This summer is going to fast! Mainly i was working on many project at the same time. I was lucky because most of them were Silverlight. So i had reduce the time i had to work on my blog. Now most of them are completed. So i expect to have more free time to play with Windows Phone 7, read some books and wrote some blogs.

So this autumn will be exiting. First the development tools for Windows Phone 7 will be finalize and released on September 16th. I’m can wait to work with it. So as soon as I can, I will convert the application for the TechDays I'm working on and I'll publish the source code on Codeplex.

On the community side, i will do a presentation on Windows Phone 7 (November 15th) at the .NET Montreal user group. I expect to have a lot of fun for this session has i have a lot of information to share. Also for those who assist at user group there is a “Speaker Idol” again this year. I encourage everyone who want to share his passion about .NET to participate. It the way i begun speaking. I’ll be there to encourage all the participant.

Again this year, Microsoft Canada organized the TechDays which will stop in Montreal on November 23-24. There is a great list of session. Again, i will probably speak at this event (subject need to be confirmed) again this year.

Have fun coding!
LP

Today is the release of the latest developer tools for Windows Phone 7. And with this release, another step have climb, because the tools are now in Beta. When you look at the release note you will see that there is a lot of braking change. They work a lot in refactoring stuff like merging multiple DLL in a single assembly. The application bar now required a value on the new “Text” property.

It seems that we will now be able to use Expression Blend 4 RTM. In fact, with the tools now provide a new version of Expression Blend 4 that will run side by side with the RTM version. This version is specific to the Phone, so you will not allowed to create other project.

So i suggest that you read the following post about those changes:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jaimer/.../migrating-apps-from-windows-phone-ctps-to-the-beta-build.aspx

You can download the latest version of the Developer tools here: http://www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx?FamilyID=c8496c2a-54d9-4b11-9491-a1bfaf32f2e3

Official blog post from the team:
http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/.../windows-phone-developer-tools-beta-released.aspx

And a great blog post from the Expression Blend team on the new feature:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/expression/.../windows-phone-developer-tools-beta-released.aspx

Regards,
LP