by Microsoft
- Brian’s pick of the week: Correction on features coming in XNA from Michael Klucher

-Dan’s pick of the week: Silverlight-based Future Desktop in Silverlight (blog post, Codeplex project), via Rishi Oberi

This new, open source screenshot application runs from a small executable file – no installation required. After it’s up and running, you can use keyboard shortcuts to take a shot of either a region (hit the Print button), a window (Alt+Print), or your entire screen (Ctrl+Print).

Unlike Jing, which saves all images as .PNG files, Greenshot lets you specify your image file format along with name and storage location. In addition, you can choose to just copy the image to the clipboard instead so you can paste it elsewhere.

After your screenshot has been copied, you can then add objects including rectangles, circles, and text boxes. A unique feature lets you select an element within the picture and resize it, move it, copy it, cut it, or delete it.

Unfortunately, Greenshot doesn’t let you upload photos to the web like Jing does, but you can always use Windows Live Photo Gallery or your favorite FTP program for that. Greenshot may not replace Jing for me, but it definitely has some useful features that make it a worthy addition to my everyday toolkit. 

The Zune Pass subscription service has been modified so that you still have the opportunity for the unlimited sampling that a subscription music service provides, but you can now also keep your ten favorite songs, too.

Ten songs – I think that equates to about a CD’s worth of music every month, give or take.

This service is $14.99 per month – a pretty decent offering for ten free songs plus unlimited streaming for up to 3 PCs and 3 Zunes.

Getting together an offer like this was no easy feat. Agreements between Microsoft and the record labels EMI, Song BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music, had to first be signed and put into place along with agreements with independent distributors of digital music like INgrooves, Independent Online Distribution Alliance and The Orchard.

In addition to this new model, Zune owners have access to unique features not found elsewhere, like buy-from-FM, an option that allows for immediate download of songs heard on the built-in FM tuner. There’s also a Wi-Fi store, a recommendation engine that learns what you like and suggests tracks you might enjoy, themed channels for discovering music by genre, and a dynamic visual mosiac called Mixview which lets you discover music by clicking around a visual display of related albums and artists.

Oh, and did I mention that the majority of the music in the Zune Marketplace is DRM-free?

To learn more about the Zune Pass or to sign up, visit the Zune.net site.

The Freepath 2.0 software offers three different viewing modes: a preview mode which shows you digital assets on the right but also makes the playlist and playlist library accessible, a full screen mode  (like what PowerPoint offers), and a dual screen mode which shows the presentation both on your screen and that of an external monitor. This dual monitor mode is also compatible with WebEx, GoToMeeting, Live Meeting, and Intercall.

If you’re more comfortable creating presentations in PowerPoint and are hesitant to try a new tool like this, you can actually prepare your slides in PowerPoint itself and then drag them into FreePath’s downloadable software to take advantage of the other tools that it provides.

When complete, your presentations can be shared with the Freepath community on myFreepath.com, which is similar to how Slideshare operates. All beta users receive 100 MB of free storage space in this community.

iPower is a little app that runs in your system tray allowing you to instantly logoff, reboot, or shutdown your computer. From the right-click menu, you choose what you want the default action to be (after installation, it’s set to “shutdown”). After it’s configured, you only need to double-click on the icon to have it perform your preferred action. This is a pretty quick way to do a shutdown, but be careful not to click it when you meant to click on another system tray app like your anti-virus or your Wi-Fi connection! You may prefer going with a Vista sidebar widget instead (like this one) – it’s just as fast and not as easy to accidentally click.

This weekend, I decided to look for an alternative to Windows Explorer. Although Windows Explorer gets the job done, there’s just a lot that it doesn’t do that I wish it would, and frankly, I miss XP’s version. Well, now, I have it back and then some! That’s one of the great things about Windows actually – you don’t have to be stuck with the way things come out of the box. If you don’t like something, you have the power to change it. Tweak, customize, download new software, whatever – you can really make Windows your own.

I decided to go on the hunt for a new version of Explorer. I heard a rumor someone out there is creating an XP version of Windows Explorer for Vista users, but I couldn’t find it. (If you know, please leave a comment! The closest I found was Explorer XP, which is similar, but not the same.)

Instead, I found something nearly as good, if not better: UltraExplorer. This alternative Windows Explorer program has it all: a completely customizable interface, tons of configurable toolbars, lots of different views, favorites, a temporary holding area for moving files around called “Drop Stack,” and, of course, the long-lost “up” button. (Don’t tell me about Alt+Up, I know - I want a button!).

Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the program except that I would like to customize the defaults for the views depending on the folder I’m accessing, and it seems that you can only set defaults for the whole program. However, the app does remember your most recent settings, so this hasn’t been a huge problem.

If you want to try this alternate version of Window Explorer, you can visit the app’s homepage here or download it from Download.com here. 

Another web app for SMB I.T. admins that I did try was Spiceworks. Since the time I used it, it has gone through several upgrades and it keeps becoming more and more useful. The latest version, Spiceworks 3.0 now offers Active Directory integration, so your computer groups will copy over to the application, instead of you having to re-create them there. There’s also a new feature that lets you monitor the health of your Exchange Server. You can browse through your software, devices, and groups in cover-flow style, schedule automatic backups, keep tabs on windows events, and fully customize your help desk portal. And those are just some of the new features! In addition, the software also does inventory management, auditing, reporting, and provides a help desk.

Both software programs – OK, they have web interfaces, but they are installable software – are great ways for the overburdened I.T. departments to keep track of network inventory and management without the need for physical or manual reviews of the devices. Even better, they’re both free!

During their private beta, they tweaked several things, fixed bugs, and even decided to streamline the plugin a bit by removing the "organize" tab, instead choosing to focus on their core product's offerings - super-fast search and relationship management. Using Xobni, you have access to features like threaded conversations, analytics, user profiles, a "related people" feature, shared attachments, and other automatically extracted info - like phone numbers for your contacts. To get in on the Xobni public beta, just visit the Xobni homepage and sign up.

In addition to the Pro Photo Tools download, Microsoft also released Expression Media 2, a new version of its digital asset management software, which is designed to work with the Pro Tools software. Expression Media 2 helps save time when it comes to managing and organizing large collections of photos and other digital media, and it includes geotagging functionality built-in. Expression Media 2 also lets you quickly export of photos into multiple formats to produce slide shows, video, and interactive Microsoft Silverlight-powered web galleries.

“Geotagging is a hot new area in digital photography, and like other popular digital photo features, I expect photographers will be asking themselves how they ever lived without it,” said Ron Glaz, analyst at IDC. “Until now geotagging has been hard to do, requiring special expertise and tools. The time has come for an application that even the weekend photographer can use."

Well now with Pro Photo Tools V1, even the weekend photographer can do geotagging!