One question I get asked immediately is about the availability of the apps and marketplace. There are plenty of apps and here is how you can find more about the available apps.

From the web:

Bing visual search has a WP7 app page that shows all the apps. From here you can browse the various apps available for WP7, find the newest app, most downloaded etc.

Here is the URL: http://www.bing.com/visualsearch?g=wp7&qpvt=Windows+Phone+7+Apps&FORM=Z9GE43#

From the phone:

Obviously you will go to the marketplace in the phone to find the list of apps. When you are in “Marketplace”, click the “Search” button and you can search within the marketplace.

Happy app searching!

Last week Don and I blogged more details about the Symposium here and here and Michael kicked off a new series called Behind the Curtain with a discussion about upcoming p&p events including the Symposium for Episode 1 and followd it up with a discussion on p&p planning for Episode 2.

We are making good progress in locking down the agenda and speakers for the p&p Symposium. Here is a quick recap of what we have planned for the event:

- 3 half a day technical workshops (Attendees can choose 1 workshop to attend which is included in the event registration)

- Windows Azure Guidance

- Enterprise Library and

- Prism

- We have a great line up of keynote speakers for this year’s event:

Robert C. Martin	Emma Williams	Jason Zander	Charlie Kindel	Yousef Khalidi

- We have 20+ technical sessions planned with speakers from p&p team, other Microsoft product teams and industry leaders. We also have time set aside for open space discussion through out the event. In addition, we will have ask the experts luncheon which will be a great venue to bring your hard questions to the speakers and team members.

Coding Game – We are working on the details right now for this exciting coding game night. Stay tuned for more details.

Here is picture from Don’s whiteboard with the tentative plan/schedule. We will be posting the session titles/abstracts shortly here. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ff797017.aspx)

Where are the attendees registered so far are from?

Great to see that we have attendees coming from 10 countries. That is based on who has registered so far. See the chart below for breakdown of the attendees by countries. Register now and be part of this truly international event.

Early Bird Registration:

Register Now before we run out of the early bird registrations. Only 7 days and limited # of seats left. Or you can take advantage of the 5 for 4 offer.

It’s $699 if you register on or before August 31st.  This price includes the workshop and 4 days of sessions. That is what I call a deal!

See you all in Redmond at the p&p Symposium!

Every fall patterns & practices team hosts an annual p&p event at Microsoft Redmond Campus. This year’s event called “p&p Symposium” is being held Oct 18th-22nd 2010. This year’s event has got a new name and a new price (it’s only $699 before Aug 31st and $999 after that) among many other exciting new improvements. Here is a quick run down of what this event has in store.

Half a day workshops:

On Oct 18th afternoon, there will be three workshops that attendees can choose from on the following topics:

- Windows Azure Guidance

- Enterprise Library and

- Prism

Keynotes:

We have an amazing line up of Microsoft technical leaders keynoting this year’s event and they will be joined by a leading authority on Agile development.

Here are the keynoters:

Technical Sessions:

This year’s event will include 20+ technical sessions, open space discussions, ask the experts luncheon and more. Don Smith just posted a blog with more details about the sessions that are being planned. Stay tuned for more information as we lock up the agenda.

We will have sessions covering the following areas:

• Web
• Windows Azure
• Windows Phone 7
• SharePoint
• Client
• Enterprise Library
• Agile Practices and
• more

Parties and Goodies:

Of course. It wouldn’t be complete without parties. Would it? We are planning a reception on Oct 19th and an attendee party on Oct 21st. We will also have giveaways. We will post more information on the goodies shortly.

Register Now!

It’s $699 if you register on or before August 31st and take advantage of our limited number of early bird seats. This price includes the workshop and 4 days of sessions. That is what I call a deal!

See you all in Redmond at the p&p Symposium!

I will write a detailed post later about the trip (including the weekend spent in Croatia).

As promised I want to post the deck from the “p&p Keynote” talk. The objective of this talk is to introduce few of the p&p guidance assets that helps developers to:

- Make the right design decisions

- Apply common patterns and proven practices and

- Address cross cutting concerns.

Here is the link to the deck:

patterns & practices for Application Development

Cheers!

NT Konferenca, Slovenia (http://www.ntk.si/) – May 24th – 27th 2010.

When Bostjan from Microsoft DPE, Slovenia asked me a few months back about speaking at the conference in Slovenia, I had no knowledge of the IT community in Slovenia. Little did I know about the size of this community. NT Konferenca will be attended by over thousand attendees including architects, developers, project managers, technical leaders and IT managers. I am very eager to visit Slovenia and present the “patterns & practices” keynote. I am also looking forward to meeting with several customers and partners during this visit.

Dev Summit, Sweden (http://cornerstone.se/sv/Event/DevSum/2010/Seminarier/PAG/) – June 1st and 2nd, 2010

Several months back Dag, Robert and Johan from Microsoft, Sweden and I talked about hosting a p&p event in Sweden. They came back with a plan to integrate this with the Developer Summit in Stockholm and that’s what we are doing. This is a great opportunity for us to engage with the developer and architect community in Sweden. We will be presenting on various topics including “p&p for application development”, “application architecture”, “cloud patterns”, “enterprise library” and more. Looking forward to speaking at this event and meeting with customers and partners in Sweden.

