Arranging controls on a user interface in a flexible manner is key to building successful applications.  Silverlight 2 provides three main controls that can be used for layout management:

I started working on a Windows Mobile application on Vista and couldn’t get the emulator to sync property with the Mobile Device Center.  I’d synced device emulators long ago on XP with ActiveSync but just couldn’t get it working like I wanted on Vista.  I had the different 6.0 and 6.1 SDKs installed, had the Cellular Emulator working perfectly with the device emulator but couldn’t sync to save my life.  I needed to move over a C++ dll that needed to live in the device emulator’s Windows directory.  After a lot of searching it turns out that all I had to do was enable DMA in the connection settings for the Mobile Device Center as shown next:

Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying out the Sprint Instinct touch screen phone to see how I liked it.  I wrote my initial review here and posted some tips and tricks on using the device here.  The poor browsing experience on the Instinct finally led me to take it back to the store yesterday so I’m back to using my PPC-6700 until Sprint releases the HTC Touch Diamond (or Pro) later this year. 

In a previous post I discussed some of the pros and cons of the new Sprint Instinct phone that I recently purchased.  I’ve had the phone for a few weeks now and still like it a lot overall.  It’s not nearly as flexible as the PPC-6700 phone I had previously when it comes to installing software (a lot of applications like Opera Mini won’t work due to a virtual keyboard issue that Sprint/Samsumg will hopefully fix), but it shines in many areas where my Windows Mobile phone was severely lacking such as visual voice mail, GPS navigation, flexible touch screen interface, business search (with GPS positioning), plus more.

There’s been a lot of hype over Apple’s new iPhone 3G coming out on July 11th as well as Sprint’s recently released Instinct phone.  I was originally going to switch over to AT&T and get the iPhone but it meant switching my wife over as well since we need to be able to call each other without using plan minutes.  After evaluating the cost of switching carriers we decided it wasn’t worth it since we’d have to pay $400 to get out of our Sprint contracts and my wife recently bought the PPC-6800 Windows Mobile phone which wasn’t cheap.  We’ve been very happy with Sprint’s network in our area as well.

Silverlight provides several different ways to access data stored in remote locations.  Data can be pulled from Web Services and RESTful services and even pushed from servers down to clients using sockets (see my previous articles on sockets here, here and here).  Silverlight 2 Beta 2 introduces another way to push data from a server to a client using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and HTTP.  WCF's support for duplex service contracts makes this possible and opens up unique opportunities for pumping data to Silverlight clients.  In this first part of a two part series I'll demonstrate how a WCF push service can be created and cover the steps to get a sample service up and running.  The second article will focus on the client and show how to communicate with a WCF duplex service and listen for data that's sent.