SilverlightShow: Silverlight Community

Daily News Digest 2/9/2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:30:23 GMT

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Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Thursday, February 9th, 2012.

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Win a free pass for Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas in SilverlightShow Contest

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 13:51:35 GMT

Great news for all SilverlightShow members!

SilverlightShow and Visual Studio Live are giving away one free Best Value Package pass (a $2,095 value) for Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas event (taking place March 26-30, 2012 in Mirage Resort & Casino, Las Vegas) to one of you who completed a simple sentence.

At Visual Studio Live, what you learn in Vegas, won't stay in Vegas! So, just finish the sentence: If I won a free pass for Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas, I hope to leave Vegas having learned ....

Post your replies in the SilverlightShow Forum Thread we've opened especially for this contest, and you are in for the draw! All posts should be done by end of March 5, 2012. The winner will be randomly picked and announced on March 6. Good luck!

See the complete rules of our contest »

Why attend Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas? This is a 5-Day Event including 60+ sessions and workshops on Silverlight/WPF, Windows 8/WinRT, Windows Phone 7, Cloud Computing, HTML5 and more, with Tim Huckaby and Billy Hollis among the speakers! A number of networking events will get you in touch with professionals in your field!

Your free pass includes the full conference package and gives you access to:

All Visual Studio Live! Sessions and Keynotes
Pre-conference workshops
Post-conference workshops
Reception
Networking Events
Lunch (March 26-30)
Coffee and Morning Pastries
Laptop Computer Bag
T-shirt with Completed Survey
Proceedings CD of all course notes and sample code

Learn more on Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas event

Get a Bundle With The Top 10 SilverlightShow Article-based Ebooks

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 12:20:56 GMT

It's been more than half a year since we released SilverlightShow Ebook Store and we decided it's time to check out which are the 10 favourite article-based ebooks of our readers:

Working with Collections in WCF RIA Services by Kevin Dockx | 15 pages
WCF RIA Services by Brian Noyes | 79 pages
Producing and Consuming OData in a Silverlight and WP7 App by Michael Crump | 63 pages
Silverlight in the Azure Cloud by Gill Cleeren | 17 pages
Silverlight WCF RIA Services: Strategies for handling your Domain Context by Kevin Dockx | 14 pages
Data Driven Applications with MVVM by Zoltan Arvai | 27 pages
Beginners Guide to Visual Studio LightSwitch by Kunal Chowdhury | 77 pages
The Duplex Story: Looking at Duplex Communication in Silverlight by Gill Cleeren | 20 pages
Developing real-world Applications with LightSwitch by Gill Cleeren | 104 pages
Windows 8 XAML Metro Apps with OData by Samidip Basu | 24 pages

You can now get this great collection of 10 ebooks in one bundle. Purchase here >>

Price: $8.99 (more than 40% off)

For your convinience, all 10 ebooks come in 4 different formats (PDF, Word, MOBI, EPUB), plus source code (if any).

This offer is valid thru end of February, 2012.

Get the bundle here!

Virtualizing storage for scale, resiliency, and efficiency in Windows 8

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:15:47 GMT

Read original post by Rajeev Nagar at Building Windows 8

In this post, we are going to dive into a feature in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. Storage Spaces are going to dramatically improve how you manage large volumes of storage at home (and work). We’ve all tried the gamut of storage solutions—from JBOD arrays, to RAID boxes, or NAS boxes. Many of us have been using Windows Home Server Drive Extender and have been hoping for an approach architected more closely as part of NTFS and integrated with Windows more directly. In building the Windows 8 storage improvements, we set out to do just that and developed Storage Spaces.

Learn How to Build your First Windows 8 App with XAML and C#

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:11:13 GMT

Read original post by Paul Ballard at The Pluralsight Blog

Jump aboard Windows 8 Metro app programming with this video excerpt from Dan Wahlin and John Papa’s course “Introduction to Building Windows 8 Metro Apps”. In this video John Papa takes the reigns and provides an introduction into building Metro Apps on Windows 8 using XAML and C# including the XAML project structure, the project templates available for XAML Metro apps, and what’s new for XAML developers in Windows 8.

