The silverlight toolkit is now the #wptoolkit

If you've done any Silverlight development on Windows Phone 7 there's a 90 odd plus percetage chance you've used (or at least looked at) the Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone.

Now, with the release of Windows Phone 8, it's been separated into a separate, phone specific project.
Go and get all your favourite, essential, additional controls from:

http://phone.codeplex.com/

Windows Phone sessions at #bldwin

Update: See the final list at  http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/11/05/it-s-a-wrap-on-windows-phone-at-build-2012.aspx



If, like me, you're not at Microsoft's Build conference this week you'll probably want to keep up with the Windows Phone (8) related sessions that are happening there. Fortunately, they're all being made available online.
You can find a list of all sessions at http://channel9.msdn.com/events/Build/2012/ but if you just want the phone related ones I've linked them all individually below:

• Deep Dive into the Kernel of .NET on Windows Phone 8
• Designing awesome XAML apps in Visual Studio and Blend for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
• Developing Mobile Solutions with Windows Azure Part II
• Create Cross-platform Apps using Portable Class Libraries
• Building Cross-Device Xbox Games
• Building data centric applications for web, desktop and mobile with Entity Framework 5

No, that's not a lot of sessions so let's hope for quality, not quantity and also hope that there will be more information and events coming soon.

Debugging an MPNS issue

After struggling with debugging an issue with the Microsoft Push Notifications Service for Windows Phone (MPNS) today, I discovered that it's not possible to get a ChannelUri when on a Wi-Fi network that uses a proxy. It can also take several seconds (up to about 10 if today is anything to go by) before a channel is obtained. (Previously I've only known it to take less than 1.)
If a device has a low battery or battery saver is enabled you cannot get a URI either.

Just documenting as useful to know.


via http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/wpnotifications/thread/8af38ab5-f6b9-441f-af68-b9fefe0184a5

Preparing for Windows Phone 8 - Slides

In the last few months, I've spoken at WPUG, DDD10 and DDD North about Preparing for Windows Phone 8.

Sorry, there's no secrets revealed*. This is all public knowledge and sensible assumptions based on many years of working in the mobile space and with Microsoft products.

Sorry, as with most presentations the slides on their own don't give the full picture but may be useful - and some people have asked for them.



* I know very little that isn't public knowledge and don't have access to the SDK - yet.