• MSN Money App - Commodities tab not working
• MSN News Web - Breaking News stream not loading
• MSN Sports App - I want to pin my favorite team
• MSN Weather App - Manual and automatic refresh

Fixed on 4.6.169.0:

• All - Content loading slowly for users in China
• All - "An Error Occurred, Please Refresh" when refreshing
• Money, News - Can't disable notifications
• Money - Russia Rouble doesn't display symbol
• Sports - Last Column in Standings table is cut off
• Weather - Lots of cities are missing

Fixed if you have Windows 10543 or higher:

• All - Some web news fail to load
• Weather - Map doesn't load

Fixed in our end, no need for you to update:

• Weather - No data for China after 10/19
• News - Service not available starting 10/22

While reading your feedback, I saw someone having issues with adding back a section. Particularly, he/she removed the "Money" section from the Home Page accidentally and couldn't get it back.

Well, in case this happens to someone else... Here is how to do it!

1. Click on the arrow at the top-right of one of the sections you still have there. For example, News.
2. Click "Add Section Below"
3. Click "Money" (or, whatever section you'd like to add) and "Done"
4. The page will reload. Your section should be back!

Every now and then, new sections get added to the list -particularly in events like Halloween, or elections, and depending on your geographic location. I recommend you check often :) !

Being involved in the Software business is like being involved in something magic. Have you watched Fullmetal Alchemist? Remember the "Equivalent Exchange" rule? Basically you can't create stuff out of nothing: you have to give something in exchange, something equivalent. If you want ice, you have to give up on water and heat. If you want a piece of furniture, you have to give up on some wood, plastic, metal, and hard work... There are, however, a few ways in which we can create stuff whose result greatly exceeds what we give in exchange. And Software is a great example. 

It's like having a superpower. Software and Information have been redefining the world at an incredibly fast pace for the last decades. That's sped up with the popularization of the internet, and then again as our devices become smaller, more portable, more social and more capable. A lot of attention is given to the economical and technical enrichment derived of that magic; but I'm afraid many engineers (not all of them, of course) forget paying attention to the social improvement potential of their superpowers...

Flash back to many years ago. Like, I don't know... 20 years ago, or something. When I was a little kid in Mexico City with an extreme hunger for knowledge. Knowledge back then (before the internet was popular, at least down there) came in the shape of books... But my family was neither fond of books nor in the position of acquiring them with enough pace to keep up with my hunger. "All right", my mom would say every 3 months or something, "we're going to the book store... I'm going to buy you 3 books, not expensive ones, and you better make them last 3 months"… They rarely were enough to keep me entertained for over a week. 

My salvation came in the form of a monthly subscription to a delivery service of public domain or almost-public-domain books. "The Little Prince", "Robinson Crusoe", "Frankenstein", et. al. They were relatively cheap, and a few years later you could find the whole collection for insanely cheap prices at some subway stations (Chabacano transfer, anyone :) ?). Then the internet came and, leaving aside the ridiculously slow dial-up connection speeds, everything was easier. But I wonder, haven't I known that something such as "public domain" books existed -wouldn't I be either downloading illegal books, or even worse, finding a way to entertain my mind with something less healthy? 

Lets' come back to the present, then. There I was, wondering what could I do now to improve, at least a little bit, the lives and success potential of people. I needed something that: 

1. Required the less possible amount of time, for reasons I'll explain in post #2, 
2. Could have an impact. In order to have an impact it would most likely need to be free for end users, from start to end, 
3. Preferably used the Windows Phone ecosystem for the most part, so It'd both reach the lower-end of the Spanish-speaking countries income bracket AND guaranteed that my buddy Chris would get involved :P , and, 
4. Was based in something that I felt passionate about, so I had a good motivation to keep up with it. 

So there we go... #2: Free. #3: Windows Phone. #4... Uhm... Coffee, dogs, my daughter, history, books, Canada, gardening... Wait wait, what did you say? Books? Free. Windows Phone. Books. Free Books for Windows and Windows Phone! 

And eureka! The idea was born. There, I have it! An app to search for free (public domain) books on the Windows and Windows Phone platform! Lets' get coding then, right now! 

Eh... Wait. Except for, you know, time :( … Well, I guess it'll have to wait... 

Hold on. Wasn't there a set of tools to create apps from the scratch, using data sources, web-based and that would end up basically giving you the app packages, super quickly? What was its name, Windows App Studio? All right, lets' check it out... 

And that's how this story continues in post #2: how was the app itself actually made :) . 

Since it was their last "lecture" before getting all into the action, and it was early Friday, I expected them to be a bit bored or something... Fortunately, it wasn't the case. Their energy, willingness to learn (and teach some stuff to this old salt ☺ ) was inspiring.

Although I'd delivered similar talks and workshops before, this is the first time it was not in Spanish. I really wish the language wasn't that much of a barrier anyway.

We talked about different topics, including:

• What's a Design Pattern
• Why are they important
• Why you want to learn Spanish if you travel to Mexico
• How to implement a factory in C#, using dragons, because dragons are cool
• The fact that I can't 100% remember Toothless/NightFury
• How to implement a builder in C++ (yup, believe it or not, I still remember a bit of C++)
• Some builders in the Android API (they aren't doing Android, but just because)
• C3PO as an adapter
• How being a father is, in some aspects, similar to software