Windows Phone Fast Application Switching and Page State

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 11:07:33 GMT

Read original post by Dhananjay Kumar at DotNetSlackers

Windows Phone 7.5 operating system provides improved fast application switching over Windows Phone 7 operating system. Before we go into details of how FAS is better in Mango, let us first understand what is FAS.

Fast Application Switching
Imagine application "A" is running and user launches a new application "B". On pressing hardware back button user can return back to application "A". If application "A" gets activated without "resuming " screen then it can be termed as "Fast Application Switching".

Microsoft to host Windows 8 Consumer Preview on Feb. 29

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:52:01 GMT

Read original post by Jay Greene at CNET

Microsoft will take the wraps off the consumer preview of Windows 8 on February 29 in Barcelona, a key milestone on the path toward launching the new operating system.

The consumer preview is the name Microsoft has given the beta version of the operating system. The company said in December it would launch the beta by late February.

The Curious "Today" Button in Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:42:55 GMT

Read original post by Jeff Blankenburg at BlankenBlog

Yesterday, I was working on a Windows Phone application that is very date-centric. I show the user a list of events for a specific day, and the page always loads data for “today” by default. They can always change it (I’m using a DatePicker for that), but I wanted to give them an easy way to return to whatever “today” may be.

High performance HTML5 content in Metro-style Apps

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:36:00 GMT

Read original post by Andy Zeigler at IEBlog

Metro style apps in Windows 8 have all the performance benefits of IE10 when showing Web content. In Metro style apps, Web content is always JIT compiled and hardware-accelerated. Other platforms do not provide the same level of performance in apps. For example, Cocoa apps on iOS offer significantly worse JavaScript performance (via the UIWebView control) than the same content running in Safari. These Cocoa apps do not enjoy JIT compilation, and these apps cannot show and use Web content the same way the browser on the system can.

Unified Ad for Windows Phone - Part 2 - Basic Usage

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:29:38 GMT

Read original post at Mark Monster's Blog

Time for Part 2 of the Unified Ad for Windows Phone series. Also read part 1 for the introduction of the Unified Ad for Windows Phone. We covered the reason why we want the Unified ad for Windows Phone control and also registered for a couple of Ad Providers. Let’s start with implementing the Unified ad control in our application.

Correcting Pinch Zoom in Silverlight for Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:24:56 GMT

Read original post by Francesco De Vittori at DZone

Pinch zooming is one of those things that look incredibly simple until you actually try to implement them. At that point you realize it hides quite a number of intricacies that make it hard to get it right. If you tried to implement pinch zooming in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 you probably know what I’m talking about.

Treadmill Assistant Windows Phone 7 App Released

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:21:47 GMT

Read original post at Michael Crump's Blog

Back in December 2011, I decided that it was time to start losing weight. So what did I do? I made a lifestyle change – not a fad diet. I decided that I would start eating healthier foods and allow myself one cheat day. I also started an exercise program using a treadmill and light weights. I started running 3.5 miles a day at least 4 days a week. After running for about a month, I decided that it would be interesting to keep track of my runs in a calendar view. So, what did I do? I looked for an existing WP7 app that had the functionality I wanted. I found several apps, but they seemed to never fit the bill so I just went ahead and built my own.

Windows Phone Mango Sample: Give your app the Finger!

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:15:56 GMT

Read original post at Jerry Nixon's Blog

My colleague Developer Evangelist, Sam Stokes, in California has written a compelling article on dragging items in Windows Phone.

But I have a problem with Sam’s approach. Maybe it’s because I have a problem with Sam – but probably not; he’s actually one of my top 90,000 people @ Microsoft. So, let’s talk about moving things in XAML!

Sam moves objects around by incrementing and decrementing an item’s top/left dependency property inside a Canvas.

Introducing Rate Application Reminder for Windows Phone

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:08:23 GMT

Read original post by Valentin Stoychev at The Telerik Blogs

As part of the Telerik “Q1.2012 Beta” WindowsPhone package we released a set of building blocks components. You can find more info on the idea of building blocks for Windows Phone here.

As we are discussing in our “Promote your Windows Phone App on a Shoestring” whitepaper, the number of ratings plays a big role in the algorithm that the marketplace uses to rank the different apps. Our experience shows that if the users are reminded to do something, chances are that their response rate will be higher than if they are not reminded.

