In a follow up to yesterday’s article about Tile Notifications, let’s take a look at sending 
Toast Notifications.
You’ll remember that we had two projects yesterday, SendTileServer and TilesNotificationClient. Today we’ll create SendToastServer and ToastNotificationsClient. The parallels are obvious.
Jeff Paries appears on Silverlight TV talking about the Bird Hunt game that was documented here in this posting and this followup. Great guy, great game, great show, and very valuable information about animation in Silverlight.
This posting is a rip-off. Specifically, I steal liberally from the MSDN documentation, but 
my goal is to mix together and distill a great deal of information down to the essentials to provide you with a clear and concise explanation of how to create Tile Notification for Windows Phone.
[ Click on image for full size ]
Yikes! That is one scary diagram. But it is needlessly intimidating because most of the work is done for you. It turns out that the work you have to do is pretty straight forward. It consists of the following steps (all of which I will demonstrate)
Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile are offering new Windows Phones for a penny with a new 
two-year service/data contract. The offer is good until July 2. More information here.
If you have upgraded to Mango, your browser is now IE9. The browser control has been engineered and tested for backwards compatibility, but if your Windows Phone 7 (pre-Mango) application uses the browser control and suddenly finds weirdness, please do let us know.
As part of my continuing (and occasional) series of mini-tutorials on LINQ this posting will consider the overloaded Contains operator. This operator allows you to check whether a list contains a given value, as illustrated in the following code that you can drop into LinqPad or wrap within a console application:
var someList = Enumerable.Range(1,10);
Console.WriteLine(
"someList contains 6? {0}, someList contains 12? {1}",
someList.Contains(6), someList.Contains(12));
The output for this is
someList contains 6? True, someList contains 12? False
Mango From Scratch
It turns out that launching Bing Maps, even with Search terms and setting the zoom level 
is absurdly easy, using the new BingMaps task. I used it to search for donuts in the Boston area (and came close to crashing it, it found so many!)
The BingMaps task is a launcher; once you start it you do not return a value to the calling program. That said, it works like all launchers (instantiate it, set its values, call Show()) and thus is easy and convenient.
A few weeks back I had Jeremy Likness on Yet Another Podcast discussing Sterling, his terrific SQL database that runs on top of Isolated Storage. Recently we announced that Mango will have Local Storage (SQL CE) on top of Isolated Storage. Does this make Sterling obsolete? Absolutely Not.
Larry Lieberman, Product Manager – Windows Phone Team, who works on the 
Developer Platform joins us to discuss what’s new in Mango for Consumers and for Developers. Larry provides a vital overview of the newest features in Windows Phone.
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Mango introduces fast application switching. To implement this feature a new stage in the 
lifecycle has been added: Dormant. Applications are put in the dormant state when the user navigates forward, away from the application (e.g., using the Start button).
In the Dormant state all execution of the code is stopped but the application remains in memory. If the user navigates back into a dormant application, the application resumes and each page’s state is restored automatically.
Unfortunately, if the phone runs low on memory, your application may be tombstoned. In that case, the application is terminated, but if the user returns to the application you are responsible for making it appear as if the application has been alive all along. Fortunately, tombstoned applications do retain their State dictionary, and you can use that to restore the page state.
We walk through the code we used to add photo support to the WhoIsThat application, including:
Part 2 of a conversation with Shawn Wildermuth, president of Agilitrain and author of the 
forthcoming book Essential Windows Phone 7 about Mix, Silverlight, Windows Phone, HTML5 and the state of .NET development
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