Blogs|Jul 25, 2011

Creating Custom Ringtones in Windows Phone Mango

Now that I have upgraded my phone to the Windows Phone 7.1 Developers’ Preview, one of the features I’ve been anxious to try out is Custom Ringtones – the default tones and the ones provided by AT&T are “interesting”, but they’re just not “me.”  Windows Phone 7.1 (AKA Mango) supports custom ringtones – but how…
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Blogs|Jul 24, 2011

How to Include and Deploy Data using a Visual Studio Database Project

I’m a big fan of Visual Studio’s Database Project and I’ve used them successfully in several client projects.  If you are not familiar with using the Database Project, I encourage you to give it a look.  It gives me a nice warm feeling to see that the database schema and even necessary seed data is…
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Blogs|Jul 15, 2011

Enriching Windows Phone 7.1 (“Mango”) Apps with Secondary Tiles

Another new feature of Windows Phone 7.1 that every developer should know about is secondary tiles. Windows Phone 7.0 allowed users to pin an app to the Start screen, creating a tile for that app. But it limited apps to one tile each, and it provided no mechanism for passing information to an app launched…
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Blogs|Jul 10, 2011

Portable and Efficient Generic Parser for CSV

I recently had some pretty ugly CSV files to parse and decided to have a quick look around to see if there were any libraries around that would handle the specifics of these particular CSV files without me having to write yet another CSV parsing class.  I found a couple that seemed to fit the…
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Blogs|Jun 29, 2011

DRONE Profiler: The New Old Profiler

Deep down inside every developer really wants to create developer tools. Let’s be honest, how many of you are really excited to the tips of your toes about that Line of Business application you’re working on? It pays the bills but working on a project where you completely understand the target audience and all use…
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Blogs|Jun 28, 2011

Moving further towards the Dark Side

I’ve been a proponent of dark coding environments for many moons, back to Turbo C++ and that blue.  In fact, my current Visual Studio template started way back in the first version of Visual Studio for .NET. I actually painstakingly hand-copied my colors from HomeSite. At the recent Atlanta Code Camp, I overheard someone ment…
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Blogs|Jun 28, 2011

Does That PDB File Match the Binary?

While you should always have your PDB files in symbol servers, there are times when you’re doing private (aka local) builds and moving those builds around hither and yon in a test environment where you can accidentally forget to copy over a binary’s PDB file. That leads to the common question: short of starting a…
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Blogs|Jun 27, 2011

Using the Task Parallel Library (TPL) for Events

The parallel tasks library was introduced with the .NET Framework 4.0 and is designed to simplify parallelism and concurrency. The API is very straightforward and usually involves passing in an Action to execute. Things get a little more interesting when you are dealing with asynchronous models such as events. While the TPL has explicit wrappers…
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Blogs|Jun 18, 2011

CT Code Camp 4 Presentation Materials

I have uploaded the content from my talk at the Connecticut .Net Developers’ Group Code Camp 4 from today (6/18/2011).  The code and content  from my “What’s New in Windows Phone 7.1 Silverlight Development” are available here. Many thanks to SB Chatterjee and his team for putting together the event.  Also thank you to the attendees…
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Blogs|Jun 9, 2011

Telerik, Windows Phone 7, Sterling, and Free Licenses

You’ve heard plenty about the Sterling database engine on this blog. I recently released version 1.5 which extended the reach of the database and added several feature requests. My article on Sterling for Isolated Storage on Windows Phone 7 was also recently published in MSDN Magazine. The phone has made this a very popular engine…
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Blogs|Jun 7, 2011

Microsoft’s Silverlight Elevator Pitch

You have heard of an elevator pitch, right? It’s that quick, 30-second pitch that starts with a hook, goes on to the how, what and why and closes with a strong call to action. It’s the perfect way to quickly provide the value proposition for something you’re trying to sell, condensed into an easy, fast…
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