Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Microsoft launches MSDN Code Gallery for open-source sharing

Microsoft recently launched the MSDN Code Gallery for Microsoft employees and others to share code and software using the Microsoft Public License.  MSDN Code Gallery looks and feels very much like CodePlex, but Code Gallery lacks the TFS source control feature and developers can only publish their source code and binaries as releases.As ...

New job with Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem

I have accepted a new position within Microsoft with the Visual Studio Platform & Ecosystem team.  Rather than working on the .NET Compact Framework I will be working on "VS10".  I don't actually make the transition for a few more weeks, so I look forward to several more posts on NetCF topics before leaving...

Using the XmlSerializer as an XmlObjectSerializer with WCF

The Windows Communication Foundation introduced the new DataContractSerializer to replace the XmlSerializer in many scenarios.  The DataContractSerializer is faster than the XmlSerializer, but has certain limitations.  For example it does not support serializing an object's members as XML attributes.  When you write a WCF client that calls ...

.NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys RTW

The .NET Compact Framework 3.5 Power Toys have been released.  You can download them from here.Tools included in this package: Remote Performance Monitor and GC Heap Viewer – Provides real time counter data (ranging from Garbage Collector activity to type loading info) on a running NETCF application. The GC Heap Viewer feature ...

Provisioning smart devices: an introduction

A lot of questions on the MSDN forums center around how to customize a device or an app to prefer a specific network connection over another.  The correct way to accomplish this is by "provisioning" the device.  In fact a great many aspects of the device and the applications on it can be configured through 'provisioning' the device.&...

Trying out the iPhone

So I had the opportunity to try out the iPhone for a day.  Overall I was impressed, but there were some very basic features missing from many of the otherwise killer apps that I would greatly miss if I was to use the iPhone as my primary PDA and phone.  Here is a brief summary:Then of course there's the closed platform problem, and I...