While recently working on the live tile implementation for my Windows Phone 7 hobby project InTheKnow, I had a need to implement Unix Time Zone support using a TZ database. This list of Time Zones is widely used by Unix systems around the world as their source of Time Zone information. Sadly Microsoft’s .Net framework doesn’t have any support for this library – but like other parts of the framework that developers have found to be lacking, there is a library out there to fill the gap.

When users of Windows Phone 7 devices open up the marketplace application in the US, they are greeted by an Apple’esque pricing model that start at $0.99 cents – but what if you don’t live in the United States? Why aren’t we charged the equivalent US$0.99? As i discovered recently this disparity in pricing is beyond ridiculous. So is this just currency conversion or is it a bad joke that users are getting sick and tired of – let’s take a look.

So i seem to have stumbled across a bug in the Windows Phone 7 Live Tile update toast notification update API. The bug occurs while sending a tile update URL using toast notifications that are longer in length than 260 characters. While you may think this is a problem that only affects extreme/edge usage cases, in situations where you need to pull a tile from an SSL path that contains security keys or other query string parameter data and this data is longer than this 260 character limit, you come to a dead end.

If you’ve worked with Windows Phone 7 Live Tiles, you may have noticed a bit of a hole in the platform SDK’s functionality – the inability to programmatically update the current running applications tile without the push coming from a remote webserver. The purpose of this post is to show you that this is not the end of the world, and there is a way around this. 

I have recently had a couple of interesting discussions with a different people on twitter and “the real world” about the use of third party build dependencies such as unit testing frameworks, database versioning tools and other command line executables in your build. The topic of these discussions has been about where these dependencies should be located, inside your project, or installed on your build server.

While writing list navigation and search features in websites today there is a constant need to find/replace and play with query string elements, so that you can easily manipulate these mystical items while you’re carrying them around in your website’s URLs. I have a few little methods I’ve used over the years and carry with me project to project, and this post is putting them on the record for easy access later.

Last year I wrote a post on how to setup an ASP.Net HttpModule that detects and redirects mobile devices so that you can show a different version of your site to users browsing your site using whatever hot new mobile device is going around. Since then the lay of the land has changed a bit, so i thought it was time to reassess the solution i recommended and offer you a new updated one for 2011. The great thing about this solution is it’s a lot more future proof, so hopefully i won’t have to write another blog post next year.

Last week i had the awesome honour of being at a tech talk on Continuous Delivery by “the great” Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Evan Bottcher, put on by Thoughtworks here in Sydney. I have spent the last two years of my life evangelizing on the benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment to anyone who would hear me all on my own terms and entirely self taught in the dark. I have selected snippets and ideas from other peoples documented ways on how they achieve Continuous Deployment, but the experience of listening to pioneers in this space was a truly awesome experience.

These days IIS has so many bells and whistles installed that it can be hard to find the settings panel that does what you want it to do (or if you’re an IIS 5/6 guy like me you may just get lost in general some times). The one thing that is lacking as a feature in IIS is log file recycling. If you manage an IIS installation of any decent size, you’ll know first hand how quickly log files can fill up a server’s hard disk, and bring it to its knees if not managed properly – how do i take care of this?

SQL Express is pretty awesome as a light weight database server, and when Microsoft released it using the same database engine as the full version they did the world a huge favour. I have seen SQL Express in use on a lot of Virtual Private Servers & development boxes, but in most cases users don’t backup their databases regularly because of the missing scheduled jobs functionality that doesn’t ship in the Express version of Microsoft SQL Server. Like most limitations there is an easy way around this.