Windows Phone 7 Mango Pre-RC is out (Fixed Title)

I upgraded my primary phone HTC HD7 to Windows Phone 7 to version 7.1 for ISV (codename “Mango”) about a month ago. and so far my experience with the stability and new features was great.

Today while charging my HTC HD7 I received an update notification from the Zune software. I free 20min of my life and went on.

Version 7.10.7712.60 is installed on my phone = Windows Phone 7.5 Mango Pre-RC

More to follow soon.

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Red-Gate Released .Net Reflector 6.8 the Last FREE Version

Red Gate announced couple of months ago that the next version of .Net Reflector won’t come in two flavors as it used to be. The free version was removed and only 3 types of paid application will be available. This announcement started a large community noise calling Red Gate to re-think about this step. As a result of the huge amount of complaints red-gate decided to release a new version (6.8) only for people that use the 6.6 or 6.7 version. The new version don’t have any of the Pro features or bug fixes of version 7. BUT it doesn’t have the 6 months time bomb earlier versions had.

For thus of you with didn’t worked with .Net Reflector before here is the short story. A guy named Lutz developed and supported the .Net reflector application from day 1. the application was shareware and required just supplying an e-mail address for download. there was no checks on the email and no registration required. Sometime during 2008 Lutz sold the code and rights for the Reflector to Red-Gate and started working at Microsoft. Red-Gate continued developing newer versions of the Reflector and introduce a “Time Bomb” into the application. Once every 6 month you had to download a new version of the application. If you wouldn’t accept the “refresh” the application would close, if the date of the computer was changed backward the application checks were fooled and you can keep running. This was used in specific at environments where development computer don’t have an Internet connection and every binary files need to pass a gated checks for security reasons.

When Red-Gate introduce version 6.6 they changed the “Time Bomb” behavior… instead of just closing the application it deleted it self…

This new behavior in combined with the paid version only announcement resulted in the large community noise which made Red-Gate change their plans. The Reflector version 7 would remain a paid application but anyone who have a version 6.6 or 6.7 installed will receive a last free update to version 6.8. This version will require email based registration for up to 5 computers. On the day of the announcement Red-Gate removed the 6.7 versions from the download page allowing only to people that had it installed already to update.

I won’t get into the emotional and practical side of the Red Gate decision or the debate they started at the community but I think this screenshot can summaries some of the feelings :

Anyway… What’s next

Version 6.8 was released earlier this week and available for update only. The following was copied from Red Gate Forum and contains the instructions for the update and registration & activation :

“Based on a large amount of community feedback and the success of version 7, we’re releasing a version of .NET Reflector 6 with no expiry date for existing users. This will be a stripped down version without any of the bug fixes or new features in version 7 and it will not be supported going forward.
This version of Reflector will only be available to current users via the check for updates mechanism in existing copies of Reflector. It will be available from early May and no separate download will be available.
For most people (using Reflector 6.6) the upgrade procedure will go as follows:

• On April 30, Reflector version 6.6 will warn of an upcoming expiry. Users should ignore the warning that this will be the last free version of Reflector.
• The auto update mechanism in any version of Reflector 6 can be used to automatically download V6.8 until the end of August. This does not require a visit to the Red Gate website.
• A serial key that will activate the free V6.8 license on as many as five machines will be sent via email to the user. There will be no other commercial use of email addresses, but the free version will contain news and promotion about the newest paid versions of .NET Reflector.

If you have any other version of Reflector and it asks you to update then just click 'Yes'. This may upgrade you to an interim version, after which you can update to the final version in May.”

I Already upgraged :

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Mix11 Here I’m

As you maybe aware this week the Mix11 conference is happening at Las Vegas. Sela has taken 13 consultants and 2 managers and sent us here. This is as far as I’m aware of the biggest delegation from any company beside Microsoft them self.

I arrived Sunday afternoon to the Las Vegas airport after a very long flight with multiple connection just to discover 2 things.

1. My suitcase is ruined by the airline, broken zippers and a nice cut on the side.
2. In order to get to the hotel I need to grab a taxi, and the taxi line looks like this :

I waited almost 40 min in that line when other options where even longer or WAY more expensive.

