Keyboards are a very personal thing. For those of us whose job requires their use basically all day, every day, they are the piece of hardware that we have to be comfortable with. A good keyboard will stay with you for years, decades in fact, but PCs...

I recently added Flurry Analytics support to my application and in the few weeks it has been available I have learnt huge amounts about my users, their habits, and found and fixed several bugs that no-one has even reported. [This post is my personal...

With UPnP discovery worked out, the next feature is to turn the discovery results into a Device, find a Service on that device, and to make calls on that service, ie Invoke some Actions. I'll start with the code from my test app, to give you an idea of...

Publishing a beta version of a WP7 app is both exciting (“does it work on someone else’s phone?”) and frustrating (“when is it going to actually show up?”). Having submitted maybe five beta versions over the holidays I wanted...

I recently had a desperate need to upgrade the audio system in my car, and wanted a good Mango-compatible system. I learnt a lot about Bluetooth and what to look for to get a great in-car experience, which I am sharing here. Please note these are my personal...

Finding your IP address I have already covered, now for the next useful thing: your SSID name. Although MSDN documentation seems a little sparse in this area, this function works well for me so far. Note that simply enumerating until you get a wireless...

[Update: SSDP is WORKING now: all code updated] I have been on a mission for maybe six months now to get something resembling a UPnP stack working on Windows Phone Mango. This post covers Discovery. First off some basics: read the UPnP spec (download...

For reasons never adequately explained there is still no API to obtain the IP address of the phone from a WP app. However if you want the IP address on the local wifi network, help is at hand, via this sample code. The way this works is that the phone...

I have already covered using WCF from Windows Phone 7 with my quick walk-through , but now, some months later, I have now shipped an application that uses it, and learned a few things on the way that help get a connection to the local WCF host reliably...

The LongListSelector control is an awesome thing, but using it without LINQ I found a tricky business. Here is what I learned. [Updated 11/20 to grossly simplify the code] I am pretty new to Silverlight and to DataBinding, and I was happy when I...

[Minor code update Jan 15 2010] It may come as a surprise to some, but applications sometimes crash. Even mine! On WP7 when an app has an unhandled exception it is killed by the operating system and you, the developer, will be none the wiser. However...

Two years ago Disney predicted that Blu-ray sales would overtake DVD in two years . Like pretty much every prediction about Blu-ray this has failed to occur. In fact the studios have actually reduced the number of BDs they are producing: this year there...

Windows Phone 7 and WCF: a great combination, but can be tricky to get going. Here is how I did it. Internally at Microsoft there has been quite a bit of interest with developers wanting to produce WCF (Windows Communication Framework) applications...

With the release of the RTM version of the Windows Phone 7 developer tools, some folks are running into the video card requirements that block them from running XNA applications in the emulator. I hit this problem on my home machine too, and the solution...

Data breakpoints are both incredibly useful when you need them and yet can cause extreme pain under some circumstances. For the latter reason they are always disabled on restart, and here is why. First of what is a data breakpoint? Since at least VS2005...

If you set a [native] breakpoint by address, then restart your debugger session the breakpoint will be disabled, unlike most other breakpoint types. This was a deliberate change (in VS2003 or VS2005, I forget which), and here is why. Address breakpoints...

Both my wife and I are happy KIN users so I thought I would share some information that might be useful to others about the KIN phones. Note that I am not attempting to replicate or duplicate the official support pages, but instead share additional information...

[Updated June 1st to correct ATM information and to add PayPal option] Recently I had the need to buy and use a UK PAYG SIM card for my phone, so I could make calls and access the web in the UK without the gigantic costs involved with my US SIM card...

Since the demise of HD DVD (RIP) I have been working on the secret “Pink project” at Microsoft, which yesterday had its coming-out party under the name of KIN . Microsoft is usually not good at keeping secrets, so it has been a unusual two years of development...

As a happy TiVo customer since 1999 I and a reasonably happy DirecTV customer since 2000 I've been anxiously awaiting the new DirecTV TiVo . However its been a while since I've heard anything about it, and now I'm pissed. My existing DirecTV HD TiVo can...

Gratuitous post time: my wife has been doing a great job dealing with various food sensitivity issues in our family for a while now, and she has her own blog that includes recipes and tips that should be of interest to anyone else in a similar position...

In a matter of days it will be the 40th anniversay of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, a seminal moment for humanity, at least as far as I am concerned. Less than a hundred years since man figured out he could fly, three men travelled to another celestial...

In frankly amazing news even to me, a new Harris Poll shows that over a year and a half since the format war ended there are more Americans with HD DVD players than with Blu-ray players , and in fact 2009 was a pretty good year for HD DVD players, in...

The SP1 release of VS08 regressed some functionality compared to the original release, in a couple of critical areas. As a result it is highly likely you'll need the following two patches for it. I know many of our team who hit these issues, cursed, came...

According to British law the copyright on my first book expired last year, after twenty-five years. Not only does this make me feel ancient, but it compels me to recall the heady days of 1983, when I created my tome " Master Your ZX Microdrive ". I...