Lately, I have been busier than not. Normally this is a good thing but it has resulted in me neglecting this blog more than I would like. I have several topics in the works but the free time just hasn’t been available to wrap them up.

So, in the meantime, I’d like to start a new (hopefully) weekly feature. The idea is quite simple: a list of news and other things that I have encountered over the week that I feel might be of interest to readers. Here it is:

• 4 Free WPF Utilities I Use Every Day, that come with source!
  “Here are 4 WPF utilities I use almost daily, that also have the excellent property of coming with source-code included.” – [Learn WPF]
• Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide
  “Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide is a detail document highlighting the new features and capabilities of the Visual Studio 2010 product.” – [Microsoft]
• Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’
  “…Courier will function as a ‘digital journal,’ and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed” – [engadget]
• Break with the Past, Bright New Future
  “Windows Phone Application Development Platform build on XNA and Silverlight” – [Ozymandias]
• Microsoft open-sources clever U-Prove identity framework
  “U-Prove allows the creation of secure ID tokens, which are pieces of data that incorporate whatever information I need for a given task—but no more—along with cryptographic protection to ensure that they can’t be forged, reused, traced back to me, or linked to other tokens that I have issued.” – [ars technica]
• SQL Server 2008 R2 UNICODE Compression – what happens in the background?
  “The current implementation of ROW compression is very simple to understand; all columns are implicitly converted to variable length columns under the covers. I assumed that Unicode compression would be equally intuitive.” – [SQL CAT]

Right now seems like a great time to get into mobile development. Microsoft recently released their Mobile Marketplace along with Windows Mobile 6.5. There is even some fun to be had with game development on the new Zune HD. And, with luck, Windows Mobile 7 will be right around the corner.

So, a few month’s ago fellow Exceptional Geek Robert Fischer and I put together an article for Microsoft’s Coding4Fun blog titled Building a Full Featured Mobile Camera Application: C4FCamera.

In a nutshell, the article details the process of creating a simple Windows Mobile Camera application from start to finish. It uses C# and is targeted at those new to Windows Mobile development. But, it certainly can be fun to play around with at any skill level.

I am happy to report that we have received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from readers. And, we have received some great suggestions on extending the project even further. With that in mind, I am hard at work on crafting a follow-up article that will introduce some additional features as well as some more advanced mobile development concepts. No ETA as of yet, but keep I’ll keep you posted.

So, you should check out the article and let me know what you think.

Related Links:

• CodePlex Project