We are all staying at the Luxor hotel which is very nice and built like an Egyptian pyramid

and I got a very nice room on that 29th floor with great views :

This morning I woke up from jetlag sleep and run to the convention grounds which is at the near by hotel the Mandalay Bay. Long walk, coffee to go on the way and I’m hitting another LONG QUEUE, this time the queue to registration. After 30 min in the queue someone from the organizing team realized that if this continues no one will get to the boot-camp session which where schedule to 9am. So they told everyone to register later and just go the halls.

I’m siting in Silverlight boot-camp to brush my skills after long time I didn’t touch it and later on today re-brush my Windows Phone 7 skills.

I will try to post any news/interesting thing I encounter this week so make sure you check my blog.

Technorati Tags: Conference,Vegas,Sela,Microsoft

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Life As a Developer….

No words are needed…

This morning when checking where is the nearest brunch of Old Navy near Redmond WA (checkout Gadi M post about why I'm here) I saw a small ad in the bottom of the page

I accessed it with fear that maybe they passed over Israel Again but too much of my surprise I saw the Israeli flag in between our friendly neighbors countries

Old Navy

http://oldnavy.gap.com/customerService/storeLocator.do#

Now what's left is checking the shipping price and start ordering or even it will be like in the USA that you can order over the web and pickup/return in the physical stores just saving on the price. We are not there yet but this is a great beginning. 

I’m sitting in big hall listening to overview on Samsung Bada operating system for developers.

Bada (Ocean in Korean) is Samsung try on making “Simple” standard mobile phones to a “Smartphone” by opening their proprietary operating system to the developers eco-system.

Bada includes application store which is a gateway for the phone and includes a rich set of application layers to allow developers introduce application to new market of users with “Simple” phone that are willing to pay up to 5$ per application. The “Samsung Apps” Store exist for the last 9 months and allows you to download the application from the phone it self of from PC client which called “Kies”. The store also have a web front at http://www.samsungapps.com the allows you to browse the application, any download forward you back to the PC client. Payment for application is done either through the cellular provider or by using credit card payment.

Here are some pictures from the first presentation on what is Bada :

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Samsung claim to allow/support other devices like TV sets and Camera (Video/Stills) in the Apps Store.

More to follow…

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This post is based on the on going buzz in the net about the capabilities of Windows Mobile 7 due this year

1. First nothing is official, wait for next Monday (Feb 15th) for the official announcement.

2. Multitasking – Still exist but this time no one can create a busy wait loop and kill the device battery in 30min (happened to me couple of times with some applications), Making software more stable and better suitable for mobile device is good at my book.

3. Flash – Why I need to ask ? first of all WindowsMobile already good a very good solution for flash with either Skyfire (www.skyfire.com) or Opera (www.opera.com), but still the first thing I do when installing them is to disable the flash support. Flash in it current stage is not suitable to mobile devices, there is nothing to gain of using flash in mobile devices and anyone saying otherwise doesn't really understand mobile devices usage.

4. There was never a .Net FW that wasn't backward compatible to the previous one, create such a version is out of the normal development cycle for MS, so far CF was just a scale down version of the Full .NET with a CLR tuned to the requirements of memory and CPU

5. If MS will require a signature for any installed SW I guess they will provide a mechanism for signing existing SW

6. Creating Silverlight as the core of the OS is GREAT IDEA, having a single software that runs multiplatform is a killer feature

7. Making every device pass MS labs is also great IDEA, all of you knows only the HTC hardware which are made with good coordinate due to the fact they are making it for very long time, but still there is no compatibly between the HTC accelerometer and the Samsung one meaning I need to write 2 versions (or more) of the application. Look how good the introduction of signed drivers and the WHCL brought to the Windows.

8. Having over the air or even plain single point of distribution for firmware is great also, the reason XDA creates some many ROMs is basically due to the delay HTC release fixes first and new features second. This is for me the same as Windows Update (it was part of WM since 6.0 it was never used due to the item 5)

9. ActiveSync and Windows Mobile Device Center being replace, you won't see a me crying over it, they should have killed it since ActiveSync 4, version 3.8 was the last version that worth something

10. Just remember that this is my personal opinion and not an official view, some people may feel otherwise and they can keep holding their anachronistic views in the cave. You need to remember that more than 90% of the users are not developers or hardcore users and for them stable and easy to use device is a good thing, the rest of us will find way to go around the limitations like we always did.

Tomorrow afternoon Bram and myself are going to give a lecture on Sela Devloper Partice convension on the topic "Integrating Service Buses" which will explorer the Windows Azure Platform AppFabric.

