Debugging

If you app does not handle an exception, a dump file will be generated. This gets done automatically by Windows Error Reporting. You are going to want some custom tools to work with this dump file.

You should start with Debugging Tools for Windows. This is a part of the Windows SDK. It is also part in parcel of the Windows Driver Kit, which you use compile additions to the tools.

Once you get into the WDK, the world is at your fingertips. I want to get to creating my own extension to the WDK. Unfortunately we have app crashes too frequently on our system. Time to investigate them and figure out what we need to do to eliminate them.

Nokia Partnership

Nokia has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft. Nokia will use Windows Phone 7 for its smart phones. It will also use Bing for search on its phones.

Nokia has a 31% market share in the mobile phone market. They previously partnered with Intel to produce the MeeGo open source mobile operating system.

The Windows Mobile operating system is being phased out. It is being replaced by Windows Phone 7. This o/s targets the consumer market. Other phone manufacturers using Windows Phone 7 include Samsung, LG, and Ericsson.

Visual Studio Plugins

Visual Studio 2010 has a lot of plugins that can make your IDE work easier. First off there is Wordlight. It will highlight all occurrences of some text in your code. Next there is the Color Theme Editor which can modify the color of everything in Visual Studio.

There are some package plugins that give you must bang for your buck. Powercommands is a bunch of tools wrapper into one. Power Tools by Microsoft is also multiple features bundles into one plugin.

Don't count out writing your own extensions to Visual Studio. Be reminded that you can't use these plugins in the free Visual Studio Express version. They work with the other versions of Visual Studio 10 though. Get cracking.

Internet Explorer 9

The Internet Explorer 9 Beta is out now. It has a lot of ground to make up. IE 6 used to own the browser market. But market share has been slipping. IE9 comes with the promise of actually supporting standards like HTML 5. Like other browsers, it attempts to make browsing fast.

Part of the performance improvement will be due to the new JavaScript engine. This is code named Chakra. It is similar to the V8 engine in the Chrome browser from Microsoft.

There are some other changes to the browser. The user interface has been simplified. I like that there will be more screen real estate used for the actual web page you are viewing. This comes at a cost though. Some features you are used to seeing on the screen in IE8 and prior have been hidden. They are still there. You just have to find the way to access them.

A strange fact about IE9 is that you must have Windows Vista or Windows 7 to run it. There is no Windows XP support. I guess Microsoft is positioning this browser for the future. They also don't want to encourage you to keep sticking with good old Windows XP. Or maybe people running XP don't want anything new, and will just stick with the ancient IE6 anyway.

Thanks to ArsTechnica for the 411 on IE9. That's where I learned the most about IE9 details.

The End of WPF

I read a post by a blogger that follows Silverlight product manager Scott Barnes on Twitter. Seems like Scott is sharing some insider scoops on the future of Silverlight. In turn, he exposes the mind of Microsoft. Or at least you get to hear what the Silverlight team hopes the future will be.

WPF is dead. The real question Microsoft is debating is whether the future rests with HTML5 or Silverlight. Naturally one would think that HTML5 should win. It is the future standard for HTML. At least nobody is debating whether XHTML has any future.

I am not unhappy. Never really learned WPF. So I might just be able to skip the darn thing and concentrate on the correct future technology. The future is tricky though. You never know what will win out. And it will most likely be replaced even further in the future.

Windows Phone

The very first thing you need to do when developing a Windows Phone app is to get an AppID. You need to be a registered Bing Developer to get one. Then you need to focus on design.

The best design is a simple one. This cannot be stressed enough. The design tool for the Windows Phone is called Metro. It uses XAML to layout your user interface.

There is a clear separation of your phone application logic and the user interface design. That is the way of XAML. Of course Visual Studio is the IDE of choice to develop your code in.

Sync Framework

Microsoft has a platform called the Sync Framework which handles synchronization of data between devices being online and offline. You applications use this framework to access data storage. Let's first cover some key terms in this platform.

A replica is a given data store. It can be the source or destination of a sync. A participant is the place where data can be retrieved. There are different levels of participants. If you can run an application on the participant, then it is a full participant. Otherwise it is a partial participant.

There is an engine in the framework that controls the process. It works with a provider, which can be one of 3 types. These types are database, RSS, and file. Alternatively you can write your own customer provider, which sounds like a complex undertaking to me. On a final note, you can apply a filter which restricts what gets synchronized and what does not.