Still tweaking the format a bit.

• List of SQL Compact 3rd party tools- just updated by ErikEJ.
• Labryinth Sample game for Windows Phone- from Pete Blois
• Outlook Mobile Update – Detailed info from the Exchange team; for WM 6.1 devices (WM 6.5 doesn’t need it)
• Fool’s Gold in Mobile?- An interesting perspective by Tomi Ahohen /via Carnival of the Mobilists 215
• Windows Phone 7 Series Copy & Paste drama, resolved eventually – Post from Long Zheng with some details. I’d also like remind the reader that Silverlight 3 doesn’t have c&p, so…
• WiFi offload vs femtocells- Dean Bubley has a great post on why WiFi offload will not always win over femtos.
• FCC’s Broadband Plan – Details & analysis from GigaOm.  Mobile broadband will save us all. Huzzah!
• Mobile social networking stats- UK stats show that it’s huge!

As some of my readers may know, I’m a big fan of the Mercurial distributed version control system, and I have it installed on all my dev machines and VMs.  I opened up http://mercurial.selenic.com tonight to pull down the Hg + TortoiseHg bits for a new VM and I was pleasantly surprised to see that Hg 1.5 and TortoiseHg 1.0 have been released (2010-03-06).  There are many important changes, so be certain to read the release and upgrade notes (and review the release planfor future release dates).

Hg 1.5 Release notes

Hg 1.5 Upgrade notes

THg 1.0 Release notes

Download TortoiseHg 1.0 + Mercurial 1.5 here  If you want just the Mercurial bits, go here.

Mostly MIX stuff this time…

• Learning Windows Phone Programming- A forthcoming book from O’Reilly with PDF sample
• MIX10 Session Videos – Available now as WMV, WMVHigh, or MP4.  Slides often available, too.
• Silverlight for Symbian – The beta version has been released at last. Check things at Nokia, too.
• csharp-sqlite for WP7 (using IsolatedStorage) - Crazy. And cool.
• Windows Phone 7 Series dev forum- now available.

Today at MIX 10, MIcrosoft announced details of its development story for Windows Phone 7 Series.  While it has been known since Mobile World Congress in February that Silverlight and XNA form the core of the development platform, no information had been released about the toolchain itself.

The toolchain is composed of:

Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone CTP
Windows Phone Emulator CTP
Silverlight for Windows Phone CTP
XNA 4.0 Game Studio CTP
Expression Blend 4 Beta
Expression Blend Add-In Preview for Windows Phone
Expression Blend SDK Preview for Windows Phone

You need to download only four things:

1) Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (contains the first four items in the list)

2) Expression Blend 4

3)  Microsoft Expression Blend Add-in Preview for Windows Phone

4) Microsoft Expression Blend SDK Preview for Windows Phone

Additional resources:

Windows Phone Developer Portal(includes links for documentation, developer guides, and code samples)

Silverlight for Windows Phone (includes links to a support forum for Silverlight for Windows Phone, documentation, and getting started videos)

Also check out this excerpt from a forthcoming Charles Petzold book and some learning material on Channel 9

Download the tools, read the dev guides, and dive in! 

Republishing this one again today; it didn’t show up on Saturday (or Sunday)due to technical issues.

• Broadband.gov – Info about the National Broadband Plan and a connection speed test (tip: run it using both Ookla and MLAB).
  
  
• 5 Alternatives to the iPad- via jkOnTheRun.com
• Xbox Live on WP7S Part 1 and Part 2 – good aggregation from pocketnow.com
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone – but no Zune HD support (that’s ok; it means interesting things to come for Zune)
  
  
• Shawn Hargreaves has two postson XNA Game Studio and Windows Phone that are good reads.

I have restarted my The Mobile Minute series tonight after a very sparse year of posting in 2009, and am nearly complete overhauling my blog (there may be some unavailable content/broken links this week).

I decided to pick up TMM right where it left off, and have decided upon a thrice weekly, minimum, publishing schedule.    I also have some other limited posting series in the works, and I’m looking forward to getting those published.

I’m sure that some folks are wondering why or what happened. In sum, the last few years have been a tough balancing of priorities, and I’m now able to put community involvement  back in the mix. I look forward to getting back into the community and sharing knowledge, which is something I truly enjoy.

• Kevin Tofel from jkOnTheRun posts some videos about the upcoming HP slate device.  Interesting how HP pushes the Flash/Air support in the second video.  This device does look very cool; I can’t wait until it ships!
• James Kendrik (the other half of the jkOnTheRun team) posts 5 Ways to Stretch Laptop Battery Runtime .  Most of these might seem obvious to the geek set, but I’d encourage you to pass this along to your friends and family.
• Charlie Kindel has posted a roundup of the most recent Windows Phone 7 Series videos.  Enjoy!
• To help you keep track of all the MIX tweets next weeks, head over to Marketplace and get the View MIX10 Tweets app that Kevin Wolf has published.  He has also published the WinMo Twitter Widget Starter KitCheck his blog post about it as well.
• ErikEJ shows us how COM (yes, COM!) can help us connect to SQL Server Compact from Silverlight 4.
• From last month, msmobiles.com published a piece by Joel Ivory Johnson listing available graphics APIs.
• Also from February, a great post by Mike Francis on the Windows Blog offering tips to help you improve your first time pass rate on submitting applications to Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
• The last February item I want to mention that you might have missed is that the Windows Mobile 6.5.3 DTK has been re-released.
• Nick Randolph has a great set of posts on working with OpenGL on Windows Mobile.  Start. Next. Next. Next.

The slides from my Introduction to Distributed Version Control with Mercurial grok talk at the January 2010 CINNUG meeting is available here (pdf).

Tonight at the Cincinnati .NET User Group (CINNUG) I will be giving a grok talk on distributed version control.  The featured speaker tonight is David Giard who will be talking about the Microsoft Extensibility Framework (MEF).   I hope to see you there!

Update:  You can find my presentation materials here.

I have been using Mercurial for a short while now, and wanted to share the contents of my .hgignore file for any other developers using Visual Studio with Hg (and Resharper).   You may download the file from here (rename from hgignore.txt to .hgignore), and here are the contents:

syntax: glob

*.suo
*.user
*.FileListAbsolute.txt
*\bin\*
*\obj\*
*.ncb
*.nlb
*.aps
*.clw
*.pdb
*.obj
*.exe
*.pch
*.vspscc
*_i.c
*_p.c
*.tlb
*.tlh
*.bak
*.cache
*.Cache
*.ilk
*.log
*.lib
*.sbr
*.scc
*.sig
_ReSharper*\*