My small add-in for Visual Studio to help you debug your Silverlight applications had problems running on Visual Studio 2012 RC. It installed correctly but did not show up in the respective menu, and wasn't able to do its work either. Time to introduce some changes I wanted to do for a long time anyway!

The Debug Helper now is a Visual Studio Extension rather than an add-in, and can be installed directly from the Extension Manager from within Visual Studio, or downloaded from the Visual Studio Gallery here:

http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/b5f1634e-1608-4376-8f00-caf93f5f58c8

Of course, the source code is still available through CodePlex, on the project's hompage:

http://sldebughelper.codeplex.com/

There you can also find more documentation and information on the motivation to create the extension. Things that have changed in the new version besides the packaging:

• Made detecting Silverlight projects more robust.
• Made selecting the Silverlight debug engine more robust.

The extension has been tested on both Visual Studio 2010 and 2012. If you run into any issues, please feel free to contact me, preferably on CodePlex.

Almost two years ago, Firefox started to isolate plug-ins like Silverlight in a separate operating system process. One of the consequences was that debugging Silverlight applications with Visual Studio became somewhat more tedious, because the Silverlight debug engine was not able to automatically attach to the correct processes anymore. At that time, I started developing a small and simple Visual Studio Add-In named "Firefox Debug Helper". Later on, when I discovered that Visual Studio also had problems with other browsers like Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome, I extended support for this Add-In to these browsers, and renamed the tool to "Silverlight Debug Helper".

Today, the topic is still relevant for Silverlight developers, and this small tool continues to serve me and others well. Every now and then, someone asks for the source code of the Debug Helper Add-In, either to learn about how to extend Visual Studio by a practical example, to extend the existing features, or because they want to track down issues when they use the Add-In. I'm pleased to announce that starting today, the source code of the "Silverlight Debug Helper" is available for free to everyone (the tool itself always was available for free from the first day) on CodePlex. It's not very sophisticated and probably could be improved in some areas, but I still hope those of you interested in it can make good use from this release. The new project page also is the place where new releases will be made available at, if applicable:

http://sldebughelper.codeplex.com

This also means that the existing project page here on this blog will be suspended and link to the new home on CodePlex from now on.

YLAD

Today, I've also released a new version of "Your Last About Dialog" for Windows Phone. This new release adds support for trial mode, which means that a "buy" button is automatically added to the about page if you are using this feature of Windows Phone. As always, I've tried to make the default behavior suitable for most scenarios, so you usually don't have to worry about it – it simply will work "out of the box". But if you want to override the default behavior and either force the buy button feature both on or off for your particular scenario, YLAD offers the flexibility to do so. The new version is already available on CodePlex and (recommended) NuGet, and in addition improves the default configuration template as well as fixes a potential bug with multiple successive taps on the "review" button of the about page. Learn more about the release and the new features on the project page and its documentation section:

http://ylad.codeplex.com

Have fun ;)

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...

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...

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...

After watching the keynote of the //BUILD/ event last night (due to the time difference it already was evening here in Germany) I decided to go to sleep first and then blog about it. Partly because the tools and downloads wouldn't be available for another few hours, and partly also because getting some time between you and an exciting event helps with thinking clearer.

If you haven't watched the keynote yourself, I recommend doing that to see for yourself what's new in terms of both hardware, software and of course software development on Windows 8. The video can be found on the BUILD website linked to above. If you want to get up and running quickly without watching 2.5 hours of video, take a look at the bullet points compiled by Michael Crump. More...

Edit 2011-12-11: This article is compatible with the final version of Silverlight 5 (5.0.61118.0).

Silverlight 5 has built-in support for Platform Invocation Services, which more often is abbreviated by PInvoke or P/Invoke. If you're not familiar with the topic, you can read a small tutorial here, or an MSDN Magazine article here. In a nutshell, P/Invoke allows you to call into unmanaged code that is located in Win32 dlls on the system. People already have come up with nice short tutorials regarding this, for example how to let your computer beep. However, often P/Invoke is much more complex than these simple examples, especially when you need to move data between the managed and unmanaged world. But on the other hand, these more complex scenarios enable thrilling new possibilities with Silverlight. How about displaying system dialogs, and use the results in your Silverlight application? Let's play some games with fonts! More...

Edit 2011-12-11: This article is compatible with the final version of Silverlight 5 (5.0.61118.0).

The first posts with questions about 64-bit support in Silverlight 5 already start to show up. The thing is that the 64-bit version of the plug-in is not installed by default when you install the tools. So even though the documentation says Silverlight 5 has 64-bit support, you are still prompted to install Silverlight when you use a 64-bit browser to access a Silverlight application.

The solution to this is to install the 64-bit runtime manually; the installer can be downloaded from here:

http://www.silverlight.net/downloads

… or by using the direct links here:

Developer Runtime 64-bit for Windows
End-User Runtime 64-bit for Windows

After the installation, you will see that Silverlight content shows up correctly in e.g. IE9 64-bit.

In the last article, I talked about the specific requirements and recommendations regarding Windows Phone 7 iconography, including images for your application's tiles, the Marketplace, and application bar buttons. This time, I want to take it a step further and sum up all of the most important key points of the application certification requirements in the form of a cheat sheet.

The full requirements can be found online on MSDN. The following will provide you short summaries of the technical and submission requirements as well as the application policies. The order is not necessarily the same as in the original documentation, to structure the information a bit more for a developer's view. Please note that this is not a normal article. It is not intended to be read from top to bottom – instead it is meant as a reference for quick look-ups where you don't want to click through/search the complete requirements online. You can download a handy single-page PDF/XPS version at the end of the article which for example can be printed out and pinned to a wall in your working space, so you have everything at hand with a quick look.

The full article and the print version downloads of the cheat sheet can be found on Silverlight Show.

Windows Phone 7 supports multiple screen orientations, and the built-in sensors allow the system to adjust the orientation automatically when the user rotates or tilts the device, without manual interaction. For developers, supporting these orientations and orientation changes seems pretty simple at first, but on closer inspection more and more issues need to be resolved and planned ahead.

You can read the full article at Silverlight Show.