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NYC Windows Phone User Group Winter Meetings: Mobile Analytics, Azure Data Market, VS vNext, & XNA Game Development

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WP7UG11-2011A little more than a year ago, in November 2010, I announced launch of a new Windows Phone User Group in NYC.  Ryan Finnesey, Boulos Dib, and Jon Westfall have been doing a great job of running the group since its inception after the launch of Windows Phone 7!

In recent months, they have helped organize some great activities like the December 2011 WP7 Hackathon in NYC. The group has covered some great topics related to Windows Phone development, and mobile development in general such as:

Winter 2012 Line-Up

The group has already scheduled a great line-up of talks for the winter months in the Big Apple.  I thought I’d share them here for a wider audience, but please visit the NYC Windows Phone User Group site for details and to join the group.  By joining the group (on Meetup.com), you can get e-mail notifications of future meetings and other group sponsored events.

WindowsPhone7January 16, 2012

Mobile exception monitoring and analytics in Visual Studio 11

Speaker: Sebastian Holst, CMO PreEmptive Solutions

Last December, at the ALM Summit in Redmond, WA, Microsoft disclosed that Visual Studio 11 will include an application analytics and incident monitoring solution. While the functionality works across all .NET frameworks, it has specific support for WP7 (Mango) and Windows Azure providing a unique view into the “whole mobile application,” not just the bits running locally on any given device.

This session will introduce the components included inside Visual Studio 11 and demonstrate the steps required to instrument distributed mobile applications and integrate them into your development process leveraging automated, rule-driven work item generation within TFS.

February 20, 2012

Visual Studio vNext for the Phone Developer

Join speaker Robert Palmer to learn more about what’s in Visual Studio “11” for mobile development.

February 27, 2012 (Bonus Meeting!)

Using the Windows Azure Data Market with Windows Phone 7

Speaker: Richard Dudley

The Azure Data Market can be a treasure trove of data sets, containing everything from baseball stats to mortgage data to compiled census data. Some of these data are free, while some carry a fee for use, and all of them utilize the Odata protocol.  In this session, we'll take a tour of the Data Market, review Odata, dig into the two ways of querying data, and discuss some strategies for not costing you a fortune.  Although this session focuses on Windows Phone 7, there is a great deal of overlap to Silverlight and WPF developers, too.

March 19, 2012

Windows Phone 7 Games with XNA

The XNA Framework is ready for you to leverage your existing .NET development skills to create fantastic games that you can publish today for Windows Phone 7 and 7.5, the PC, and the Xbox 360. But how do you get started? Come see how surprisingly easy it is to create your own games with XNA Game Studio starting at File > New Project with no previous game development experience required!

If you’re interested in mobile development in NYC, the Windows Phone user group is a great way to get engaged with the local community. Hope to see you at one of these upcoming meetings!