HTML5 and CSS3 on Windows Phone: Dark and Light Styles

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:41:24 GMT

Read original post at Rob Tiffany's Blog

In my last article covering HTML5 and CSS3 on Windows Phone, I got you started with a simple boilerplate. It just so happened that the style I presented you with was Dark. Since we know that Windows Phone also has a light theme, I think it’s important that your mobile web site have one as well.

Part 2: Developing for a multitude of clients: Strategies for code reuse and keeping costs in check

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Kevin Dockx ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:41:00 GMT

Introduction

Welcome to the second part of this article series on strategies for designing your application for a multitude of different clients. A lot of businesses face this problem today: your customers expect a rich desktop client, an almost equally rich web client, a mobile client, … and of course, on different form factors and for use with different types of input: typically, a mouse-keyboard combination, or touch.

That typically amounts to higher costs. And in reality, it will - after all, you are building multiple client applications. The good news is: your costs don't necessarily have to spin out of control. The aim of this article series is to look into how you can cut costs when you're faced with these demands: where can you reuse existing code, and how?

More resources...

All SilverlightShow Ebooks

In the first part, we've had a look at the business case, and the clients we're going to develop. We've also looked at the provided data model. In this part, we'll look at the service layer. We've got a few requirements we need take into account. First of all, the service layer should be able to be consumed by the different clients: Silverlight, Windows Phone, HTML, Windows Phone, Metro. We've also got a few common concerns we should tackle: validation & authentication come to mind. And we require something that allows us to rapidly get our applications to the market: development time is an issue to take into account as well.

The accompanying source code for this article can be downloaded here.

Say hello to WCF RIA Services

If you have been building serious Silverlight Line of Business applications, you've undoubtedly heard of WCF RIA Services. A Silverlight client will typically get its data from a server via asynchronous service calls - so when you're building a Silverlight application, you're forced to build it in an asynchronous, service-oriented way. This can quickly become quite cumbersome: you'll have to write quite a lot of application logic to solve some common concerns, like validation logic and authentication, which quickly results in writing code on both sides (client and server), plugging in some code generator or your own mapping tool, …

Here, we're trying to get our applications to the market quickly, and we're trying to cut down on development time & costs. This is where WCF RIA Services really stands out: it obscures a lot of the plumbing details you'd have to write yourself otherwise, and more importantly: it solves most of our common concerns. You'll typically write the code on the server side, and WCF RIA Services will generate the corresponding code on the client - including your validation logic, your domain model, and all the logic you need to fetch and submit entities.

Working with WCF RIA Services feels a lot like working with the Entity Framework (of course, I’m talking about the “feel” here, not the technicalities): you'll load entities to your client, construct change sets, and submit them back to the server, which will take care of committing them to your data store: it obscures the intermittent service layer. This is, of course, a simplified explanation, and in reality it's not as easy as a typical marketing department would like you to believe, but I've used WCF RIA Services on a multitude of real-life Line of Business projects, and I'm convinced it's the fastest option on the market, while still allowing great extensibility and robustness, making it a good fit for most Line of Business applications. In this series, we won't look into the specifics of developing with WCF RIA Services, as there are already some great resources out there: you can learn a lot more about WCF RIA Services in Brian Noyes excellent series on this site, or have a look at some of the WCF RIA Services related articles I wrote.

What about the other clients?

Ok, so it's a no-brainer for building a Silverlight application, and our two main clients are Silverlight-based (web & out of browser), but what about those other clients? Weren't we supposed to build a mobile client (Windows Phone), an HTML-based client, and even a Windows 8 Metro client? Yes, we are, so let's have a look at those.

The mobile client (Windows Phone 7): when you're developing for Windows Phone, you're developing in Silverlight. However, this isn't the same version as the Web/OOB plugin. Contrary to what you might hope, WCF RIA Services isn't supported as we're used to in regular Silverlight. However, WCF RIA Services can expose its Domain Services as SOAP, REST or OData (read-only) endpoints, making it easily accessible from a Windows Phone client. We'll look into how we can enable this a bit further on in this article.

