If you’ve recently attended one of our Windows 8 Events or Windows 8 Camps (London, Edinburgh, Manchester, London again, Birmingham etc etc) then you may have asked us about how you can get hold of the materials. You’ll be pleased to hear that the official materials including Hands on Labs, presentations...

Hot off the press from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the news that Windows Phone will be rolling out across another 23 markets and the engineering team have done the work to optimise Windows Phone OS to run on lower-cost hardware. This means devices based on the SoC (System on a Chip) architecture...

We have another couple of free Windows Phone events coming up – one in London and one in Bristol. London is on Saturday 4th Feb (I’ll be there) Bristol is on Saturday 11th Feb (my fellow evangelist Andrew Spooner will be there) For full details see the UK MSDN blog (don’t ask me about that URL – that...

In my post last week I talked about the Advertising SDK and using the AdControl in our applications as a means of generating revenue. I should have mentioned something that could catch you out – the AdControl requires certain capabilities to be defined in your app manifest. Specifically: For Silverlight...

If only I had a pound for every time I’ve been asked when Microsoft’s in-app advertising would be available in the UK. The Microsoft Advertising SDK was only available in the US for the initial Windows Phone launch. With the release of Mango however, 11 additional countries were added including the UK...

Just a quick plug for our upcoming online conference (Wednesday 5th October) which is themed “Design from a User Perspective”. More details on the UK MSDN blog here .

The Windows Phone “Mango” Jump Start Training with Rob Miles and Andy Wigley that took place on 23/24th August is now available to view on demand on Channel 9 . This is  a great way to learn about Windows Phone development and upcoming enhancements in the Mango release. There are a total of 14 session...

Building on the success of the original Windows Phone 7 Jump Start training , the dynamic duo* will be in action again to deliver free Mango Jump Start training live on 23rd and 24th August �� 2 full days of it! Day One — August 23, 2011 | 8am-4pm PDT | Live online training ( 4pm – midnight in UK ) Building...

Oops – somehow this one slipped through the net. Brandon talks about Marketplace, recent and future improvements and how to maximise your opportunity by building apps customers really want. View this video as a WMV Direct link to the video on the Tech.Days website.

Brennon Williams takes a look at user-centred design, Expression Blend, inspiration, SketchFlow and rapid prototyping, and design templates for Windows Phone whilst at the same time attempting a world-record for the number of libellous statements referring to Will Coleman in a single presentation. Good...

In this session, Andy Wigley takes a look at the new local database features in Windows Phone Mango. Specifically SQL Server CE, how to deploy databases, how to access them and even how to update the database schema. Andy also explores the new APIs for accessing user data on the device (eg contacts)...

Jaime Rodriguez explores some of the new features in Mango by taking an existing application and updating it with local storage, background transfers, reminders, Live Tiles local API etc etc View this video as a WMV Direct link to the video on the Tech.Days website.

Oren takes us on a tour of some of the upcoming Silverlight features in the Mango release of Windows Phone; inherited features from Silverlight 4, performance, controls, networking, media and graphics etc View this video as a WMV

Brandon Watson takes us on a tour of the upcoming release of Windows Phone “Mango” with a strong focus on developer features including multi-tasking, framework enhancements, XNA & Silverlight integration, access to phone capabilities, performance, database access, push notifications, Marketplace...

In this session Ian Blackburn talks about Love Clean Streets and its use of platform features and Windows Azure services to create a more rewarding and engaging experience for users. View this video as a WMV Direct link to the video on the Tech.Days website.

The VerySoftware team share their experiences in building successful applications for Windows Phone 7. Using a Tech.Days sample application the guys take us through their learnings and offer some tips and tricks as well as stressing the importance of embedding design at the heart of your applications...

Rich Griffin and Ollie Riches explore the use of data in a real-world application and how libraries such as wp7contrib can do some of the heavy-lifting for you. View this video as a WMV Direct link to the video on the Tech.Days website.

In this session, Andy Wigley looks at accessing, storing and manipulating data in mobile applications. From local storage to accessing data in the cloud, persistence formats, databases and data presentation, Andy manages to cram a lot of practical information into an hour. View...

In this session, Oren Nachman walks through some common performance pitfalls on Windows Phone (and mobile platforms in general) and offers guidance and advice on how to avoid them and how to get to the root of the problem if you do run into problems. View this video as a WMV...

In this session, Gergely Orosz talks about Cocktail Flow and some of the lessons they learned in building it including the importance of “creating experiences” rather than “building applications” and knowing when to diverge from the guidance. View this video as a WMV ...

It seems like an age since “Tech.Days Live” when we had two full days of Windows Phone sessions. All the sessions were recorded and they’re published on the Tech.Days website. To make things really easy I’m going to post the ones relating to developing for Windows Phone on my blog starting with Brandon...

I’m sure most of you reading this will already know we released Beta 2 of the developer tools for Windows Phone Mango last week. In addition, if you’re a registered AppHub developer, you’ll be able to update a developer-unlocked Windows Phone 7 (retail) device to the matching Beta 2 build of the Mango...

Some time ago, at a Windows Phone User Group meeting in Cardiff, I saw Trevor Daniel talk about his application TaxiRoute . It’s an interesting concept – and one we can all relate to – how much is a taxi going to cost me from A to B? (Or how much should this taxi I’ve just flagged down cost me to make...

I posted the Day 1 agenda as there was some new information that hasn’t yet been published on the UK Tech.Days website . However for Day 2, things are looking pretty good. We may try and sneak in another Mango session if we can but I can’t confirm that yet. As of today, this is how things stand.

When you’re organising an event, things change rapidly. Sometimes it’s just not possible to keep the Tech.Days website 100% in sync so I’ve pasted below a summary of the “Windows Phone – State of the Nation” day (Tuesday 24th May) with all the latest info. Note the addition of VerySoftware in the afternoon...