The next version of Windows Phone OS codename "Mango" was released last week. There are a lot of new features added - we can say that this is a major update of the OS. Here is the list of more important features targeting the developers (I'll skip the end-user features which you can see here, together with the full press release). Silverlight 4 New profiler and emulator for testing  Use of Silverlight + XNA together   Background processing  IE9 web browser control Live Tile enhancements: use of back of tiles and ability to update Live Tiles locally Additional sensors; direct camera access, compass & gyro...

Following our second webinar in the Telerik Windows Phone Wednesdays series, we now have the recording online and available to view!  In this webinar, industry expert and Microsoft MVP Jim Wooley covers the Reactive Extensions (Rx), a framework that allows for more asynchronous calls to take place within your applications, keeping your UI responsive while all the behind-the-scenes operations still take place.  Head on over to Telerik TV to check out the recorded version here: Become an Rx Pusher with Windows Phone 7 by Jim Wooley Then head over to Jim's website to check out the sample code as well as the...

Good news for any member of a developer user group who’s interested in winning a $100 for his/her user group.   Here’s the deal: Telerik in partnership with PreEmptive Solutions and Microsoft will donate a $100 to your user group for each eligible app published at the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The app needs to use Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone 7 and PreEmptive Solutions Runtime Intelligence for Windows Phone. You get both Telerik RadControls and PreEmptive Solution at no cost. What’s even better is that if you get Telerik RadControls for WP7 now, you will automatically receive the updated version of the suite...

If you enjoy writing documentation from scratch, this article may not be for you. If you like removing as much repetitive work as possible, then JustCode can help you out. Aside from aiding in this endeavor with code, it also addresses code documentation. There are two primary features in JustCode I will discuss. The first is Generate Documentation which handles the XML comments for methods and types. The second is a new feature, Introduce Header, which was made available on May 3rd with internal build 1. Generate Documentation I like self-documenting code. I write short, descriptive methods intended for anyone to be...

It’s been another busy week supporting the community!  On Tuesday, I gave two presentations.  One over lunch for the Cincinnati Financial Corporation Internal .NET Users Group on “Implementing MVVM for Windows Presentation Foundation” and in the evening spoke for my home user group, the Cincinnati .NET Users Group (CINNUG) on “Test Driving ASP.NET”.  On Wednesday, I drove up to the Dayton .NET Developers’ Group to give my “Deliver Cleaner Code with LINQ to Objects” talk, and had to take a 30 minute intermission due to a tornado warning!  Not to be stopped, we actually had a great open spaces style discussion while...