If you have some knowledge of Silverlight and .NET it will be so easy to leverage your knowledge and develop for WP7 codenamed Mango. Please see this new ad for Mango update: youtube!

A bit of context Windows Phone 7.5, codenamed “Mango”, was the version of WP7 that finally felt complete. It shipped in late 2011 with a serious upgrade story: multitasking, deep Twitter and Facebook integration into the People hub, threaded messaging across SMS / Facebook chat / Windows Live Messenger, IE9 with hardware-accelerated rendering, and a new Marketplace flow for both users and developers. For developers, Mango added Silverlight + XNA combined projects, Live Tiles you could update from the cloud, push notifications, background agents, and full SQL CE access on the device. ...

The other day I played around with the newest release of the Windows Phone 7 SDK (7.1 Beta 2) and started by using the base application template. I created a new class that serves as the entity definition for the view model. The data is bound to a list box. Nothing spectacular. In design time (Visual Studio) my static sample data that I created showed up just fine. During application start I created some “real” data and bound it to the list box. As a result, the list box is empty and does not show any data at all … no exceptions or other runtime errors. After a bit of testing I found out that the problem is with the entity class definition. The class was specified to be private instead of public. This little keyword led to an empty list box.

Why schema management was painful in 2011 Before Entity Framework Code First Migrations, keeping a database schema in sync with your application code was one of those problems every team eventually built their own answer for. The typical setup was a folder of hand-rolled SQL scripts named with version numbers, plus a small home-grown runner that tracked which scripts had already been applied. It worked, but every project re-invented the wheel slightly differently, and merging schema changes between branches was a recurring source of pain. ...

Background: the Managed Metadata Service and TaxonomyHiddenList SharePoint 2010 introduced the Managed Metadata Service as a way to define a centralised, hierarchical taxonomy of terms that could be reused across site collections. Instead of every site re-creating its own dropdown choices, an information-architecture team could maintain a global term store and let lists and document libraries reference it through a Managed Metadata column. It was a real step up for enterprise content management, especially for organisations standardising on terms across regions, departments, or product lines. ...

By way of exception, this post is not it-related. Since I have struggled to find some information on the web, I think this still could be interesting for some folks out there. A couple of days ago my wife noticed that our refrigerator is quite warm inside and it does not get to the specified temperature anymore. As you can see on the following photo is was quite hot inside: ...

If you are interested in cloud technologies, this is a great place to learn more about all Microsoft Cloud Technologies. You will find information on topics such as Hyper-V, SQL Azure, Windows Azure, virtualization and much more. I think it is a great source of information and learning experience.

For all you Java developers out there, have a look at this link in order to learn more about C# and the .NET framework.

Last week I learned a very interesting lesson. I am just in the end phase of a custom software delivery project. Using OLIVANOVA’s model driven software development approach, I created a three-tier application with an ASP.NET client, a COM+ based server tier and MS SQL Server as the persistence layer. The COM+ application is deployed to a dedicated server along with the SQL Server database management system. The ASP.NET application is created on another server that lives in a DMZ (demilitarized zone). This web server does not have access to the Internet from inside, but is accessible from outside of this company. A connection (HTTP) from the web-server to the database server is then responsible for communication between the user-interface and the server tier. ...

A couple of days ago I did some performance tests between Oracle 10g (Express) and Oracle TimesTen. As with any commercial products, there is some licensing and costs involved. Obviously, our idea was then to look for a more cost efficient solution in order to get the same results. We specifically looked at H2, a Java SQL Database. This DBMS can operate in several different modes such as embedded, server and in-memory and has compatibility modes for certain commcercial database products like DB2, MySql, MS SQL Server, Oracle and some others. So, looking at the feature list, this seemed to be a good fit. ...