Silverlight for Windows Mobile announced on march 2010?

I’m just guessing, but Gerry O’Brien writes on his blog that the Las Vegas March 2010 Mix 2010 will be about “Microsoft's web platform and tools such as Windows Mobile, Silverlight, Expression, and ASP.NET”.

The fact is Mix 2010 usually is a Web-centric event. Plus Silverlight for Windows Mobile has been under developement (and late) for quite a while. One might guess that Mix 2010’s big announcement could be Silverlight for Windows Mobile.

We’ll see on March 15 whether that was a smart guess... :-)

Edit: Christophe Lauer tells me that Scott Guthrie already twitted about that past yersterday. Worse even: I wasn’t following Scott on Twitter. I feel ashamed!

Standard deviation in Silverlight using LINQ

For a security feature in a Silverlight project I needed to compute the standard deviation of a series. Googling for it I quickly found a code sample, but it dates from the days before LINQ, which makes it 70 lines-long.

Thanks to LINQ, you can write a method that computes a standard deviation with only 3 lines. It works with Silverlight 2 (and 3) and with whatever .NET 3.5 application (WPF, ASP.NET, ...). Here’s my code:

using System;
using System.Data.Linq;

public static class SecurityMaths
{
    public static double StandardDeviation(this IEnumerable<double> data)
    {
        double average = data.Average();
        var individualDeviations = data.Select(num => Math.Pow(num - average, 2.0));
        return Math.Sqrt(individualDeviations.Average());
    }
}

Note that I defined my method as an extension method, so that it can be used just like the Average LINQ method. Which means you can use it that way:

double[] numbers = new double[] { 2,4,4,4,5,5,7,9 };
double average = numbers.Average();
double standardDev = numbers.StandardDeviation();

What a clean code: it’s almost as obvious as the mathematical definition of the standard deviation. Thanks a ton, LINQ!

MCPD Windows Developer 3.5

Here are another two in my passed certifications series: MCDP Windows Developer 3.5 and MCTS Windows Forms 3.5. My full list of certifications is there.

6 certifications .NET 3.5 passed in a year right from their first day out, so now I can show off my expertise.

MCPD ASP.NET 3.5

I’m now a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer, ASP.NET 3.5 Applications. Together with my previous certifications, that makes it up to prove my proficiency in ASP.NET 3.5, AJAX, WPF, Silverlight 2, ADO.NET and Windows Forms.

What makes me especially proud is that I had to answer the questions for this certification in half the time allowed since I did it during TechEd Barcelona and had to go back and take my shift.

Want to see which certifications I have? It’s on my site – or just go and grab my Microsoft official transcript.

Framework 3.5 and .NET Configuration Tool

When you install Visual Studio 2008 on your machine, you don't get the .NET Framework Configuration tool. You can still use caspol.exe and other command-line configuration tools, but in order to visualize Code Access Security trees I believe a GUI tool is better...

Well,  it's easy to get it back: just install the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SDK. Yep, 2.0. Want more info about that? It's here.

Microsoft helps us break their own limitations

If you're evaluating Visual Studio 2010 as I am, you may have noticed that Visual Studio 2010 won't run beginning January 1st. That's a time limit built into the software.

Instead of providing us with a fixed VHD, Microsoft simply explains how we may go around the software's time limits - sort of like a neighbor teaching me how to break through his house.

In any case, even if those steps lengthen the already long VHD installation process, thanks to Microsoft for letting us have a look at this CTP so early in their development lifecycle.

TechEd sessions from Barcelona

I was at TechEd Europe developers edition, and I wrote down summaries of the sessions I went to. They're in French, but you can still have them automatically translated...

• Keynote
• Developer and Designer: working together using WPF or Silverlight
• .NET My Services
• Silverlight 2 for Mobile Devices
• Creating composite WPF and Silverlight applications
• SQL Server Compact Edition
• Visual Studio 2010: the joy of writing code
• Using WPF for better and worse
• Tips n' tricks for cool Silverlight applications

Note: those are my notes for what was said. They don't reflect my personal point of view about the technologies mentioned.