To get started go into your “Settings” on your Windows Phone 8, once there swipe from right to left to get to the “applications” screen, then tap background tasks. You will see a list of applications the have a background task, and my rule of thumb is, if it does not have regular or wide tile on my start screen or the live tile data I don’t really care about then I block it to save battery time. Now you may ask “how do I block an application?”, as you can see below it is fairly painless to do - one in background task simply tap the app then tap block.

Let’s take a quick look at my battery usage to see how I have things performing.  As you can see below I have almost 3 days of usage from a single charge.

Now as a side note, if your mail supports push technologies like Office 365 or Outlook you don’t need to worry about the next comment.  if you use pop, you should set your POP email to check every 30 minutes to an hour, this will help increase your battery time as well.

Well I hope these suggestions help you, if you would like to know more please let me know.

Have you ever thought “I have a good idea for an application, however what can I get for it?” and/or “I would love to go to DevConnections, but I am not sure how to pay for it?”. Well, you are in luck. With the INETA Component Code Challenge for 2012, all you need to do is create an application using 2 approved controls from 2 approved vendors, create a video talking about your application, and submit it to our judging panel. Our judging panel, consisting of Bill Reiss, Nikita Polyakov, Matt Hidinger, and Greg Leonardo, will be looking for innovation and creativity in the use of approved controls. To read official rules click here.

So grab your computer and Visual Studio and GET YOUR CODE ON!

Disclaimer: INETA covers one conference ticket, hotel, and travel to the conference as is outlined in INETA’s travel policy. Please visit the site for additional rules.

If you would like to install the Universal Providers, because you did not select Internet based project in the MVC4 project selection screen.  You can run the Package Manager to install but doing the following:

And entering “Install-Package System.Web.Providers” at the PM> prompt.

Learn more here.

To secure a controller action you can use the [Authorize]  attribute to secure an action or the controller itself.  If you use just the [Authorize] attribute, all you are really saying is you don’t want anonymous users to access the controller or action.  You can further define this by adding Roles or Users to the [Authorize] attribute, which is the authorization part of security in MVC3.

Now let’s talk about site attacks.

Cross-Site Scripting, which are defined as cookie theft, malware downloads, account hijacking, and modify content to name a few.  This is controlled by the underlying framework, however you can use [AllowHtml] attribute to the model property you would like to allow Html to flow through with minimal risk.

The Anti Cross Script library can be used to help sanitize the Html.

Cross site request forgery can be combated with the @Html.AntiForgeryToken() on your form declaration and ValidateAntiForgeryToken attribute on the post destination action in the controller.

Example:
In the View form definition.

[sourcecode langauge="csharp"]
@using (Html.BeginForm("Contact", "Home")) {
@Html.AntiForgeryToken()
@Html.ValidationSummary(true)
[/sourcecode]

In the Controller Action

[sourcecode langauge="csharp"]
[OutputCache(NoStore=true, Duration=0)]
[ValidateAntiForgeryToken]
public ActionResult Contact(string message = null)
{
EmailModel email = new EmailModel();
ViewBag.Message = message;
return View(email);
}
[/sourcecode]

Hopefully this give some insight into security options with MVC3, I will follow this up with MVC4 here soon.

I asked myself, why is architecture important?

Like everything else to me it is a process and with that it has defining characteristics.  Some of the main issues that seem to get focused on is acronyms and perceptions.  What I mean by that is acronyms have different meanings to different industries – they also seem to overlap.  Like a house, software needs a strong foundation to build on and without it everything built on top of it is at risk – do we really need to concern ourselves with what we call it.  Sometimes I think quite a few great discussions get last with acronyms and there usage

With that what should the goals of Architecture be?

The main focus should be bridging the gap between business requirements and technical requirements by understanding the software’s use cases and working out ways to implement them.

Well then, what key principles should an Architect consider?

• Instead of building to last, build to change.
• To reduce risk and model to analyze.
• Use visualization as a collaboration tool.
• Work to identify key engineering decisions.

With emergent architecture try using a more iterative or agile approach to help minimize risk of change throughout the process.

So, to answer the main question without a strong foundation you simple end with a house of cards, that is difficult to deploy, modify, manage, and support.  While architect by nature is conceptual, without walking that mile or suffering through a bumpy foundation – how do you really know what foundation to build?

Have you ever thought “I have a good idea for an application, however what can I get for it?” and/or “I would love to go to DevConnections or Tech•Ed, but I am not sure how to pay for it?”. Well, you are in luck. With the INETA Component Code Challenge for 2012, all you need to do is create an application using 2 approved controls from 2 approved vendors, create a video talking about your application, and submit it to our judging panel. Our judging panel, consisting of Bill Reiss, Nikita Polyakov, Matt Hidinger, and Greg Leonardo, will be looking for innovation and creativity in the use of approved controls. To read official rules click here.

So grab your computer and Visual Studio and GET YOUR CODE ON!

Disclaimer: INETA covers one conference ticket, hotel, and travel to the conference as is outlined in INETA’s travel policy. Please visit the site for additional rules.

After some troubleshooting I found that install the following applications through the Microsoft Web Platform Installer, the issue was corrected.  I also verified this with Kevin D. Wolfe - as he had the same issue – thanks Kevin:

1. IIS 7 Recommended Configuration (Good to clean up IIS installs)
2. Application Request Routing 2.5

Anyway happy Rock, Paper, Azure!, follow the link for more info or to compete.