Sometimes seemingly simple things are the most expensive to achieve. One such thing involves the Windows Phone WebBrowser control that allows you to show arbitrary web content embedded in your application.

The problem I ran into is that the control does not show any scrollbars when the content is larger than the visible area. This is a bit of a surprise, because the built-in browser of the phone does this nicely:

This means that your user has no indication of the total content length or the current scroll position when you show HTML content in your application, which is a bit unfortunate. In the following I talk about the various attempts and ideas I tried to fix this; if you're only interested in a possible work around, you can skip to the end of the post. More...

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 DevTools Service 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...