I’ve been talking for a long time about creating a conversation with the community, but at the same time I’ve been missing a prime opportunity: the comments section on my own blog.
New policy: you comment and I’ll reply asap. Sometimes I’ll reply to a couple similar comments at once, but your comment will be read and responded to. If not, drop me an email and remind me.
Thanks!
On May 10 I posted about the upcoming addition of SQL Server Compact Edition (CE) 
in Windows Phone Mango. At that time, I showed how to create the DataContext object and how to store and retrieve “flat” data.
In this posting, I build on and modify the previous example to demonstrate relational data.
We will have a Book class and a Publisher class. The relationship is one to many (each book has one publisher, but any publisher may have many books).
Mango From Scratch
Coming in Mango is the ability to query the Contact List and retrieve considerably more 
information than was available previously. In addition to the EmailAddress Chooser Task and the PhoneNumberChooserTask Mango will include an AddressChooserTask.
In addition, Mango provides direct access to Contacts and Appointments.
Mango From Scratch
With the forthcoming Mango release of Windows Phone 
(tools to be released this month) you can store structured data in a Sql Server Compact Edition (CE) database file in isolated storage (called a local database).
You don’t actually interact directly with the database, but instead you use Linq to SQL (see my background article on Linq). Linq to SQL allows your application to use Linq to speak to the local (relational) database
Reactive Programming
Continuing my intermittent series in Rx, today I take a look at Hot vs. Cold Observables in the Reactive Extensions Library.The distinction, in a nutshell, is this:
Hot observables are like a river – you can dip into them when you arrive, but whatever has moved downstream is missed. Cold observables are like a river that has been dammed – each time you subscribe or observe the dam is opened and the elements in the river are sent your way.
Talking with Phil Haack (Program Manager for MVC3 and NuGet) and Jon Galloway – 
what are MVC and NuGet, what are their strengths and limitations and how do you lean to use them?
Listen | Return to Yet Another Podcast
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
Talking with Eric Mork and Kelly White about developing games and applications
on Windows Phone, iPhone and Android.
Reference information from show
Listen | Return to Yet Another Podcast
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
Mango From Scratch
As noted in earlier posts, Mango represents a move from Silverlight 3+ to Silverlight 4, and 
with that comes ICommand on ButtonBase and Hyperlink (and classes that derive from these two).
This is a significant breakthrough, especially if you are programming with MVVM.
ICommand allows you to bind an action as a property, thus keeping a clean separation from the controlling class (typically the view model) to the presentation class (typically the view).
Mango From Scratch
Mango represents the upgrading of the Windows Phone Operating 
System from Silverlight 3+ to 4. With Silverlight 4 comes a number of very useful features, not least of which is implicit styling.
With implicit styling you create a target type but not a key for your style and the style is implicitly applied to any object of that type that does not otherwise have an explicit style.
My colleagues in Developer Guidance have created 22 topic/scenario-focused web pages on App Hub, the Windows Phone developer website, that provide a comprehensive view of all the resources available for Windows Phone development.
The pages are self-contained, single-page search targets, which means that each page provides deep topics links, high-level links to tools and key resources for Windows Phone development, and links off to other content pages via the navigation menu on the right side of the page.
Bookmark this page.
Mango From Scratch
One of the very cool features coming in Mango is Reminders, and more generally, scheduled tasks. 
This allows you to set up a reminder and then exit the application. When your reminder fires you have the opportunity to snooze the reminder or to enter the application. And if you enter the application you can enter not only at the home page, but also deep within the application at the relevant page for the reminder.
To get started, let’s strip down an example shown at Mix 11 by Peter Torr to its absolute essence. We’ll create a new Mango application and place a button which says “Remind Me” on the main page. In the code behind, the click event handler for the button creates the Reminder (and passes in a name so that we can, if we choose, refer to the reminder programmatically).
The big news at Mix this year was the upcoming release of Mango – the next generation for Windows Phone. Among the many exciting new features were a few new tooling capabilities that will change the way you write your Phone applications, making life far easier, and making your programs more efficient and performant. Let’s focus on just three.
