During a recent consulting, I helped a client to resolve his authentication issues with his existing Web application and Windows Phone application.
Using the existing MembershipProvider
If you have already an existing Web application and you want to extend it throughout a Windows Phone application you can use the existing System.Web.ApplicationServices for the authentication.
Austrian Provider A1 is giving away 360 XBOX 360 if you preorder a Windows Phone 7 Device.
What a start – I hope there will be a similar thing like when 6.5 was launched 
If you ever want to add a service reference to your Windows Phone 7 app, and fail with a message like:
Custom tool warning: No endpoints compatible with Silverlight 3 were found.
Please remember the following 2 simple actions to finally get your reference:
1) Silverlight only supports basicHttpBinding (default: wsHttpBinding) -> so change it in the web.config file
2) close your Visual Studio & reopen it again.
Now try to update your reference: ét voilà!
This worked for me. Bonne chance!
Last week Microsoft published the final version of the all new operating system Windows Phone 7.
Those lucky guys (yes, that’s me!) who own a prerelease of a WP7 phone, can update the phone’s OS to RTM. All the others just may uninstall the Developer Tools Beta, and install the RTM.
Final version ships with e.g. following controls:
- Panorama
- Pivot
- Map (yes, they included a silverlight control for bing maps!)
Upgrading from beta to the final version was quite simple, namespaces stayed the same. I only had to transfer my app from codeplex’s PanoramaControl to Panorama, and PivotControl to Pivot. And as far as I tested the app by now, MS also fixed some bugs (like refresh-bugs, ScrollViewer).
Links: Developer Tools, Windows Team Blog
If you are a developer, and own one of the prototypes, Microsoft gave away, you might want to reset the device, before showing it a potential customer:
Go to the main screen, settings, info.
On the bottom of the screen there’s the button to reset the device to factory settings.
How to find out, if your app is running in an emulator, or on a real device?
In July’s beta, Microsoft has moved this property from System.Environment to Microsoft.Devices.Environment namespace.
//enum DeviceType contains: Device, Emulator this.IsEmulator = (Microsoft.Devices.Environment.DeviceType == DeviceType.Emulator);
MS announced, that there will be no database available for 3rd party applications, like on windows mobile 6.5. Instead of using SqlServerCE the user shall use cloud computing or xml files to store data.
So I searched for alternatives, and found a very pretty proof of concept. This guy is using a modified version of csharp-SQLLite to manage a database in Isolated Storage. I tried it a few minutes ago, and although it has some performance issues yet, it’s working also with the beta release of Windows Phone 7 Development Tools.
Here’s the link: Mobile Development .
Thanks, Dan, you made my day!