The HTML-based client: for this client, a WCF RIA Services implementation is available, namely RIA/JS: a jQuery client for WCF RIA Services. With this JavaScript-based framework, you get most of what you're used to with a Silverlight-based WCF RIA Services client, but with using JavaScript. You can load data using your Domain Services (query support, including sorting, paging and filtering), you get your validation logic on the client (your server side validation metadata is exposed in jQuery validation format), you can create change sets and you can submit them.

Windows 8 Metro client: at this point, it's unclear whether or not we'll get WCF RIA Services support for Windows 8 Metro apps. However, even it doesn't happen, the SOAP, REST or OData endpoints can be used.

Other future clients (iOS, Android): these would typically use the SOAP or REST endpoints.

Setting it up: logically dividing your services

It may seem like a no-brainer, but it's often forgotten: you should logically divide your domain model into different services, and a service should only expose what's needed, nothing more. This is especially true if you're building different clients: not every client will provide the users with the same functionality, so a client that provides limited functionality shouldn't consume a service which exposes a lot more - for example, if you look at our business case, the mobile client will deal with quickly inputting new opportunities, and thus shouldn't have access to service methods that allow him to access back-end functionality, or customer administration. So, instead of having only one Domain Service which exposes all your logic & entities, you should divide them in different "modules": a Domain Service for customer administration, a Domain Service for employee/opportunity management (this is the one we'll build), … Also, don’t expose unneeded operations: for example, a Domain Service for managing opportunities will probably require access to the Employee object, but shouldn’t be able to edit it (so there’s no need for Insert, Update or Delete operations).

Using this type of division also offers you more scalability options: often-used modules, by various clients, can be published to servers with higher bandwidth capabilities, whereas little-used modules can kept on low-bandwidth servers.

Same goes for security: a back-end service module can be kept in-house, hosted on your intranet rather than on the internet.

Setting it up: the solution division

Often, the WCF RIA Services class library template is used. This creates a .Web project (full .NET 4 CLR), containing your domain services, and a Silverlight class library project, containing the generated code. However, the naming of these projects is quite unclear, and not exactly correct. We're going to change that a bit, resulting in better naming.

First, we'll add a class library to our solution, SalesDashboard.EmployeeOpportunityService. This will contain the Domain Service we'll use throughout this demo application. You'll typically want one of these for each of your logically divided modules, as explained in the previous paragraph. For the demo application we're building, two are sufficient: one for the EmployeeOpportunity service, and one for an authentication service.

Next, we'll add a Silverlight class library to the project, SalesDashboard.Client.Model. This is the project which will be referenced by our Silverlight clients, and this is where we want the generated code to end up. That can be achieved by setting the WCF RIA Services link to the project containing our Domain Service:

All we need now is a Service Host. Create a new ASP .NET application, and make sure it references SalesDashboard.EmployeeOpportunityService. Next, add an SVC file to it, EmployeeOpportunityService.svc. Double-click it, and put in the following code:

<%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" 
Service="SalesDashboard.EmployeeOpportunityService.EmployeeOpportunityDomainService"
Factory="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHostFactory, 
System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" %>

As you can see, we're stating here that the DomainServiceHostFactory should be used to instantiate a new EmployeeOpportunityDomainService - making our service accessible through the explicit EmployeeOpportunityService.svc URI instead of the auto-generated SVC you normally get with WCF RIA Services.

Note: as this is now your service host, this project should contain all necessary WCF RIA Service references and configuration in the web.config - just as you would normally have in a service host. This is how it looks in the provided solution:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
      <add name="DomainServiceModule" preCondition="managedHandler" 
type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHttpModule, 
System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
    </modules>
    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />
  </system.webServer>
  <connectionStrings>
      <add name="SalesDashboardAuthenticationEntities" 
connectionString="metadata=res://*/SalesDashboardAuthenticationModel.csdl|
res://*/SalesDashboardAuthenticationModel.ssdl|res://*/SalesDashboardAuthenticationModel.msl;
provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;data source=.\sql2008;
initial catalog=SalesDashboard;persist security info=True;user id=salesdashboard;
password=salesdashboard;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework&quot;" 
providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
      <add name="SalesDashboardEmployeeOpportunityEntities" 
connectionString="metadata=res://*/SalesDashboardEmployeeOpportunityModel.csdl|
res://*/SalesDashboardEmployeeOpportunityModel.ssdl|res://*/SalesDashboardEmployeeOpportunityModel.msl;
provider=System.Data.SqlClient;provider connection string=&quot;data source=.\sql2008;
initial catalog=SalesDashboard;persist security info=True;user id=salesdashboard;
password=salesdashboard;multipleactiveresultsets=True;App=EntityFramework&quot;" 
providerName="System.Data.EntityClient" />
  </connectionStrings>
  <system.serviceModel>
    <behaviors>
      <serviceBehaviors>
        <behavior name="">
          <serviceMetadata httpGetEnabled="true" />
          <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="false" />
        </behavior>
      </serviceBehaviors>
    </behaviors>
    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" />
  </system.serviceModel>
  <system.web>

