Well, this offer couldn’t be any simpler! All you need to do is submit 2 or more Apps to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and then receive a rebate for $99.00

Register for Windows Phone Developer Program and you will be notified when Rebates become Available!

One more reason for Developers to jump on the Windows Phone 7 App development bandwagon aka App Gold Rush!

Here are some of the really cool Windows Phone 7 Models that were announced today! I totally dig the HTC HD7.

And using Bing Visual Search, you can explore the spec’s for all these phones in a visually appealing and smart way!

Explore the new Windows Phone 7 devices

Get started now…

-Mithun Dhar

We had a super successful Windows Phone 7 Unleashed event in Portland, OR last week. Erik Mork (Silverlight MVP), Kelly White and Stuart Celarier (Microsoft RD) presented at this event. We had a total of 10 applications built and judged at this event.

Both Erik and Kelly have a fantastic write up of how the event went through. Skim through to see the app details and learn about the winning entries…

Kelly White’s Trip Report: http://kelly.whitepdx.com/post/35

Erik Mork’s (MVP) Trip Report: http://www.sparklingclient.com/windows-phone-unleashed-portland-recap

Here's a Video about our future events:

Windows Phone Unleashed Trailer from Erik Mork on Vimeo.

It will be happening again in Seattle, Bellevue, and Boise.

• Bellevue - October 7th, 2010
• Seattle (downtown) - October 14th 2010
• Boise - October 25th, 2010

We look forward to seeing you there!

-Mithun Dhar

The Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2010 is in Vancouver BC this coming weekend on the 2nd and 3rd of October. I hope you are already Registered for this event as it is now Sold Out!

I will be at this event along with a few other colleagues from Vancouver, BC and Redmond. We will primarily be talking about WebMatrix

Here’s the session abstract:

Developing and maintaining Drupal sites on Windows has never been easy. From confounding permissions issues with IIS when you first set up Drupal to deployment on a shared or hosted environment. It's always been challenging.

Microsoft has been working hard to make Drupal easier and better on Windows. Both to develop Drupal sites on as well as simplifying the deployment of your Drupal sites on Windows in a hosted environment. In this session we won't tell you what the WebMatrix is, we'll show you. You will see how fast you can download and launch a new Drupal site using the Acquia distribution from the Windows Web Application Gallery. But you can use any Drupal distro so we'll show you how easy to do that too. We'll show you the database manager in WebMatrix for your MySQL data and we'll wrap up showing you how easy it is to deploy your Drupal site to hosted Windows.

If there is time left we'll show you the other things Microsoft has available for the Drupal Community at www.microsoft.com/web/drupal. Hope to see you there.

This session will be delivered by Mark Brown (Sr. Product Manager)

If you have questions about WebMatrix or running Drupal on Windows, come join us and we’ll be happy to speak to you about it! This session is on Sunday, October 3rd 2010.

Learn more about WebMatrix Here:

See you at the event! (My twitter handle: @mithund)

Thanks,

-Mithun Dhar

If you are a .NET Developer and would like to make some moolah and have some fun building apps for the Windows Phone 7 platform, read on!

Microsoft is partnering with some of the key Influencers from the community to bring to you the Windows Phone 7 Unleashed events. These events are designed to help you get started on the development for the Windows Phone 7 platform.

So if you have had these ideas for a great Windows Phone 7 application but didn't know where to go to get some help to get started, this is your chance.

These events unlike our other events are designed to help you write applications for the Phone. We have two broad formats within these events.
First part of this event is a Lecture – Show and tell. Similar to our other MSDN Events, we will have rock star speakers deliver the technology via slides, samples and lots of information. In the second part of this event, we're going to help you put the stuff you learnt into use – Practical, Hands on Experience. We have designed Hands on Labs for these events and we'll help you go through them. We have some super solid instructors and proctors to help you write your WP7 applications.

As a bonus, we will also spend some time to help you author some applications and bring your ideas to life. You can form a group with other folks at this event and start building your application.
At the end of the day, we will have judges who will judge this application with others. The first prize is $500 USD and the second and third prizes are $200 and $100 respectively. But the main goal is to help you form a team, get you started on your application and get it into the market place so you can rake in some moolah :)

Registration:
To attend these events you need to first Register:

NOTE: Each attendee is required to bring his/her own laptop with the free software required for the labs. System requirements and installation instructions can be found here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402530(v=VS.92).aspx

The tools required for you to participate in the labs can be downloaded at: http://developer.windowsphone.com

Agenda:
Session 1 – Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Programing.

In this session, we start with a discussion of windows phone, the architecture changes made from 6.5 to 7.0, the hardware specifications and then move into the beginnings of building a WP7 application including :

1)      Sensor overview

2)      Application life cycle

3)      Splash screen and the importance of 1 second / 19 second loading

4)      Files associated with project template

5)      Application Bar

6)      Live Tile

7)      Application Icon

The session will end with a brief discussion of the Windows phone 7 Marketplace before the entering into the HOL.