In order to see who/how can enjoy the benefits of Service Bus and how can we use the in existing project you need to register to the convension (It is not too late) and come and see our amazing session and demos.

Ariel Ben Horesh – Live in PDC

Our own Sela Ariel Ben Horesh just gave a live demo on MEF in PRISM during Glenn Block session on Building Extensible Rich Internet Applications with the Managed Extensibility Framework in PDC09.

Kudos to Ariel

PDC09 – Day 2 – Keynotes – Live blogging

Last yesterday we are sitting in amazing place 8 row just in front of the stage creating a homorganic row of blue shirts (There is a power in numbers).

Even that this happened after an hour of the keynotes I need to put this first :

FREE LAPTOP !!!

Steven just Announced that we all going to get a FRESH NEW LAPTOP from Acer to all. The crowed just jumped out of their chairs for that. When we first come to the PDC we asked our self what will be the “Gift” this year, last year it was a external HD but this year MS come out and surprise us all.

And now back to the keynotes

Steven Sinofsky from Microsoft just come on stage and starting talking about development for Windows7.

Microsoft learned a lot from development of Windows7 :

• Solving the existing problems and add-on Innovation
• “Engineering 7” developers blog that was full with on going problems that the developers team encounter and very active dialog with the developers community from around the world.
• Ecosystem readiness – Vista was pre-mature for the market, the HW wasn’t ready (Drivers and Performance)
• Software Quality And Windows Error Reporting – Online reporting from problems during the Beta and RC, Helped the development and the readiness of the Eco-Systems – Note – I wish we could do something like that but I guess you need to be large enough to make people opt-in to this type of telemetry collecting.

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As part of the learning progress Microsoft learned that most people don’t hold the latest and greatest computer hardware and all of the demos are shown in a variety of computers

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Internet Explorer 9

as part of the commitment of MS to make sure that IE won’t set a standard (like IE6 did) but to comply with the world wide web standards a new release of IE9 comes :

• Standards – HTML 5, ACID3
• Performance – JavaScript improvements – IE9 is as fast as any other browser beta out in the field.
• Round corners boarders for IE
• Hardware assist rendering without change in the Website (Direct2D / Direct Write) this is amazing change that allow the web browser to take advantage of the hardware abilities that it runs on. The main change is again that NO CHANGES were done on the website.

Scott Gu

Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight, All of Silverlight 3 that was released 4 months ago with Expression Blend3 and Sketchflow.

Some demos displayed with sporting websites with DVR support and instendt slow motions. Victoria Secret Fashion show is going to broadcast in Silverlight3 and so on the little sport event that called Winter Olympic. 

When Silverlight3 was aannounced on July 2009 Silverlight had an Install base of 

Today less than 5 months after Silverlight got

Silverlight4

Tons of new features in Silverlight4

Accessing camera and microphone supporting your local hardware.

New pixelshader built in the engine

new IIS Smooth Streaming – making sure that the amount of data streamed from the server to the browser is based on the real time state of the network and the client application.

Silverlight media experience on CodePlex.com

This is already supports iPhone and any other non natively supported browsers and devices.  just changing a single checkbox on the IIS admin applet.

Live Demo – Crash, Stott tried to display the new feature on iPhone and had to switch 4 devices before it worked (“please, please said Scott”)

Other Amazing New Feature and some of them are way overdue :

1. 

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   Printing !!!
2. Rich Text
3. Clipboard Access, Selecting text from Data grid can work to Excel
4. Right Click
5. Mouse Wheel
6. Implicit Styles
7. Drag/Drop
8. Bidi & RTL
9. HTML hosting – Use the HTML content as brush to paint any Silverlight control
10. Commanding MVVM
11. New Controls
12. Share Assemblies Across SL and .Net4
13. UDP Multicast support
14. REST Enhancements
15. WCF Improvements – TCP Channel Support
16. WCF RIS Services

Scott Hanselman

Scott replace Scott and started showing off a live demo of the new RIA services and some off the new features of Silverlight4

Back to Scott

Scott Gu come back to stage and showed off some new feature like :

1. 

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   Trusted Application – Running outside of the sandbox
2. Accessing Windows API
3. Microsoft Office interoperability 
4. Performance - Twice as fast, 30% faster startup and New profiling support
5. Still 10 second install process

Schedule

Beta – Now Available – silverlight.net

Release – before Q2 2010

Conclusion

Today keynotes gave us a better feeling than yesterday, Maybe this is just me but this happen also last year with the Windows7 annoucement.

