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Windows Phone Marketplace Developer Newsletter: August 2010 - Plenty of interesting Ifo

August 30, 2010
Final Windows Phone Developer Tools Available September 16
The Beta developer tools for Windows Phone 7 have been available here since July 13 and are a great way to get started building apps for Windows Phone 7. The final toolset will be released via the Marketplace developer portal on September 16. Please note that you will need to recompile your app with the final toolset before submitting it to the Marketplace. Plan to submit your app to Marketplace in early October to ensure that it will be available to the first users of Windows Phone 7 devices. We will provide more specific guidance on timing as we get closer to the opening of Marketplace ingestion.

Make sure you take the following steps to get your games and apps prepped for launch:

  • Build your application or game using the Beta tools
  • Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools from the portal when they are released on September 16.
  • Recompile your app or game using the final tools
  • Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the Marketplace when it opens in early October

With more than 300,000 downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, we know we'll see amazing games and apps for customers this holiday season. Will yours be ready?

Windows Phone 7 Design Guidelines Now Available
Windows Phone 7 is based on a new smart design system that focuses on what is most important to the user. Although you can create your own design, many developers have asked for guidance, tools and controls to help build integrated app experiences that closely resemble the Windows Phone 7 phone design system. The UI Design and Interaction Guide for Windows Phone 7, version 2.0 now offers detailed information about UI elements and controls, UI system behaviors, and the interaction model for the touch interface. The new Design Templates for Windows Phone 7 provides a collection of 28 layered Photoshop template files and the Segoe WP font family for use in application layouts and UI development, or for pitching an idea. Check out these tools for help in creating an app that is well- integrated with the Windows Phone 7 experience.

Updated Windows Phone 7 Policies Now Available
The Windows Phone 7 application, content, and certification policies have been updated to provide greater clarity on the requirements for games, use of the Microsoft location service API, and a variety of application certification requirements. Download the new requirements here, and be sure your app meets all the requirements before you submit it to Marketplace in early October.

Windows Phone 7 Jump-Start: Born to Learn
Missed the July training courses or misplaced your course materials? Visit the Born to Learn community area to find additional resources for developing apps for Windows Phone 7. Course materials for all four sessions are available in Microsoft OneNote 2010 notebooks.

Get Your App Ideas Here
You can find great ideas for new Windows Phone 7 apps at Mobile App Match, where we connect developers with ideas submitted and ranked by real users. You can also get an early peek at the projects from other Windows Phone 7 developers and see how-to videos and Q&A from the Windows Phone team by entering the search term WP7dev# at YouTube.

Windows Phone 7 App Categories Finalized
App categories are our way of organizing applications so that users can more easily find what they are looking for. For Windows Phone 7, we have 41 categories and sub-categories to help organize applications for users. When you submit your app to Marketplace you can choose from one of the categories below to help users find your app. Apps can only be placed in one category.

1. Books & Reference
- eReader
- Fiction
- Non-fiction
- Reference
2. Business
3. Entertainment
4. Finance
5. Games
- Action & Adventure
- Board & Classic
- Card & Casino
- Family
- Music
- Puzzle & Trivia
- Shooter
- Sports & Racing
- Strategy
- Xbox Companion
6. Health & Fitness
- Diet & Nutrition
- Fitness
- Health

7. Lifestyle
- Community
- Food & Dining
- Out & About
- Shopping
8. Music & Video
9. Navigation
10. News & Weather
11. Photo
12. Productivity
13. Social
14. Sports
15. Tools
16. Travel
- City Guides
- Language
- Planning
- Travel Tools


Windows Phone 7 at PDC 2010, October 28 and 29
Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, PDC 2010, will include sessions on building and selling apps for Windows Phone 7. PDC 2010 has already sold out but you can join the event live on October 28 and 29 at the PDC site. You can also join the PDC email list to get a preview of what's planned for PDC, as well as stay abreast of local PDC events.

Xbox LIVE Games for Windows Phone 7 Announced at Gamescom
Earlier this month at Gamescom, Xbox announced a number of Xbox LIVE games that will launch with Windows Phone 7 later this year. This announcement signals an excellent opportunity for app developers because these aren't just big game studio games; they also include smaller, independent developer studios. Read more about the games at the blog, get the tools that are already available to you, and find support at the XNA Game Studio site.

