Version of the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK has gone RTW get it here...

www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27570

There is some (unsurprising) confusion in the community about Windows Phone versions. There have been three releases of Windows Phone OS to date 7.0, 7.0.7390 and recently 7.5 (aka mango). There have been two releases of the Windows Phone SDK 7.0 and now 7.1. You build applications for Windows Phone 7.0 and 7.0.7390 using the Windows Phone SDK 7.0. To build applications for Windows Phone 7.5 you use the Windows Phone SDK 7.1. A case of the marketing guys wanting a greater differentiation 7.0 and mango than the developers?

After installing the 7.1 SDK I tried opening one of my existing Windows Phone applications, expecting it display a dialog asking me to upgrade to 7.1, no such dialog appears, I then looked in the project properties, for something extra items in the Platform drop down (not to be found). There was a bit of a head scratch and a google search...

How to: Specify a Target Version or Upgrade Projects for Windows Phone

You have to go to the Projects menu and select "Upgrade to Windows Phone 7.1", which I think is a little unorthodox.

When creating a new Windows Phone application, a dialog is displayed allowing you to select between Windows Phone OS 7.0 and 7.1 (the developers obviously don't agree with marketing). Selecting Windows Phone OS 7.1 does indeed create you apps for Mango aka Windows Phone 7.5.

Looking past these minor inconsistencies, Mango delivers a very long list of new goodies for developers. Let the fun begin!

In this post I discuss some new constructs introduced in C# 3.0 (released with .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008) - auto-implemented properties (aka automatic properties)

A new version of the Logic Check framework has been released. Logic Check is a framework for ASP.NET 2.0/3.5 used for providing simple easy to implement comment spam protection using text based logical captchas. It's available for download from the Downloads page.

For more information about the framework click here.

BlogBlocks is a library I've written used to blog on this site.

I started writing this library back in 2006 when there wasn't a whole lot of options around for ASP.NET 2.0 blog engines.

I've been working on this library in my spare time in-between work and life and have recently reached a small milestone - having completed a Pingback plugin for the library.

In this post I talk a little about the architecture of the library, why it's a little different to other libraries out there, and what my plans are for its future.

When doing automated builds you may encounter one of the following error messages:

• error MSB3021: Unable to copy file...
• TF10128... contains more than the allowed 259 characters.
  Or
• CS0006: Metadata file .dll could not be found

In this post I explain why a build may work perfectly in Visual Studio, but fail when built with the TFS automated build system.