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Last week, we introduced WintellectNOW, a new on-demand learning service designed to make the same training content that we provide to Microsoft and other large customers available anywhere, any time. Jeffrey Richter and a team of talented people at Wintellect designed and wrote the software, which we’re continuing to improve on a daily basis. We’ve…

I’ve spent a lot of time this spring learning about Near Field Communication (NFC) and the NFC networking API in WinRT. That part of WinRT is present both in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, which means it’s relatively easy to get tablets and phones talking to each peer-to-peer. One of the things I love…

I’ve become enamored with Silverlight behaviors lately because they provide a clean and easy-to-use mechanism for encapsulating complex behavioral logic and applying it to XAML elements. And I’m equally enamored with Silverlight pixel shaders, which allow similar encapsulation of complex visual effects implemented using Microsoft’s High-Level Shader Language, better known as HLSL. Last spring, I blogged about a technique…

I’m spending the bulk of my time these days writing applications for Windows phones using Silverlight for Windows Phone (and having a blast doing it, I might add). As I write, I think of lots of little tips that can save time, reduce aggravation, and help all of us build better applications. So I thought…

Here’s a quick one that’ll save you a lot of time and trouble if you’re not already aware of it. One of the coolest features of Visual Studio is that you can launch a debug run of a phone application on a phone rather than in the emulator. Since the emulator can’t emulate everything, sometimes…

One of the improvements you can look forward to in Silverlight 3 is element data binding, also known as element-to-element data binding. Silverlight 2’s {Binding} expression allowed you to specify the name of the property you were binding to, but not the element that owned the property. This typically meant you had to write a…

My, what an interesting autumn it has been. Windows 8 has shipped, the Windows Phone 8 SDK has been made available to the public, Windows Phone 8 devices are just a few days away, and Surface RT – the new tablet from Microsoft – has landed in the hands of users world-wide. There has never…