We heading out to pick up our new Toy.

This was a Shared post by Alex G and Myself

PDC09 – Day 1 Summery

Last night I come back to the hotel from the convention center around 19:00 and waited for the Israeli delegation dinner to start at 21:00, without understanding how I woke up at 7:00 the next day and missed a hell out amazing steak dinner leaded by Guy B from Microsoft IL.

I got 3 posts waiting for final editing that I may release today on DirectX 11 Direct2D, SQL Server Spatial Data Types and .Net Micro Framework (Amazing Staff) so stay tuned.

I’m going to have a session on this topics on the on coming SDP (Sela Developers Practice)

PDC09 – Day 1 – Keynotes with Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia – Live blogging

I'm sitting on the 8th row in the center in-front of the stage with 3 other coworkers from Sela waiting for Ray Ozzie to come up and started talking about S+S and the flow of changes that come since talking about Windows Azure and Office Online / Services.

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The main topic for today keynote is cloud computing and the connection of multi platforms like Desktop/Netbook/Phone/TV to the cloud and its services. Looking for seamless multi screen experiences that is based on the web connectivity.

Ray keep dropping hints for Windows Phone (used be Windows Mobile) and what to expect in MIX2010 around April 2010.

Ray talked about MS commitment to the browsers war, Still putting alot of strenght in pushing IE as the main platform with Silverlight for all platforms including Windows Phone

Next the CEO of Seesmic come to show the new version of their application which is based on Silverlight 3.0 speaking about the time they saved as small company by developing in Silverlight and Managed environment and by that dropping Adobe AIR platform and releasing today their full Silverlight version.

Azure Advances

Azure is maturing into production and as part of that all existing CTP programs are starting to close and would terminate by Jan-2010. Major part of this set is the introduction of the Azure Data Centers.

Data Centers

Azure data center is shifting from Beta to Release mode and currently there are 6 data center worldwide with 2 in North America, 2 In Europe and 2 the far east (Asia).

SQL Azure

SQL Azure is now fully evolved DB that allow the developer to use it as if he had an instance running localing on the machine with connection to Excel for example.
Another new feature is the ability to mount a BLOB data file as VHD to the virtual machine and using Windows Azure BLOB support.

WordPress

Automattic CEO that built the OpenSource WordPress framework come on stage to show up WordPress running under Windows Azure. Automattic transferred their backbone from Linux/PHP/Apache dedicate machines to Windows Azure environment running WordPress platform.
Fail blog owner come and showed how today they can handle a large peek in demand without the need to add new hardware to the backbone and receiving the performance just by changing the configuration file of the Azure site.

“Dallas”

Code name for data catalog with uniform discovering/exploring and using data This new codename is part of SQL Azure. This is a way for developers and companies to share and sell their data to other parties.

“Dallas” Data Explorer

Allow a developer to use and process the data without the need to understand the structure and start using it immediately. By using ADO.Net data services (a.k.a ASTORIA or now O.Data) allowing us to create a data proxy on the fly and add new data sources and export it directly to your application.

A very nice demo of accessing a public domain data from NASA, using the Mars Pathfinder 3rd pictures and creating a viewer application that digests that data with less than 15 rows of code.

Shared post by Alex G and Myself

Part 1 of first PDC Keynote…

First Day in PDC09 – My Session List

One of the things I learn last year on PDC08 is to make sure you got the list of session and backup sessions (in case the first priority is full or boring…) in advance. The LA convention center is huge complex and not preparing this in advance is a major cause of leg aches from running all over the place.

This map is not to scale …

Anyway here is a list I compiled for tomorrow, I actually still need to narrow it down as I have time slots with 3 and 4 session that looks promising…

I marked my first priority in RED

PDC09 Here We Come

Tomorrow is the big day, PDC 2009 officially begin and we 20 people from Sela are already in the heat of things for the last couple of week.

Tomorrow morning we all going to sit in the first keynote from Ray Ozzie & Bob Muglia at 8:30am PST (Which means 6:30pm for the people in Israel). This keynote is going to be stream live using IIS7 and Silverlight and based on previous experience with Microsoft the bandwidth will be enough.

So make sure you have Silverlight installed on your computer (and shame of you if it’s not installed yet) and join us the hear it live with 10,000 other geeks and see what’s the future of development holds.