Why this release mattered The spring 2012 release was a turning point for Windows Azure. Up until this point Azure was largely a PaaS-only platform built around Cloud Services (web roles and worker roles), which made sense for greenfield .NET applications but was a tough sell for anyone wanting to lift-and-shift existing workloads or run anything that didn’t fit the role model — Linux servers, off-the-shelf software, custom networking topologies. ...

Today, I noticed that the CD-changer of our BMW 5-series E61 hangs and it did not release the CD magazine. What made it worth is that it tried to release it every couple of minutes which started to hurt the car’s battery. I bing’d and luckily found this post (in German) that describes how to fix it yourself. Basically you have to follow these steps in order to solve this problem: ...

Skype for Windows Phone is now officially available in Marketplace. Download it now here. It supports free voice and video calls to other Skype users (or cheaper calls to landlines and other cell phones with Skype Credit) along with other cool features like portrait mode video calling, support for joining audio conference calls, call-in-progress notifications and block and unblock contacts. See more information at Big Blog or at Skype Garage. ...

If you always wanted to learn how to script using PowerShell, this tool makes it even easier to learn and explore all the cool features. Very nice new experience of guidance and content. Check it out at https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=29101

Finally, the long awaited Skype app for Windows Phone is here. This information has been announced today during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Please find a blog post here (original URL https://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/archive/2012/02/27/windows-phone-at-mobile-world-congress-2012.aspx). Just in case the Zune link does not work, please try it via marketplace (original URL https://www.windowsphone.com/en-GB/apps/c3f8e570-68b3-4d6a-bdbb-c0a3f4360a51) … this worked for me!

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. ...