HOL – The screens that will be built during this session are:

·         Project Set-up

·         Live Tile

·         Splashscreen

·         Home Screen with Application Bar
 
Session 2 – Connecting to Services

In this session, we will discuss how Cloud Services help to bring power to the phone.  We will be binding to a rest based services and show how to search and display the information received.  In this session we will also talk about Navigation, passing information between screens, simple page animations while working with List and detail information.

HOL – The screens that will be built during this session are:

·         Search Screen

·         Display Screen

·         Detail Screen

·         Additional Application Bars
 
Session 3 – Recording Data

In this session we will be working with the Camera to capture and crop photos, record audio files, take notes, saving location, sharing (sending emails and SMS messages – and if time permits sending to twitter or FB) and saving everything using isolated storage.  We will discuss tombstoning and how it effects your application process, including the when, where and whys of saving state).

HOL – The screens that will be built during this session are:

·         Add New Wine

·         Record Audio

·         Picture Capture and Crop

·         My Wines

As always, if you have questions or concerns – tweet me (@mithund) or email me (mithund at microsoft .com)

Come join us and have some fun building really, really cool Windows Phone 7 apps.

-Mithun Dhar

SharePoint 2010 coupled with Office 2010 is the ultimate collaboration platform. In SharePoint 2010 there is native support for developers to skin and theme websites. SharePoint Server 2010 allows customers to create customized, branding sites that fit their business needs. From ribbons to theme files to Silverlight 4 dynamic theming engine to master pages, Paul explains what they are and how these new capabilities can be applied to create high-quality SharePoint 2010 based branding sites.

Watch this video and head over to the SharePoint 2010 Developer training site to get started on honing your SharePoint development skills: http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/SharePoint2010Developer/

-Mithun Dhar

If you are in and around Boise, ID I strongly recommend you to register for the Future Idaho Tech 2010 Conference. I am the keynote speaker for this event. I’ll be speaking about the new paradigm in the computing world, covering information about Cloud Computing. I’ll also touch base on Collaboration and how the software industry is going through a huge change in the way we perceive and use Services.

You can read more about the event here: Future Idaho Tech 2010

More information about the event:

Location

Boise State University

Oct 19th & 20th 2010

8:00am to 5:00pm
Student Union Building – Jordan Hall

1910 University Dr, Boise, Idaho 83725

208-426-4636

Register Now!

Looking forward to seeing you at this event!

Regards,

-Mithun Dhar

Since the announcement of Windows Phone 7 at MIX this year, the interest in the developer community has been nothing short of AMAZING! The main reason for this is the beauty of the tools available for .NET Developers. This development support for the Windows Phone 7 ecosystem is unparalleled. The power of .NET tools and platform allow developers to really have their applications shine with very little sweat.

We are very happy to announce that the Developer Tools for Windows Phone RTM’d today! Here’s some download links and information you should know about…

Windows Phone Developer Blog (official announcement)

Windows Phone Developer Tools RTM Download (direct)

Release Notes (Always good to read! )

And of course, if you are a new developer who wants to learn about Windows Phone 7, we are putting together a bunch of trainings and free events for you to get ramped up…

Register for an event close to you…

Or get started here:

Windows Phone 7 Advanced Topics – Part 1 (online training)

Windows Phone 7 Advanced Topics – Part 2 (online training)

And here’s the golden nugget from the WP7 blog, ‘For developers to put their apps into the marketplace, opening in early October, you will need to download this version of the tools. Any application built with a previous version of the tools will fail application certification in the Marketplace. When you do submit your application, you can expect it to take about five days to pass or fail certification, though you can check the status of your app submission at any time at the developer portal. For more information on passing certification, please see the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace policies.’

So if you are thinking about submitting those apps, make sure they are built with the latest release of the tools.

Happy coding!

-Mithun Dhar

Intel and Microsoft has partnered to present you Parallelism TechDays. Come learn about Parallelism and Threading in this FREE 1 day training course…

Details below…

Intel® and Microsoft Present Parallelism Techdays

Free 1-Day Course on Parallelism and Threading

Learn directly from Intel and Microsoft when you attend this free one-day course on parallelism and threading. This is a great opportunity to learn about threading your applications for multi-core platforms. This course is targeted for Windows C++ developers using Microsoft Visual Studio. Familiarity with threads is helpful, but not required (target is beginning- to intermediate-experience with threads, experts would not benefit as much from this course).

Course Agenda

http://www.programmers.com/PPI_US/PartnerCenter/partners.aspx?name=Parallelism_Techday

Come Join us!

-Mithun Dhar

This past Monday, I interviewed David Kelley on the weekly www.msdnradio.com show and we spoke primarily about the User Experience on the Phone…download and listen at leisure.

Don’t forget to tune in to the next MSDN Radio show. Details at, www.msdnradio.com

-Mithun Dhar

I love the new Kindle Ad. It’s an ad well done!

Key points to take away for marketer's – Keep it short, simple and to the point! Entire ad is grounded in key points of differentiation, the cornerstone of a good value prop; screen readability and price.

It’s a game changing device and more goodness is to follow. Hint! (With the largest online Marketplace in the world, Developers just have a ton to GAIN!)

-Mithun Dhar