Mobile Apps

Monetize your Windows Phone 7 Apps

Download the Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7 for mobile applications using the XNA Framework or Silverlight before registering your Apps on pubCenter, Microsoft Advertising's solution for Windows Phone 7 Publishers and App Developers

 

	Make More Money Introducing Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, the industry’s first real-time, bidded ad exchange in mobile – leverage superior ad targeting, multiple purchase models and leading resellers including Microsoft’s sales force and large-scale Microsoft Advertising adCenter marketplace.
	Quick and Hassle Free  Microsoft’s simple Ad Control, self-serve developer sign-up, reporting and automated payout ensures a seamless ad monetization experience for developers. The Ad Control SDK supports the XNA framework or Silverlight.
	See What’s Working  Actionable reporting helps developers optimize for best user experience and advertising yield.

 

Get started in three easy steps

	Download the Ad Control SDK. Download the Ad SDK to build your app and run ads in test mode that requires no on-boarding to try out the Microsoft Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7.
	Register your mobile apps on pubCenter. Sign up andand register your Windows Phone apps using Microsoft Advertising's solution for Windows Phone 7 publishers and app developers.
	Implement and Submit. Set the Application Id and Ad Unit Id properties in the Ad Control and submit your ad-enabled app to the Windows Phone marketplace.

SILVERLIGHT 5, as shown at MIX in Las Vegas

This sample shows a full 3D realtime engine with some advanced features and an integrated collisions system.

The engine provides support for:
•Collisions
•Diffuse channel
•Ambient channel
•Textures (including light maps)
•Per-pixel & per-vertex shader
•Models/cameras and lights

The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit includes a comprehensive set of technical content including hands-on labs, presentations, and demos that are designed to help you learn how to use the Windows Azure platform, including: Windows Azure, SQL Azure and the Windows Azure AppFabric.

The April 2011 update of the Windows Azure Platform Training Kit has been updated for Windows Azure SDK 1.4, Visual Studio 2010 SP1, includes three new HOLs, and updated HOLs and demos for the new Windows Azure AppFabric portal.

Some of the specific changes with the April update of the training kit includes:

• [New] Authenticating Users in a Windows Phone 7 App via ACS, OData Services and Windows Azure lab
• [New] Windows Azure Traffic Manager lab
• [New] Introduction to SQL Azure Reporting Services lab
• [Updated] Connecting Apps with Windows Azure Connect lab updated for Connect refresh
• [Updated] Windows Azure CDN lab updated for CDN refresh
• [Updated] Introduction to the AppFabric ACS 2.0 lab updated to the production release of ACS 2.0
• [Updated] Use ACS to Federate with Multiple Business Identity Providers lab updated to the production release of ACS 2.0
• [Updated] Introduction to Service Bus lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Eventing on the Service Bus lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Service Remoting lab updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Rafiki demo updated to latest AppFabric portal experience
• [Updated] Service Bus demos updated to latest AppFabric portal

Cloning C# objects is one of those things that appears easy but is actually quite complicated with many "gotchas." This article describes the most common ways to clone a C# object.

nice article about cloning in c#

Since its availability on March 14th, IE9 has been available for manual download and we are pleased by the early and continued enthusiasm for IE9.  We are seeing not only strong customer and business demand, but some of the highest web and application compatibility rates in IE history, not to mention all the sites that are taking advantage of HTML5 and IE9’s Windows 7 integration.  On March 28^th, we began to upgrade existing IE9 Beta and RC users through Windows Update.

On April 18^th, a little over a month after the final release of IE9, we will be ready to start the rollout of IE9 to our Windows 7 and Windows Vista customers.  We will offer IE9 to customers via a gradual rollout and expect the rollout to be largely complete by the end of June.  Similar to our approach for IE8, we will use Windows Update to deliver IE9 to users.  IE 9 will not install automatically on machines.  Users will have to agree to install IE 9.

For our business customers who require time to plan and test their deployments, we will make IE9 available on Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) in June.  WSUS allows use of management tools that make it easy for IT professionals to deploy IE9 in their environments in an automated fashion and at their own pace.  We would also like to remind our business customers who do not rely on WSUS they have the option to use the IE9 Blocker Toolkit to prevent IE9 rollout via Windows Update until they are ready.

Keyboard Mapping for Windows Phone Emulator

quite useful, if you haven't discovered this yet.

