Getting free advertising for WP7 apps

If you've got apps in the WP7 UK marketplace you have the chance to be included in the Nokia and Microsoft ad campaign, more info can be found here. We (Rich, Nick & I) had FINDaPAD put forward - thanks Matt.

The ad campaign started a couple of days ago and we're being featured with an in-app banner and entry on the app highlights in the marketplace:

We're already seeing great results, our daily download rates for the app have tripled in the first 2 days of the campaign :)

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Implementing a busy indicator using a visual overlay in MVVM

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WPF tips & tricks: Dispatcher thread performance

Not blogged for an age, and I received an email last week which provoked me back to life. It was a job spec for a WPF contract where they want help sorting out the performance of their app especially around grids and tabular data. I thought I'd shared some tips & tricks I've picked up along the way, these aren't probably going to solve any issues you might be having directly, but they might point you in the right direction when trying to find and resolve performance issues with a WPF app. First off, performance is something you shouldn't try and improve without evidence, and this means having evidence proving you've improved the performance - before & after metrics for example. Without this you're basically pissing into the wind, which can be fun from a developer point of view but bad for a project :) So, what do I mean by ' Dispatcher thread performance '? The 'dispatcher thread' or the 'UI thread' is probably the most ...

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