News

We just published a new article by Silverlight MVP Andrea Boschin. Take a look at it here:

Consume JSON with Windows Phone: a seamless solution

From the author:

One of the growing needs of these days, is the requirements of exposing services that are available to multiple platforms. This request come obviously from the increasing availability of a number of mobile platforms that is forcing companies to adopt strategies to decrease the complexity and use technologies that are able to respect the verb "write once and use everywhere".

Andrea is also the author of the following SilverlightShow Ebooks:

• Windows Phone 7 Data Access Strategies: Ebook
• Introduction to Windows Phone 7: Ebook
• Windows Phone 7.5 Fundamentals: Ebook

Andrea has authored more than 40 SilverlightShow articles. Check them out here!

Find about new articles and ebooks published by SilverlightShow via 

A few days ago we emailed the March issue of our Webinar Newsletter to all SilverlightShow members. And now it's also available online - check it out!

• Recording of the Recent Webinar: 'Windows Phone 7.5 Background Workers' by Gill Cleeren
• This Week's Webinar: 'Windows Phone Raw Camera Access' by Peter Kuhn
• On April 4th: Join the Webinar '10 Best Practices for Windows Phone Developers' by Samidip Basu

If you like to get delivered our monthly and webinar newsletters straight to your inbox, please register at SilverlightShow and make sure to enable the newsletter option in your member profile.

Missed an earlier newsletter? Check all of them out!

Read original post at Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

Microsoft will have expected some users to find the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 8 challenging, but I doubt it was ready for the reaction from its own community that it is receiving for Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The best place to start is the comments on Building Windows blog here and here – at the time of writing, around 1300 comments, most from users who have downloaded and tried the Consumer Preview. It is worth browsing through them if this is something you care about; some are knee-jerk negative reactions, but some others are thoughtful and wanting Microsoft to succeed.

Don't miss the next meeting of the Windows Phone User Group in London!

When: Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 from 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM (GMT)

Where: The Vibe Bar (91 Brick Lane, E1 6QL), London, United Kingdom

Topic: A touch of mono

Register for this FREE event here!

Event Details:

Continuing with our theme from last month, we'll be continuing to look beyond Windows Phone and the lessons we can learn from other platforms and the lessons, knowledge and experiences we can take with us if we take Windows Phone apps to other platforms too.

Some WPUG regulars will be sharing their experiences:
Stuart will be talking about his experiences with creating an MVVM solution that also works with MonoTouch & MonoDroid

Paul will be talking about his experiences of porting applications between iPhone and Windows Phone and vice versa.

Dominique and Dean will be talking about MonoGame and bringing the joys of XNA to other platforms too.

As ever, we're also providing the opportunity for people to demonstrate the apps they've made and share some of their experiences and lessons learnt. We have a couple lined up, but if you have an app you want to show or an experience you want to share then please get in touch.

Read original post by Rob Mauceri at Building Windows 8 Blog

In this post we want to talk about the new Internet Explorer 10 browsing experience. We have considerably improved the underlying browsing engine with performance, standards, and features as we have previously blogged about. IE10 designed for a Metro style experience is a new and improved way of browsing, where you can truly focus on the information you want to browse rather than the task of browsing – a fully immersive experience. At the same time it provides all of the safety and controls you are used to – tabs, keyboard shortcuts, InPrivate browsing, and more.

Read original post at Mauro Servienti's Blog

I’m building a sample application for a friend in order to see if it is possible to have a completely OOB and offline Silverlight application running on a Mac using a document database (RavenDB in this case, a special version) as backend.

On the other side I’m using the same spike to start the Radical Presentation Silverlight 5 implementation, if you recall the first time we spoke about it we state that the main pillar should be simplicity.

Read original post at Diederik Krols's Blog

[...] Yesterday, Tim Heuer revealed how to build a deployable custom control for XAML Metro style apps with the Consumer Preview of Windows 8. I discovered that the current beta of Visual Studio 11 comes with a template for a Templated Control. I happily noticed the return of the themes/generic.xaml file that we know from all the other XAML platforms. So I decided to have another go on the radial gauge custom control.

Read original post by Mohammad Najeeb Aljaber at Bunjeeb's Blog

Ok, Lets talk about some geeky stuff here. Watch the video to see the output; And If you like it; Continue reading and download the sample from link below.

Read original post by Kurt Mackie at Redmond Magazine

Microsoft late last week released two community technology previews (CTPs) of System Center 2012 solutions specifically designed for use with the new Windows Server 8 beta.

The CTPs of Virtual Machine Manager and Data Protection Manager, which are part of the System Center 2012 suite, can be downloaded here. Testing the CTPs requires that a computing environment also have SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (64-bit editions), .NET 3.5 and Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisor installed.