Updates on Understanding the Windows Phone Application Execution Model
Last month on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, you read about the various app life-cycle events and how they differ from one another. The third installment of the series discusses saving the transient state and navigating to the right page, and the post closes out with a full understanding of how to launch, deactivate, activate, and close your application. Next up for discussion: choosers and launchers.

Follow Us on Twitter!
Get to know the people on the Windows Phone team by following them on Twitter:

@ckindel
@ozymandias
@mklucher
@cschormann
@shawnhargreaves
@ai
@brandonwatson

Swisscom TV air case published

You can find it here.

I particularly like :-)

  • Says Liechti: “We were working on a Smooth Streaming video player and a Flash-based video player at the same time. Thanks to the user-friendly tools in the Smooth Streaming development kit, it was twice as fast as developing in Flash.”
  • Gisi says: “The number of consumers that subscribed to Swisscom TV air showed that it had achieved our goals. This was a successful project at Swisscom with a fast return on investment.”

Microsoft Aurora Server Builds Small Business 'Bridge To Cloud'

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) this week made Windows Small Business Server (SBS), code-named Aurora, available for preview, promising small businesses and home users access to myriad Microsoft services in the cloud.

The next generation of SBS is dubbed as a "significant departure" from Microsoft's traditional on-premise version.

"Aurora will be Microsoft's first server to deliver both on premises and cloud computing capabilities for small businesses," the company said in a blog post announcing Aurora's availability.

Aurora targets companies with 25 or fewer users that utilize a peer-to-peer network versus a full Windows domain with Active Directory. The server also ties in built-in backup and recovery for all company computers, plus file-sharing capabilities.

"Aurora offers small businesses the help they need to ensure their data is safe through advanced backup and file restoration features," wrote Kevin Kean, Windows Home and Small Business Servers general manager, on Microsoft's SBS blog. "Aurora's users can quickly set automatic, daily backups of every personal computer on the network. If problems with those files arise, small businesses can restore individual files, folders, or an entire PC or server with simple recovery tools."

Microsoft said Aurora can link with other Microsoft offerings, like Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), the software giant's cloud collaboration offering, which includes Exchange Online, Office Communications Online and SharePoint Online. Aurora is being billed as the central hub from which SMB and home users will manage and access various services. Users will also be able to access files and documents via the cloud, when out of the office.

"Using a personalized web address, Aurora users will be able to connect to the server from virtually anywhere and access their computers and documents from any common web browser," Kean wrote.

Kean added: "Windows Small Business Server Codename 'Aurora' is a true 'bridge to the cloud' designed to integrate between on-premise and online services and to use pay-as-you-go online services to extend the server functionality without increasing workload and maintenance needs."

The Aurora preview is available for download now from Microsoft's Connect web site with a Windows Live ID.

Via CRN 

Windows Azure News

In the past summer months, a few announcements related to Windows Azure have been made: Let's summarized the key ones (newest on top):

