My first posting about Reactive Programming for Windows Phone generated 
some terrific comments… many of which asked (and others answered) “what is the benefit of this?”
In this second posting on the topic I’ll tackle a bit of asynchronous programming that may help to illustrate how the implementation of the observer pattern by the Reactive Programming framework can greatly simplify Windows Phone programming.
I’m increasingly convinced that Reactive Programming is going to be critical for Silverlight and Windows Phone developers. Reactive Programming is not new, and the Rx toolkit has been out for a while, but this is not a heavily covered topic, and the more I look the more I think it should must be.
In short, Reactive Programming is a way to take aspects of your code that are currently imperative and turn them into something much more event-driven. In fact, Reactive Programming is sometimes referred to as LINQ Over Events.
This is tremendously helpful with asynchronous programming, but also with managing routine programming as well.
I interviewed Bill Wagner for Yet Another Podcast while we were both at CodeMash 
(look for his interview to be published next week). In addition to being one of the nicest guys I know, he is also one of the smartest.
During the conversation he illustrated the ideas behind Linq and Fluent programming with a verbal example. With his permission, I’ve picked up that example and present it here as a crisp crystallization of these key programming concepts.
On January 24 we created an application that launched the contact list and returned 
the phone number of the selected contact. In that posting I reviewed, briefly, the difference between Launchers and Choosers. This posting builds on that work.
Today we will use the Chooser for the Camera, which will bring up the camera and then return the location of the image taken.
In yesterday’s posting we created an application that used a chooser to allow you to pick a name from the contacts list and to obtain the related phone number.
Today we’ll use that information to launch the SMS service to send a message to the selected user.
To provide your Windows Phone application access to the operating system (and with 
it, to the native applications such as SMS, the Contact List, the Camera, and, oh yes, making a call) Windows Phone 7 has a set of predefined Tasks.
Tasks can be divided into two types: Launchers, which launch an application but do not return a value (e.g., sending a SMS message) and Choosers, which launch an application and do return a value (e.g., fetching a phone number).
IOC Containers, .NET, Alt.NET and much more with Jeremy Miller
Jeremy is the Chief Software Architect at Dovetail Software, the coolest ISV in Austin. 
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun.
Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap tool for Dependency Injection with .Net, StoryTeller for supercharged acceptance testing in .Net, and one of the principal developers behind FubuMVC. Jeremy’s thoughts on all things software can be found at The Shade Tree Developer.
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
Personal Brain has an extraordinary feature called ESP. Depending on how you set it up (I have it set to monitor the clipboard and to automatically bring up a thought), it watches everything you type, in any Windows application, and as you type if it recognizes the word you just typed it jumps to the relevant entry.
This can be amazingly powerful; I have only to type Full Stack and up comes that though with all its related thoughts.
I’ve collapsed the related thoughts and cropped the image to make it fit here.
Jon Galloway and I recently documented what we were learning about Entity Framework Code-First and oData as part of the Full Stack project. It turns out, however, that we were into some bleeding edge technology, and while everything we posted works, it works read-only, as written it is not possible to update the data. Not great.
With the guidance of Chris “Woody” Woodruff we stopped using batch updating and we opened up our error messages to see more detail. This led Jon to an article by Rowan Miller which targeted exactly the problem we were having. Jon documents it all here.
Key was that we were using DbContext, which is a wonderfully lightweight convention-over-configuration based wrapper over ObjectContext, but one of its limitations is that it does not does not include IUpdatable support, as documented here.
Animation, used with restraint, can greatly enhance the user’s experience of the phone; clarifying transitions and creating useful illusions. One, discussed here previously, is the illusion of “flipping” part of the page over, perhaps to reveal a help file.
In a mini-tutorial on December 22, I showed how to do this, using code to start the animation. Today, we’ll take a look at how to do all of this in Expression Blend, without using any code whatsoever. (Okay, of course there’s code, written by Microsoft, but no user-written code).
Completing the conversation with Ian Griffiths about C#, Async and much more. 
Call in comments: 1-347-YAP-CAST
In July I published a list of 12 Insanely Essential Utilities for Programmers. That list is still current and I’m still using every one of the twelve. The list, however, has become popular enough, and there are enough great utilities that didn’t make that list, that I herewith present 12 more Insanely Great and Absolutely Essential Utilities:
NB: This list, like its predecessor is Windows-centric.
