Software

  • Phone Tools v0.6 Released – Breaking Change! – Shawn Wildermuth announces a update to his Phoney Tools library for Windows Phone 7, taking the version to 0.6. This release includes breaking changes caused by a restructuring of the Networking and Microphone classes into their own assemblies. This version also features a streamlined NuGet install process based on feedback from Scott Hanselman
  • Cloud Sync/Backup your Visual Studio settings with Pepper – Greg Duncan highlights Pepper, a Visual Studio 2010 extension from Robert MacLean which backups up / synchronises your Visual Studio settings ‘to the cloud’ (an SQL Azure database)
  • Expression Web 4 Service Pack 1 Available for Download – Wes Yanaga highlights the Expression 4 Service Pack 1 release, giving a summary of the bugfixes and improvements included in the service pack release.
  • Building Windows Phone 7 Apps just got easier! – Allan Naim highlights the launch of AppMakr, a web based application which creates Windows Phone 7 Applications for you in your browser, drawing on website RSS feeds for their data, and providing push notification and social media integrations.

Information

  • Implementing the virtual method pattern in C#, Part Three – Eric Lippert continues his series looking at how you would go about implementing Virtual Methods (in C#) if they didn’t already exist. In this post Eric looks at improving on the technique introduced in the previous part, and introduces the concept of virtual function dispatch tables.
  • C#/.NET Little Wonders: The ToLookup() LINQ Extension Method – James Michael Hare continues his on-going series of posts looking at the various little wonders contained in the C# language and .NET Framework. This instalment looks at the use of the ToLookup LINQ extension method to manipulate your IEnumerable<T> into a specific collection data structure.
  • When Should a Method Be a Property? – Rob Conery discusses the (often confused) issue of wether to use a property or a method for a particular class member, looking at an example and refering to the MSDN guidance on the subject. Discussion on this one is beginning in the comments
  • Brief introduction to Windows Identity Foundation – Gunnar Peipman shares his first ever webcast, on Windows Identity Foundation, providing an introductory overview of the WIF claims based authentication, sharing the slide deck and also a number of reference links on the subject.
  • IE9’s Document Modes and JavaScript – Gaurav Seth and Paul Chapman discuss the behaviour of the JavaScript engine in Internet Explorer 9, and how the different compatibility modes change the behaviour to help ensure that your sites continue to work.
  • WCF How To’s Index – Alik Levin shares a link list of MSDN How To documentation for a variety of WCF features
  • So you think you’ve finished implementing that new Windows Phone 7 page? – Damian Mehers shares a checklist for declaring that a Windows Phone 7 page complete which will help you ensure that your WP7 page conforms to best practices.
  • Ways to Load Applications Faster – A Windows Phone Recipe – Arik Poznanski shares a loading procedure for making your Windows Phone 7 Applications load as quickly as possible, discussing the WP7 lifetime events, showing a slow loading application, and working to make this application load quicker using 4 tips.
  • Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 application (Part 1) – Michael Crump highlights an article series he is writing for SilverlightShow.net exploring the use of OData data in Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight applications