    <compilation debug="true"></compilation>
    
    <httpModules>
      <add name="DomainServiceModule" 
type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHttpModule, 
System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
    </httpModules>
  </system.web>

</configuration>

Setting it up: making the service layer available for other clients

Non-Silverlight clients will communicate with our service layer through OData, SOAP or REST endpoints. Setting these up is quite easy – the OData endpoint is even provided out of the box. When you’re going through the Domain Service wizard, simply check the “Create OData endpoint” checkbox, and it will be created for you (you’ll still need to copy/paste the relevant code to the web.config of the Service Host).

If you want to do this manually, you should add some following code to the web.config on the Service Host. This should be added right underneath the configuration tag:

<configSections>
    <sectionGroup name="system.serviceModel">
      <section name="domainServices" 
type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServicesSection, 
System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" requirePermission="false" />
    </sectionGroup>
</configSections>

And this should be added underneath system.serviceModel:

<domainServices>
      <endpoints>
        <add name="OData" type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.ODataEndpointFactory, 
System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.OData, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
      </endpoints>
</domainServices>

The other two endpoints are provided through the WCF RIA Services Toolkit. The most convenient way of getting these is by using NuGet, as they are provided as a NuGet package. Use NuGet to manage the packages for the Service Host, locate the RIAServices.Endpoints package, and click install. The following endpoints will be added to your web.config file:

<add name="soap" type="Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.SoapXmlEndpointFactory, 
Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
<add name="JSON" type="Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.JsonEndpointFactory, 
Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 
PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />

That’s really all there is to it: from now on, our Domain Service is accessible through OData (read-only), SOAP and JSON (REST) endpoints.

Conclusion

In this article, we’ve looked into our service layer options, and we’ve settled on WCF RIA Services. We choose this framework mainly for its extensibility, RAD characteristics and possible reuse across different clients. We’ve looked into some pointers on service layer design, and created the Domain Service for the module we’ll develop. At the end, we’ve made this Domain Service available for other (non-Silverlight) clients through the use of endpoints from the WCF RIA Services Toolkit.

In the next part, we’ll start with the first Silverlight client.

About the author

Kevin Dockx lives in Belgium and works at RealDolmen, one of Belgium's biggest ICT companies, where he is a technical specialist/project leader on .NET web applications, mainly Silverlight, and a solution manager for Rich Applications (Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 Series, WPF, Surface, HTML5). His main focus lies on all things Silverlight, but he still keeps an eye on the new developments concerning other products from the Microsoft .NET (Web) Stack. As a Silverlight enthusiast, he's a regular speaker on various national and international events, like Microsoft DevDays in The Netherlands, Microsoft Techdays in Belgium & Portugal, NDC2011, etc. Next to that, he also authored a best-selling Silverlight book, Packt Publishing's Silverlight 4 Data and Services Cookbook, together with Gill Cleeren. His blog, which contains various tidbits on Silverlight, .NET, and the occasional rambling, can be found at http://blog.kevindockx.com/, and you can contact him on Twitter via @KevinDockx.

Daily News Digest 2/8/2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:34:05 GMT

Subscribe to our Daily News Digest RSS Feed to receive a summary of all SilverlightShow news!

Here is the new SilverlightShow content for Wednesday, February 8th, 2012.

Missed yesterday's news digest? Check it out here!

