It has been said that if you know Silverlight then you are already a Windows Phone 7 developer. Jesse Liberty joins John Papa on Channel 9 to explore that statement and demonstrate the side-by-side creation of both a Silverlight application and a Windows Phone application.

Watch as Jesse cracks open Visual Studio 2010 and creates two similar applications: one for Silverlight and one for Windows Phone 7. He does this all from scratch so you get to see every step along the way.

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If you didn’t see Jason Zander’s keynote from VSLive! 2010 Redmond where he announced and demonstrated Visual Studio LightSwitch. You can view the announcement here . Visual Studio LightSwitch was created to help make building application faster and more accessible by providing pre-configured screen templates, code and other reusable components. You can use Visual Basic.NET or C# if you need to write custom code. Data sources supported will include Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SQL Azure, SharePoint...

Professional Developer Conference 2010 (PDC10) registration is now open. PDC10 will be held October 28 – 29 at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, WA where leading-edge developers and architects will gather to hear firsthand from Microsoft’s leaders about the next generation of Cloud Services, Phone, Tools & Technologies, Internet Explorer and Gaming Platforms.

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Support for the Bing Search API 1.1 will be discontinued on November 1, 2010. For those using the older API, this means that you will need to switch over to the newer API over this period.To get more information about the Bing Search 2.0 API please visit here . There are considerable benefits in the newer APIs such as: RelatedSearch, Instant Answer, MobileWeb, Video, and Translation.New protocols supported include JSON, XML and SOAP. For more information please visit the Bing Blog

SQL Server 2008 R2 offers an impressive array of capabilities for developers that build upon key innovations introduced in SQL Server 2008. The SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit is ideal for developers who want to understand how to take advantage of the key improvements introduced in SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 in their applications, as well as for developers who are new to SQL Server. The kit includes 32 presentations, 39 Demos, 24 Hands-on Labs, and 55 videos. For...

A white paper that answers many of the customer frequently asked questions about Windows Azure is now available for download. The white paper provides details on how Windows Azure provides confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer data. It also provides detail on how we provide accountability for customers and their agents to track administration of services.

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The Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) enhances the user experience by placing copies of data at various locations on the network. Today, the Windows Azure CDN delivers Microsoft products such as Windows Update, Zune videos and Bing Maps. This is the list of the 20 physical nodes for the Windows Azure CDN that was posted on the Windows Azure <TEAM BLOG> . Visit the link to learn more. United States Ashburn, VA Bay Area, CA Chicago, IL San Antonio, TX Los Angeles, CA Miami, FL Newark...

Support for identity providers such as Google, Facebook, LiveID and OpenID is being added to Windows Azure AppFabric. The Access Control Service (ACS) allows you to integrate Single Sign On and centralized authorization into your web application. It works with most modern platforms, and integrates with both web and enterprise identity providers. The August Azure AppFabric update is available via the AppFabric LABS environment where the AppFabric team showcases some of its early bits.

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Microsoft offers partners free support, training, and marketing benefits on nine specific emerging technologies. The new Microsoft Platform Ready takes the program formerly known as Front Runner worldwide.

My colleague Jared Bienz has put together a post about the marketing and training benefits and walks you through the steps on signing up and getting benefits. You can find Jared’s posting at Getting Help – Microsoft Platform Ready.

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Microsoft Drivers for PHP for SQL Server 2.0 are now available. The new drivers adds support for PHP Data Objects (PDO) and supports integration with SQL Server business intelligence features and connectivity to SQL Azure.

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Mobile App Match aims to bring together the people who build Windows Phone apps with the people who use them. You can post your apps or video demonstrations so that users can give you feedback before the first Windows Phone 7 devices even ship. Users can also submit app ideas for developers to build.

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The fourth preview of Internet Explorer 9 has been released to developers. Try out fully hardware-accelerated HTML5, try out modern SVG and see native JavaScript integration in action. The announcement was made on the IE blog at HTML5, Modernized: Fourth IE9 Platform Preview Available for Developers.

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This is a great opportunity to get started with the Windows Azure Platform without having to include your credit card number.

This offer is limited to the first 500 developers to respond each calendar month between August 1 and ending October 31, 2010 (US Only)

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Games are a big business opportunity for developers across personal computers, consoles and mobile devices.  The good news is that XNA Game Studio 4.0 is supported across multiple platforms. XNA Game Studio 4.0 is developed by Microsoft to help ease game development across Windows, Xbox360 and Windows Phone 7 devices. This allows the developer to leverage code across platforms and helps increase the size of the potential market. In this series of blogs post by David Rousset , he discusses how...

Microsoft announced Visual Studio LightSwitch, a new offering in the Visual Studio product family. Jason Zander announced the product at VSLive! in Redmond.

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The next edition of the leading productivity suite for the Mac will be available at the end of October. There will be two different edition available at retail – Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 and Office for Mac Home and Business 2011. In addition, each version will be available in either single install or family/multi install packs. Microsoft Office for Mac Home and Student 2011 includes: Word for Mac, PowerPoint for Mac, Excel for Mac and Messenger for Mac, and it will retail starting at...

A second draft preview ebook is now available from Microsoft Press of Charles Petzold’s upcoming Programming Windows Phone 7.

The first preview ebook contained six chapters. This one contains eleven chapters (and 265 pages),

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This question comes up frequently so I’ve listed them below for reference. If you want more information about specific containers, and supported scenarios please visit the Supported Media Codecs for Windows Phone on MSDN . Please note that this information contains pre-release information and is subject to change in future releases. Audio WAV, MP3, WMA, AAC-LC, HE-AAC v1, HE-AAC v2, AMR-NB Video WMV (VC1) Simple, Main and Advanced Profiles MPEG-4 Part 2 – Simple MPEG-4 Part 10 (MPEG-4 AVC, H.264...

Microsoft plans to release a beta version of its upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser sometime in September. Better performance, “same markup” and improved Acid3 test scores are expected.

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Canonical -- conforming to accepted principles or standard practice.

A new Canonical REST Entity Service sample code on MSDN code gallery demonstrates a REST Service built with WCF 4 that fully complies with HTTP specs for use of GET, PUT, POST, and DELETE, and includes unit tests to test compliance.

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