Wow, hard to believe it’s been over a year since I last wrote something on this blog, most of my time has been micro-blogging on the twitters. But never fear, with Windows 8 being released, Visual Studio 2012 and Windows Phone 8 on the horizon there’s lots of content coming!
In other news, I’ve gone Mac but I’m still a PC user at heart (though Mac’s are still PCs!). So you’ll see some Mac posts from me too.
Till then, I leave you with a picture of our little guy Neo who claims not to have any idea of how the bag of Oat Bran ended up on the floor next to his couch.
(His ears go like that when he knows he’s done something naughty)
File Name: mu_visual_studio_2010_sp1_x86_x64_dvd_651704.iso [MSDN Download Link] Size: 1.56Gb SHA1: 61C2088850185EDE8E18001D1EF3E6D12DAA5692 ISO/CRC: C77C2A14 Date Published (UTC): 3/8/2011 9:13:36 AM Last Updated (UTC): 3/8/2011 10:20:52 AM
Support for Silverlight 4 and Razor, SQL CE4, IIS Express and 64bit IntelliTrace are amongst the finer things in SP1. For C++ folks, the support for Intel AVX and AMD Bulldozer instruction sets are going to be interesting
The Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update includes:
Windows Phone Emulator Update – Exposes copy/paste functionality in the Windows Phone 7 emulator. For more information, see How to: Test Copy and Paste in Windows Phone Emulator. End users can use the copy and paste functionality only after receiving the corresponding update to the Windows Phone 7 operating system.
Windows Phone Developer Resources Update – Fixes a text selection bug in pivot and panorama controls. In applications that have pivot or panorama controls that contain text boxes, users can unintentionally change panes when trying to copy text. To prevent this problem, open your application, recompile it, and then resubmit it to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Windows Phone Capability Detection Tool – Detects the phone capabilities used by your application. When you submit your application to Windows Phone Marketplace , Microsoft performs a code analysis to detect the phone capabilities required by your application and then replaces the list of capabilities in the application manifest with the result of this detection process. This tool performs the same detection process and allows you to test your application using the same list of phone capabilities generated during the certification process. For more information, see How to: Use the Capability Detection Tool.
Windows Phone Connect Tool – Allows you to connect your phone to a PC when Zune® software is not running and debug applications that use media APIs. For more information, see How to: Use the Connect Tool.
Updated Bing Maps Silverlight Control – Includes improvements to gesture performance when using Bing™ Maps Silverlight® Control.
WPDT Fix includes:
Windows Phone Developer Tools Fix allowing deployment of XAP files over 64 MB in size to physical phone devices for testing and debugging.
Here’s a quick tip if you want to browse the files in your GAC easily without messing about with commands all the time. Map the folder containing the assemblies with the Subst command.
To do that, bring up a console window (Windows Key + R or Start > Run), then:
subst G: C:\windows\Assembly
This will map the Global Assembly Cache folder to your G drive in Windows Explorer. You can also peek around and see how the GAC works.
The folders you’ll find in the mapped drive include – on a 64bit system *:
GAC – Non-native assemblies used by .NET 1.x
GAC_32 – Non-native 32bit assemblies
*GAC_64 – Non-native 64bit assemblies visible only on 64bit Windows.
GAC_MSIL – Non-native MSIL (AnyCPU) assemblies.
NativeImages_v* – Native assemblies for the framework version and the architecture (Eg. NativeImages_v4.0.30319_64 is for the .NET 4.0 64bit native Assemblies)
temp / tmp – Temporary directories (duh!)
To remove the binding, use the Subst command with the -D option.
I’ve been busy hacking away the past month or so with Windows Phone 7 and Android. They’re both very different when it comes to the out of box developer experience – with Microsoft tools being supremo right now. Thought I’d contribute some resources when it comes to (on this post) writing Windows Phone 7 Applications. I’ll try and keep this up to date with new things I find.
NEW (16/11/2010):Runtime Intelligence for Windows Phone – “A commercial-grade SKU of Dotfuscator specifically targeting Windows Phone 7 including patented renaming, control flow, string encryption, and metadata removal obfuscation transforms.” (source: Windows Team Blog)
As mentioned earlier, the ASP.NET Session Security flaw has been keeping all .NET developers and Microsoft on the ball about possible exploits with their applications. Microsoft have updated their security advisory CVE-2010-333 with more information about the severity of the flaw – its taking Exchange and Sharepoint down with it too.
This is my personal blog, the opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts and not of my past or current employers, my mother, father, sister, non-existant brother, our dog neo, puppies I've trained, neighbors or countrymen and women. If anything, they serve as a memory of my ideas, thinking and musings at a point in time.
I may inadvertently link to or quote content that is useless, rude, pointless, idiotic, inappropriate, wtf or hilariously-not-funny. I do not condone, endorse or take responsibilty for such content.
All content is Copyright (c) Thushan Fernando unless otherwise stated.
Disclaimer is tiny just to make it look fancy spansy.
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