MS suggests you make sure you have all updates installed for all of your WM6.x apps before the Market Place is taken down, although I’m not sure how often those apps have been getting updated recently.  They also remind us that hard-resets apparently wipe our games and apps…

Not that I personally ever used the WP6.x Market Place, but this may be the final eulogy of the WM OS we used to love modifying so much.

A moment of silence please.

 REMINDER: Windows Marketplace for Mobile 6.x to be Discontinued

May 2, 2012

Dear Windows Mobile 6.x customer:

Microsoft is discontinuing the Windows Marketplace for Mobile service for Windows Mobile 6.x. Please review the details below to familiarize yourself with the changes:

Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace Service To Be Discontinued

Beginning May 17, 2012, the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service will no longer be available. Starting on this date, you will no longer be able to browse, buy or download applications directly on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone using the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace application and service. Please note: The service discontinuation date has changed to May 17, 2012.

Applications and games acquired from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service installed on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone will continue to work after the service is discontinued on May 17, 2012. However, additional downloads of these applications and games from the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service will no longer be available.

Take Action

Microsoft recommends you review the applications or games installed on your Windows Mobile 6.x phone and install any available updates in advance of the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service shut-down on May 17, 2012.

Please note: All phone data, including applications acquired through the Windows Mobile 6.x Marketplace service, data and user-specific settings, will be deleted from your Windows Mobile 6.x phone in the event that your phone is wiped or “hard reset.” Any data on a removable storage card, if present, will also be deleted if your phone is wiped or “hard reset”.

Windows Mobile applications and games that are compatible with Windows Mobile 6.x may still be available directly from their developers or via third-party marketplaces.

Thank you for your continued support of Windows Phone.

-The Windows Phone Team

Ready for a new phone? Explore the latest Windows Phones – now with over 80,000 applications and games available!

What do you think about Wozniak’s comments? Is he just being truthful, or downright blasphemous?

Hello PPCGeeks Readers! What’s come through the mailbox is BIG, and we mean Real Big!

Through an anonymous contact, we’ve received several PDFs that include special Windows Phone 7 Development, Usage, and Customization Content.

The content is very large and includes a wide amount of information we have yet to completely unravel and detail upon, but some of the exterior facts are VERY promising.

Mentioned items include:

• Detailing of its architecture, everything from the specifics to graphs explaining basics
• Customization and Compatibility plans, including with Microsoft Silverlight, Xbox’s XNA system and network, and Microsoft Azure (A Cloud Service for Microsoft)
• Explanation of using and maintaining content on WP7 devices, such as internet browsing, connecting to the Cloud Network, Xbox Connections, etc. Included photo shows a flowchart that seems to detail the process of starting up your phone for the first time!

We have so much more to look into and are VERY excited to look into this, for now, a few photos to get your pallet wet!

So you have decided to download the Windows Phone Developer Tools in order to start developing applications for Windows Phone 7. You spend hours upon hours coming up with the greatest app ever developed to date. You decide to release it as shareware with the best licensing key algorithm that no one could ever crack. You start up a new website, spend hours making it look professional, and once you are happy with it, you decide to finally post your application. Within the first hour, 3000 people have downloaded your application, so figuring that 5-10% of those people will register the application; you start doing the math, and realize that it was all worth it. [Ed’s Note- Some MightyMike Rom’s experience 3ooo people downloading per second.]

The next day you decide to do a Google search on your application to see if Google has indexed your site correctly, but to your surprise, the top hit is a crack for your application. How could that be? You have spent way too many hours coming up with algorithms that would make NSA jealous for it all to be for naught.

This could and has happened to a lot of developers out there, but how does this happen? Well, this has to do with how Microsoft Visual Studio compiles .Net applications. In .Net applications, they are not really compiled to what you and I would consider a true .EXE file; instead, they are compiled to Common Language Infrastructure (CLI). So what is CLI you ask, CLI is a byte-code, like Java uses, so when you run the .Net application, it first uses a Just In Time (JIT) compiler to compile it for the computer or device it is being run on.

So know you’re asking, what’s wrong with CLI code? Well, with the correct application you can re-create the original code from the CLI. The code turns out to be very close to the original, with only minor differences. The application in question is .Net Reflector.

Your next question is why anyone would use this for good and not evil. Well, I had made quite a few changes in a program I maintain while deployed, compiled it, installed it on many machines, but forgot to back up the changes. My laptop was stolen after that, so I figured I had lost all that hard work, but I still had the install file. While developing ZURN for MightyMike, I was having wait cursor issues, and started researching why; well it had to do with the JIT compiler compiling the program prior to running. I kept reading about it, found .Net reflector, but that didn’t help me with Zurn at the time. However a few months later, someone needed me to fix a few problems in my application, so I had to go back to an earlier version, made the changes, but then remembered .Net Reflector, so after a few hours, I had all my other changes back in. It really was a life saver for me.

Now, how can you protect yourself from this very thing if you’re a programmer? Well, there are other applications for just that, they are referred to as Obfuscators. What they do is go through the CLI code, and rename every function and variable to simple names. For example, if you have a function called HelloWorld(String strText, String strTitle), it might change it to A(String a, String b). This does not change the actual function; it just makes it really difficult to follow. A really good example of one of these programs is Obfuscar, and it is open source, which always makes me happy.

Via the official Bing Twitter account, Microsoft has announced that the Bing mobile application for Windows Mobile has been updated to version 5.1.2010. No major changes are apparent in this update. To download the update, go via your mobile browser to m.bing.com/download or going into the application and selecting “Update Available”. Interestingly. this update is only for Window Phones that operate on the Sprint, T-Mobile, and AT&T networks. If you are a Verizon Wireless user, this update appears to not be for you.