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.

See a nice video walk-through below:

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=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpI8252TieM&feature=player_embedded]!

Today I uploaded my first Windows Phone 7 Mango app to Microsoft’s App Hub. It is all about the service provided by OnlineTvRecorder.com. It talks to their API to view TV programs/schedules, shows your own recordings as well as future highlights and top-recordings. An integrated search lets you search the OTR catalog using keywords.

I just got confirmation that it is officially certified and published to private beta test.

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.

A couple of days ago, I bought some new Windows Phone 7 (WP7) devices for my wife and myself. I really love the new look & feel and the live tiles and hubs.One of the things I kind of struggled was the ability to sync calendars on both of the devices. After entering your Windows Live ID, you already get your contacts, email and calendar. However, only the primary calendar is synced to the device. I usually have several calendars in order to organize things. The screenshot on the right shows some of my calendars, whereas “My calendar” is set-up to be the primary.

If you care about privacy when sharing status updates then have a look at this Windows Phone 7 app named tickWell.

tickWell is a social networking platform with a focus on privacy which enables you to record and share selected moments of your life.