Noodling on having a Windows Phone 7 to Windows 8 lab in Minneapolis.  A full day of tech briefings, examples, and discussion. The goal would be to get you up to speed on what it would take to move your WP7 app to Windows 8.  It would be a free event.  Thoughts?  Would you come?  Email me at WP7toWin8@live.com if you would attend this kind of event and what would you like to see and accomplish.

I will be delivering a hands-on lab on Windows Phone development at the Mobile March Twin Cities conference in a couple weeks.  Check out this great conference, and join me for the hands-on lab.  I’ll have a sweet Nokia Lumia 800 to give away, and if things fall into place, I may have a special prize for the first group of people to show up to the lab.  You can get all of the tools you need for the lab at http://aka.ms/MobileMarch

In addition, I’ll be going head-to-head against Rory Lonergan in an iOS vs. WP7 challenge on the second day of the event.  Should be a lot of fun.

Finally go around to posting the code samples.  You can find the links to the presentations here.

Mango

Silverlight 5

The slide decks for my MDC11 presentations can now be downloaded from the slideshare.net site or from the links below…

What’s New in Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango)

What’s New in Silverlight 5

I was able to put the new Windows Phone 7.1 “Mango” tools through their paces and finally got an app I had wanted to write for a while into the marketplace.  Taxi Meter is an app that let’s you “play taxi” and charge based on things like time, distance, etc.  It wasn’t a complicated app to write, but I had been putting it off for a while because it made heavy use of the GPS and working with the GPS in the “old” tools was a pain.

The new Mango tools, with the Location emulator, made it a snap!  Impressive and very easy to use.  I haven’t had a chance to play with the Accelerometer emulator yet, but it appears to be just as easy based on the demos I have seen.  WP7 has the best dev tools on the planet!

Do you have an MVVM-based Windows Phone 7 application and you don't like having to hook into the RootFrame to navigate between pages? Do you wish you could just "ask" to navigate to a new view from your view model? One possible solution can be found in my new Channel 9 screencast.

Using an message bus to process navigation messages, view models can publish messages that are then handled by a separate navigation service, successfully decoupling your view model from the Windows Phone navigation service.

Get the finished source code here

Here are links to the slides and demo code to the Multiscreen Development with Microsoft technologies webcast I did today. Look for some Channl9 videos starting soon that will go through the different parts in more detail.

Presentation – Demo Code

Here is the slide deck from my presentation today at the TCSLUG.  Plenty of examples on working with this stuff in the WP7 Training Kit, so no source code.

At HDC 10, I had the opportunity to eat at THE DROVER in Omaha, NE.  If you are not familiar with THE DROVER (capital spelling due to required emphasis on the name of the restaurant), it is simply the WORLD’s BEST steakhouse on the face of the planet.  I used to live in Omaha and discovered THE DROVER almost twenty years ago.  There is simply no comparison or description worthy of THE DROVER.  It is one of a kind. 

I had the good fortune of eating at THE DROVER two nights in a row when I was in town for HDC.  It was perhaps the two most fulfilling nights of my life.  I feel a warmth in my belly at the mere thought of THE DROVER, yet I also feel a certain sadness.  Why?  Because I am now far away from THE DROVER.  But how far away am I?  How many miles of unforgiving, whiskey fillet empty sadness and despair stand between me and THE DROVER? 

Fortunately, Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight can easily provide me the answer.  I present to you, the FIND THE DROVER application.  This app brings me solace during the day just knowing that THE DROVER still exists.  That while I may be many miles away, there is still a whiskey fillet being ever so lovingly grilled to perfection on iron grates.  That some day, I will once again travel the barren wastelands between THE DROVER and I, and once again enjoy the “heaven on earth” that is THE DROVER.

Make sure to look for FIND THE DROVER in the Windows Phone Marketplace in the near future.