Ben Riga's Deep Shift

I had a great time last night at the Windows Phone Meetup in Silicon Valley.  Many thanks to all that attended and thanks to the Nokia folks for hosting the event.  There were a ton of great questions and comments.  I hope you all go out...

I spent the last 2 weeks traveling through various countries through Europe talking to developers of all kinds.  The whirlwind tour through 7 countries in 14 days gave me an opportunity to hear many ideas and concerns and to learn about what developers...

View or download the video on Channel 9 (includes higher quality video) Bad stuff happens!  There is no way around that.  It’s a fact; your apps, out there in the wild on consumers devices, will crash.  This in itself is ok but only if...

Misaligned elements is probably one of the most common issues I see with apps in the marketplace.  In this episode of Top Ranked, I delve into why this is an issue and how easy it is to check for that and fix it.  Alignment is a part of the...

The About page is usually one of the last things you think about when building an app. It’s just not core to the whatever it is you’re trying to build. And yet, you’ll soon find that it’s pretty much a necessity for most apps....

In this episode, I focus on another small tweak that developers can add to their apps that will help make those apps look a lot more like native apps.  I’m referring to the addition of the Tilt Effect to controls.  By default, when you add controls...

In this episode we talk about pricing and more generically about market testing. I know, I know, marketing is probably not every coders favorite subject. I bring it up as I’ve noticed many apps in the marketplace that are underpriced. Apps that...

In this episode of Top Ranked I explore Trial mode. Trial mode is one of the most important features available to you as a developer if you’re building a paid app. By implementing Trial mode in your app you give consumers the opportunity to take...

Note: This video is the first in the series so I spend some time at the beginning introducing myself and the goals for the series.  To get directly to the content in this episode skip to about the 4:00 mark.  When we launched the Windows Phone...

With this post I’m introducing a new series of videos I’m producing which called Top Ranked.  In this series I’ll present various topics that will be of interest to developers building on the Windows Phone platform.  My aim is to provide short...

I had a great time presenting to the Bay.NET user group last week.  With so much to talk about I ran out of time so I’m posting my slides for those that wanted to go a little further.  Click on the folder below to view them.  Let me know...

I’m working on a Windows Phone 7 app and ran into an issue that I just couldn’t figure out.  I was trapping the LostFocus event on a TextBox and finding that by handling the LostFocus event I was losing the case where the user hit the Back Key since...

Vertigo Software just released their PDC10 Windows Phone 7 app.  That’s going to make it a lot easier to follow along this year.  If you have a WP7 device go download it now . This year we’ll be broadcasting pretty much every minute of the PDC...

As part of our efforts to help developers get started with building their applications and games on the Windows Phone 7 platform we’re planning a couple of events in Redmond (May 18-19) and Silicon Valley (May 25-26).  If you’re interested, be sure...

In this episode of “Azure Lessons Learned” Rob Fraser from RiskMetrics talks about the work they’ve done with Windows Azure to scale some of their heavy computational workloads out to thousands of nodes on Windows Azure. RiskMetrics specializes in helping...

I’m building a Windows Media Center for a home theater setup I’m planning and in the process was installing a new hard drive into the PC.  Before I dropped it into the new machine I was showing it to my son and pulled out an old drive I had for comparison...

In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Rex Hansen of ESRI .  Rex works on MapIt ; a product for visualizing enterprise data on maps.  This was recently released as a on-premises product that enables developers to work with the tabular...

Telerik is one of the more popular component vendors building good stuff for ASP.NET, Silverlight, and WPF.  I was intrigued by the interest they have taken in the Windows Azure Platform.  Naturally all the UI components just work on the platform...

In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Dmitry Sotnikov, new product research manager with Quest Software.  Quest, as you probably know, is a huge global ISV focused primarily on Systems Management software. Quest is an early adopter...

I’ve been thinking a lot about Windows Mobile lately (more on that, a lot more, later).  As I looked at the device I’ve been carrying for the past year or so ( Samsung Blackjack II ) I’ve found a few things annoying so I recently set about fixing...

In this episode of Lessons Learned we talk with Jones Pavan and Gurleen Randhawa of CCH about tax and accounting!  No wait stick around, that stuff can be exciting too.  Yes, really!  :) The good folks at CCH (a Wolters Kluwer company)...

There are not many solutions that can claim to have saved lives.  In this episode of Lessons Learned I chat with Richard Prodger of Active Web Solutions about the Windows Azure project they’ve been working on that tracks fishermen in real time . ...

One question that is often asked is how hosters can benefit from the Windows Azure Platform.  While the platform can be used to deploy many types of web apps we expect many partners including hosters to develop on top of the Windows Azure platform...

In this episode of Windows Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Paul Forney, System Architect for Invensys and Aleksey Savateyev , Senior Architect in Microsoft’s Global ISV group working with Invensys.  Invensys is well known for industrial automation...

Database tooling is important for many developers and DBAs as they manage numerous databases across the enterprise and the cloud.  In this episode of Azure Lessons Learned I chat with Scott Walz, Sr. Director Product Management at Embarcadero Technologies...