Part 2 of the "Developing for a multitude of clients" Series Published at SilverlightShow

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 14:23:37 GMT

SilverlightShow author Kevin Dockx started a new article series titled "Developing for a multitude of clients" discussing strategies for designing your application for a multitude of different clients.

If you missed the first part, you can catch up here: Strategies for code reuse and keeping costs in check.

Today we release the second article from this series:

Part 2: Developing for a multitude of clients: Strategies for code reuse and keeping costs in check

In this article, Kevin discusses the service layer options you have, and settles on WCF RIA Services.

If you find this series useful, you may also check the 4 ebooks Kevin authored for SilverlightShow:

All SilverlightShow ebooks >>

SilverlightShow Webinar Newsletter for February is Out!

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:23:43 GMT

According to a recent poll we published at our LinkedIn page, our webinars are the SilverlightShow content you appreciate the most.

Which means that you'll probably very much enjoy the February issue of our Webinar Newsletter that we released yesterday (already emailed to all SilverlightShow members). It's now available online - take a look!

What's in:

Be the first to find out about new webinars and updates by registering at SilverlightShow and enabling the newsletter option in your member profile.

Missed an earlier newsletter? Check all of them out!

SilverlightCream Top 5 News for Week Jan 30 - Feb 5, 2012

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:16:27 GMT

Find below the most popular news for last week from our fellow site silverlightcream.com. Thanks to Dave Campbell for sharing this stats!

Top 5 SilverlightCream news for January 30 - February 5, 2012:

A while ago Dave released his new site WindowsDevNews.com. Check it out and make sure to bookmark it!

7 Deadly Sins for Windows Phone Developers: Day #7 Lust

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:01:38 GMT

Read original post by Samidip Basu at Windows Phone Love & .NET Ramblings

Upfront, we’re not going try to map Lust in the true sexual sense, since that would be difficult & a slippery slope . Let’s see how we Windows Phone developers can be wary against being over-zealous. Zest is good; craving without taking any appropriate action – not so much...

Learn Windows Phone 7 Development in 31 Days – Day 8 – Working with Camera in WP7

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:53:44 GMT

Read original post by Karthikeyan Anbarasan at F5 Debug…

In this article we are going to see how to use the Camera options in developing applications with Windows Phone 7. In order to access the camera features we are going to use the Launchers and Choosers which has the inbuilt API’s to perform each task based on the requirement. In order to manipulate the camera photos and storage with the device, we are going to use the CameraCaptureTask. This task is used to launch the default camera application to take some snap shot for any third party application which is trying to use the camera to save images locally or to an isolated storage.

Mango Sample: A Cloud-based Phone App in 5 Minutes

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:47:17 GMT

Read original post at Jerry Nixon's Blog

When you create a Windows Phone application you might have some data to store. Where do you store it?

Well, there’s always Isolated Storage. I discuss that here.

There’s always a local SQL Database. I discuss that here.

But, what if on-the-phone isn’t good enough? …to the cloud! I discuss that here [there’s no link because this is the article! :)].

What Makes End-Users and the Marketplace Love Your Windows Phone App?

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:42:13 GMT

Read original post at The Telerik Blogs

An unusual thing happened at the Telerik Windows Phone team product planning meeting for Q1 2012 a few months ago. Instead of starting with our usual mantra “What does our customer need in order to build a great app?” we talked about love. What does love have to do with a mobile app you would ask? Well, a lot. Keep reading.

Improving power efficiency for Windows 8 applications

editorial@silverlightshow.net (Silverlight Show ) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:32:09 GMT

Read original post by Sharif Farag and Ben Srour at Building Windows 8 Blog

We’ve featured several posts about how we’re working to improve battery life for Windows 8 PCs. In Pat Stemen’s Building a power-smart general-purpose Windows post, we discussed some of the investments that we are making in Windows 8 to enable a new smartphone-like power mode on system-on-a-chip (SOC) hardware, a mode we call Connected Standby. In Updating live tiles without draining your battery, we talked about how we’re enabling live tiles to give you fresh and current information without creating a lot of underlying activity that erodes battery life. In this post, we’ll expand on a few additional innovations that we didn’t cover previously, about how we‘ve minimized the power usage of running apps on Windows 8 PCs while still getting the most out of them.