  • New Windows Azure Security Overview White Paper
    • Written by Charlie Kaufman and Ramanathan Venkatapathy, the paper provides a technical examination of the security functionality available from both the customer's and Microsoft operations' perspectives, the people an processes that help make Windows Azure more secure, as well as a brief discussion about compliance.
  • 20 Nodes Available Globally for the Windows Azure CDN – One in Zurich
    • The most common question we get asked about the Windows Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is, "Where are the nodes physically located?"  We're happy to say that (Swiss) customers choosing to serve data through the network today are offered a new physical node in Zurich which improves delivery of performance-sensitive content in Switzerland.
      More details about all the nodes can be found       here. 
  • CTP3 of Codename Dallas
    • For more information and to experience “Dallas” CTP3 for yourself, visit www.sqlazureservices.com
    • Some of the new features:
      • Basic Authentication to authenticate users of Dallas data offerings
      • Flexible querying of OData content, as announced earlier this year at MIX, beyond simple web services
      • Support for Add Service Reference in Visual Studio
      • New content providers and data
  • Blog post: Adaptive Streaming with Windows Azure Blobs and CDN
    • Steve Marx shows how to use Windows Azure Blobs and the Windows Azure CDN to deliver adaptive streaming video content to your users in a format compatible with Silverlight’s Smooth Streaming player.
    • More information here.
  • CTP1 of Project “Houston”
    • It is a lightweight and easy to use web-based database management tool for SQL Azure databases.
    • It allows to perform basic database management tasks like authoring and executing queries, designing and editing a database schema, and editing table data.
    • It is now available on SQL Azure Labs.
  • Windows Azure AppFabric, July Release
    • Key new benefits:
      • Extension of AppFabric to web browsers and mobile devices
      • .NET 4 Support
    • To obtain the latest copy of the AppFabric SDK, visit the AppFabric portal.
  • Windows Azure Platform Appliance
    • Windows Azure Platform Appliance, a turnkey cloud platform that customers and partners can deploy in their own datacenter.
    • It consists of Windows Azure, SQL Azure and a Microsoft-specified configuration of network, storage and server hardware. Service providers, governments and large enterprises who would, for example, invest in a 1000 servers at a time, will be able to deploy the Windows Azure platform on their own hardware in their datacenter. 
    • The main benefit of the appliance is that it provides the benefits of the Windows Azure platform with greater physical control, geographic proximity, regulatory compliance and data sovereignty. 
    • The appliance software (Windows Azure and SQL Azure) is currently being delivered to a small set of service provider partners (Dell, Fujitsu and HP) and a customer (eBay) to run on Microsoft-specified hardware in their datacenters.
    • More information here.
  • SQL Azure features introduced at TechEd North America (June 2010)
    • SQL Azure Database size - With this update, SQL Azure now supports up to 5GB in the Web Edition, and up to 50GB in the Business Edition. SQL Azure can scale to multi-terabytes (across db instances) and is built from the ground up for scaling-out, high performance and high availability.
      Please refer to our offer comparison table for more details by offer on our pricing.
    • Spatial data support—Geography and Geometry types and query support in T-SQL are now supported in SQL Azure. 
    • Public preview of SQL Azure Data Sync Service — Expanding on the current ability to sync between SQL Server and SQL Azure, now you can also distribute and sync data across multiple datacenters and multiple SQL Azure instances around the globe. Click here to give it a try.
  • Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.2 (June 2010)
    • Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2008 to enable the creation, configuration, building, debugging, running, packaging and deployment of scalable web applications and services on Windows Azure.
    • New key features in 1.2:
      • Visual Studio 2010 RTM  and .NET 4 support
      • Cloud storage explorer: Displays a read-only view of Windows Azure tables and blob containers through Server Explorer.
      • Integrated deployment: Deploy services directly from Visual Studio by selecting ‘Publish’ from Solution Explorer.
      • Service monitoring: Keep track of the state of your services through the ‘compute’ node in Server Explorer.
  • New “patterns & practices” material: Windows Azure Architecture Guidance
    • It demonstrates how you can adapt an existing, on-premises ASP.NET application to one that operates in the cloud.
    • It is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that are appropriate for the cloud.
    • More information here.

Jeff Wilcox – Looking ahead: Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone developers

Looking ahead: Panorama and Pivot controls for Windows Phone developers

Posted August 10th 2010 to Silverlight,Windows Phone

Apps in Windows Phone 7 make it easy to explore and experience information thanks to two similar navigation controls: panorama and pivot controls. We’ve made it easy for developers to build applications with these experiences by putting these Silverlight controls and associated tooling in the next release of the free developer tools (didn’t make the beta).

The controls are simple & easy to use, but I’ve seen enough rumbling on forums to know that developers are anxious to learn more about their capabilities. In lieu of bits, I’m going to introduce these controls and how they appear from a simple API & XAML perspective, so that you’ll have what you need while planning your apps to know how these experiences can fit into your apps.

Note: this post contains pre-release information and is subject to change at any time.


Panorama control inside of the Visual Studio design surface for the Windows Phone 7.

via jeff.wilcox.name

Awesome post by Jeff.