I am proud to announce that I have joined the team at Applied Information Technologies in Stuttgart, Germany. Founded in 1991, AIT has gained outstanding achievements over the years. In 2011 it became the first Microsoft Gold Partner for Application Lifecycle Management in Middle Europe, and was awarded as Microsoft ALM Partner of the Year. AIT also is a Microsoft Gold Partner as Independent Software Vendor and has won the BQI Agile Leadership Award last year.

Every single member of the team is a deeply committed, skilled professional in their respective fields. You may know some of these people from conference talks, MSDN webcasts, print publications, from their leading role in the community as Microsoft MVPs, or simply from one of the countless projects they have completed successfully. Needless to say that I am thrilled to be a part of this company, and to contribute to the success and spirit of the team. Starting February 1st, my involvement will cover the full .NET stack as well as Silverlight, as a consultant, software architect and more.

What will this mean for my blog?

Short answer: nothing will change. I receive full support from AIT for what I do, and to continue my investments in the community and Windows Phone, so please expect the same quality and amount of blog posts, articles, webcasts and open source work for the community in 2012 as in the years before.

I'm happy to announce that starting today, my complete "Turn Out" Windows Phone training is available for free to anyone. In the past, individual parts were available to the public already, but now you can watch this whole series of development training, with over 20 hours of screencast material, at no cost.

The training walks you through the development of a small game for Windows Phone (that is also available in the Marketplace for free) and shows various aspects of programming for the platform, including:

• Working with MVVM
• Unit testing
• Creating user controls
• Visual States, Triggers, Actions
• Animations
• The application bar
• Tombstoning
• Sharing code between platforms (the project includes a WPF level editor)
• Working with the Toolkit (in particular, the LongListSelector)
• Advertising (both Microsoft's SDK and AdDuplex)
• Creating an about page
• Profiling your app to identify and resolve performance problems
• Details of the submission process

The training is targeted at "Mango" and makes use of its new features, and of course the full source code for every session, including the final product, is available too. You can find the training here:

http://www.goodcat-trainings.net

I hope you all will enjoy this; have fun developing for Windows Phone!

Over the last weeks, some users of my project "YLAD" brought some additional localization scenarios to my attention. This resulted in both some improvements to the project itself (which I've just released as a new version on CodePlex and NuGet), and the need to talk about some obstacles you might come across. More...

This is not one of my usual posts, it's more of a random complaint. A rant that has been sitting in my draft folder for half a year and finally deserves to see the light. Of course it will contain some technical details too (after all, this is a technical blog), but to be honest, I like complaining, so that's what I'm going to do today. In fact, I am known as the "complain" guy among my friends, because I probably spend more time complaining than doing actual work, sleeping, eating and shutting up during movies put together. The reason you've never heard me complain in this blog simply is that I complain so much during the day that there's hardly anything left to complain about in the evening when I write these posts (yes, I adhere to DRY even when I'm whining). So again, if you expect some fancy technical article, stop reading until it is too late, or skip all the way down to the – serious – conclusion. Unless of course it happens that you accidentally are a member of the team at Microsoft that maintains the Zune PC software. Then please, read on, no matter what. :) More...

Ever since the first announcement of my "Phone as a Remote Control" project the goal was to work towards a release of the reference app in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Over the last month I've added some improvements and fixes, and I'm glad to announce that last weekend a first version has been accepted and is now publicly available – for free and without advertisement. You should now be able to find the app doing a search for "PAARC" in the Marketplace on your phone, or by visiting this web link. In this post, I'll talk about what reaching this milestone means for you as a developer, and what's in the box for normal users. More...

Now that the final version of Silverlight 5 is released, I've gone through all my posts and articles that were based on the beta or RC version and updated the code or text where applicable. I've also fixed links so they now point to the final documentation. As a convenience, I have compiled a complete list of the changes I've made – which gives you an idea what has changed in the final release compared to the beta/RC versions. More...

To me personally, NuGet is one of the greatest additions to a .NET developer's life during the last years. It's simple to use, makes your life easier, and simply works. I like how quickly it is adopted by customers, friends and public projects, and extensively used everywhere. However, I often see that people do not know about all the available features and sometimes even create custom solutions to problems that are already solved by built-in options. In this post, I randomly pick three features you should know about when you're working with NuGet, and create your own packages. More...

Someone recently asked me about how to use the same code base for both Windows Phone and a .NET application. This is a topic that people become more and more interested in it seems. It has the potential to save time and maintenance costs, but it can also cause you quite some headache. In this post I'm going to talk about your options regarding code sharing between multiple platforms, using my open source library PAARC as an example. More...

Similar to the idea behind my project "Your Last About Dialog" (YLAD) I have created an implementation of a generic options/settings dialog for Windows Phone. The goal is to make it as easy as possible for you to set up such a dialog, but at the same time keep all options to extend and customize it when required. The features in detail are:

• Uses reflection to support arbitrary objects as "data providers" for the options page. No need to implement custom interfaces or use special types – continue using your POCOs for your user and application settings.
• Use attributes to customize the behavior and looks of your individual options, in particular:
• Supports grouping of options into pivot items
• Supports sorting of options
• Supports validation
• Supports localization using standard resources mechanism
• Has custom features depending on the data type (e.g. input scope for strings etc.)
• Much more…
• Highly extensible component, in particular:
• Change existing views (editors) to your own
• Add support for additional data types – even your custom ones
• Implement custom validators for your particular needs
• Prepares and extracts all data on a background thread for maximum responsiveness

This initial release already supports a wide variety of data types, including bool, integral types (byte, short, int, long), floating types (float, double, decimal), DateTime, TimeSpan, strings, color and all enumerations. To learn more, please visit the project:

On CodePlex
In the NuGet gallery ("Extras" extensions in the NuGet gallery)

For a quick overview and details on how to use the component, make sure to read the walkthrough.

As always, comments and feedback as well as feature requests and bug reports are very welcome.

Enjoy!

One of the attendees of my recent webinar on sockets programming for Windows Phone (you can watch it online on Silverlight Show here) brought up a rather complex issue in the Q&A session that I then took offline for further review. As it turns out, what he was facing is not one, but even two bugs in (desktop) Silverlight's multicast client implementation. At first I thought this may be a problem with Silverlight 5, but amazingly everything described here seems to be valid for Silverlight 4 too. I don't know whether this also affects Windows Phone, but since the platforms presumably share that code it's likely. More...