If you are attending either of these events, please find me and say “hi”, then I will know someone is reading my blog (other than my kids, it’s mandatory bed time reading for them:) ). It is going to be a busy and fun two weeks. Hopefully the “ash cloud” from the volcano won’t alter our travel plan. Fingers crossed for that.

It’s going to be lot of flying for me in the next month and a half. I come back from Sweden on the 3rd of June and fly back to India (mostly for vacation) on the 10th of June. I better get used to cabin pressure, peanut/pretzels and flight food.:)

Follow p&p on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-patterns-practices/215746618355

Follow p&p on twitter: @mspnp

Cheers!

Congratulations to the VS team on the launch of VS 2010 yesterday. If you missed the launch keynote yesterday, you can watch it on demand here.

There are tons of demos, hand-on labs and presentations on VS 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. You can download the training kit here.

VS 2010 ALM Book from Wrox:

I had the privilege of working with Mickey, Brian and Martin on this book. This book was released last week, just in time for the product launch. Two chapters from this book are available online.

- Chapter 14 – Manual Testing

- Chapter 21 – Team Foundation Build

- Table of Contents

Happy Reading!

In Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 you will find a new diagram type called “Layer Diagram” using which you can represent your system into logical grouping of components into separate layers.

We just made available a small VSIX package that takes the canonical layer diagrams from the Application Architecture Guide and makes them available in Visual Studio. You will find the “Application Architecture Guide Layer Diagrams” VSIX package here.  It’s marked “pre release” at this time. We will be posting a final release shortly after the release of Visual Studio 2010.

What’s in this package?

This package contains layer diagrams for the following five application types from the Application Architecture Guide:

- Web Application

- Rich Internet Application

- Rich Client Application

- Services Application and

- Mobile Application.

Once you download and install this VSIX package, restart Visual Studio Ultimate 2010. To see the layer diagrams in action, create a new project of type “Modeling Project” and add a new layer diagram to the project. Now you will notice a new node in the toolbox labeled “ Microsoft Application Architecture Guide 2nd Edition” with 5 layer diagrams as shown in Figure below:

Drag any one of these layer diagrams to the design surface to get started. Figure below shows the layer diagram for Web application as seen in the Application Architecture Guide.

Happy Modeling!

Eugenio, Scott and several members from our team have just started working on a project that will take an iterative approach to provide scenario based guidance for Windows Azure. Scott wrote an excellent blog post detailing our plan.

Excerpts from Scott’s blog post:

The program will follow three major themes:

1. Moving to the Cloud
2. Integrating with the Cloud
3. Leveraging the Cloud

These themes will allow us to categorize the scenarios that we will be delivering. Most of the scenarios are challenges that customers face today. And as we progress the program forward we will have more scenarios. The following is a simple picture of our plans on delivering on this project.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

One of the questions we get asked is around the availability of Enterprise Library for Windows Azure. As Scott explains in his blog, that is one of the first thing the team is tackling. We are in the process of validating and identifying any changes that’s needed to get Enterprise Library to work on Windows Azure. We will share more information on this shortly.

Quick links:

• Windows Azure guidance project on Codeplex: http://wag.codeplex.com/ – Not live yet.
• p&p Developer Center: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/practices/default.aspx
• Join us on Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Microsoft-patterns-practices/215746618355
• Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mspnp

Thanks!

Check out http://apparchguide.ms/ where you can download the whole guide or individual chapters.

Let us know your feedback on this guide and the localized version. What other p&p guidance we should consider localizing? Share your thoughts. This help us prioritize.

p&p on Facebook:

Stay in the know about the new releases, web casts, channel 9 videos and events from p&p by becoming a fan of p&p page on Facebook.

Happy Reading!

Tool tip: I use http://www.microsofttranslator.com/ to translate text or a site with URL.

Excerpt from Grigori’s blog post:

We are very excited about the improvements we’ve made to the overall Enterprise Library architecture [link to blog] and configuration experience, both of Enterprise Library and Unity (with new configuration tools, fluent interface and IntelliSense support with new schemas). We also focused on making Enterprise Library easier to extend. Our Enterprise Library Contrib community has been active releasing additional providers and new blocks. We expect many more contributions to be added there, thus enriching the developer’s toolbox of available components, and helping us realize the vision of Enterprise Library – to speed up software development!

Links:

Enterprise Library v5.0 Beta 1 : http://entlib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=EntLib5%20Beta1

Unity v2.0 Beta 1: http://unity.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Unity2%20Beta1

If you haven’t already done so, check out the developer guide for Enterprise Library. I had a chance to review and provide feedback on the guide. http://entlib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=EntLib5%20Developer%20Notes&referringTitle=Home

p&p on Facebook:

Stay in the know about the new releases, web casts, channel 9 videos and events from p&p by becoming a fan of p&p page on Facebook.

Microsoft patterns & practices

Happy programming with EntLib and Unity!