Windows® HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 enables administrators to increase the power of the on-premises cluster by adding computational resources in Windows Azure. With the Windows Azure “burst” scenario, various types of HPC applications can be deployed to Windows Azure nodes and run on these nodes in the same way they run in on-premises nodes.

The article provides a technical overview of developing HPC applications that are supported for the Windows Azure burst scenario. The article addresses the application models that are supported, and the data issues that arise when working with Windows Azure and on-premises nodes, such as the proper location for the data, the storage types in Windows Azure, various techniques to upload data to Windows Azure storage, and how to access data from the computational nodes in the cluster (on-premises and Windows Azure). Finally, this article describes how to deploy HPC applications to Windows Azure nodes and how to run these HPC applications from client applications, as well as from the Windows HPC Server 2008 R2 SP1 job submission interfaces.

Microsoft Visual Studio Async CTP (SP1 Refresh)

Download a CTP with new syntax and APIs for asynchronous development.

New! The SP1 refresh includes Visual Studio 2010 SP1 compatibility, APIs for Windows Phone 7 development, and a new EULA with updates regarding usage in production environments. It is compatible with non-English installations of Visual Studio and with Visual Studio Express.

While Silverlight didn’t get the leading role in either the day one or day two Mix ‘11 keynotes (much to the chagrin of some developers), there was some Silverlight news at the Microsoft developer/designer conference.

Microsoft is making available a public beta of its Silverlight 5 development tool/runtime, as of April 13. The beta will be available at http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight.

In December, Microsoft officials outlined some of the 40 new features the company planned to deliver with Silverlight 5, the final version of which is due out before the end of calendar 2011. The bulk of those features are focused around making Silverlight a development platform for rich media and business applications.

At Mix, Corporate Vice President of .Net Scott Guthrie’s comment “Let’s switch gears now and talk about Silverlight for the browser,” got huge applause from the Mix ‘11 keynote attendees. (Microsoft officials said this fall, the company’s cross-platform runtime play is morphing, with HTML5 being the new way the Redmondians plan to tackle the cross-platform challenge, going forward — a positioning statement that left many Silverlight developers feeling abandoned.)

Microsoft execs detailed on April 13 more of the features coming with Silverlight 5. Among those features:

• Reduced network latency by using a background thread for networking.
• XAML parser improvements that speed up startup and runtime performance.
• Support for 64-bit operating systems
• The ability to do some of the “trusted” features in Silverlight in the browser

The full list of Silverlight 5 features is here.

A number of these features are not in the beta, but which are still on tap for Silverlight 5, according to Microsoft, including vector printing, power awareness for things like full-screen apps, fluid user-interface transitions and 64-bit support for the plug-in, among others.

Microsoft execs also said at Mix ‘11 that full Silverlight 4 support is coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform with the Mango update coming this fall. Microsoft execs also demonstrated Silverlight and XNA melded together, allowing developers in the Mango timeframe to use a combination of the two tools when writing a single app.

...The bulk of those features are focused around making Silverlight a development platform for rich media and business applications...

Windows Azure Platform Offer Changes

We also announced several offer changes today, including:

• The extension of the expiration date and increases to the amount of free storage, storage transactions and data transfers in the Windows Azure Introductory Special offer. This promotional offer now includes 750 hours of extra-small instances and 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service, 20GB of storage, 50K of storage transactions, and 40GB of data transfers provided each month at no charge until September 30, 2011. More information can be found here.
  • An existing customer who signed up for the original Windows Azure Introductory Special offer will get a free upgrade as of today. An existing customer who signed up for a different offer (other than the Windows Azure Introductory Special) would need to sign up for the updated Windows Azure Introductory Special Offer separately.
• MSDN Ultimate and Premium subscribers will benefit from increased compute, storage and bandwidth benefits for Windows Azure. More information can be found here.
• The Cloud Essentials Pack for Microsoft partners now includes 750 hours of extra-small instances and 25 hours of small instances of the Windows Azure service, 20GB of storage and 50GB of data transfers provided each month at no charge. In addition, the Cloud Essentials Pack also contains other Microsoft cloud services including SQL Azure, Windows Azure AppFabric, Microsoft Office 365, Windows Intune and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. More information can be found here.

Read carefully: Some important, good changes to the Introductory Special offer, the MDSN subscribers benefits, and the Cloud Essential Pack offer!