I have been a professional developer for more than five years and in this time I have been working exclusively on (more or less) enterprise ASP.NET applications. In that time I have worked on a couple of Windows Services to do background tasks and a couple of migration tools but other than that I have no real world experience with either desktop or mobile development. I do not like the web as a platform for applications. I really like it as a platform for serving information (Wikipedia style) but it always seemed so wrong to me to build applications using a document format – like programming in doc + VB script for Word. Sadly in the relatively small city where I live there are not many options that pay well and have interesting projects so my whole career kind of naturally swung towards Web development. So I saved some money, quit my job, took another junior level part time job as a mobile developer with a severely reduced pay and I plan to develop some apps on my own. All of this because I do not like developing for the Web… Plus I want to have more time to play StarCraft...

   In this series of articles I will detail my experience developing my very first Windows Phone application.

Deep Purple's Jon Lord will not compose and play for us anymore. One of the pioneers who merged classical music and rock is now a Highway Star. He will never truly leave us but cancer is a bitch.

   I recently encountered a bug in the ASP.NET Web Forms project I was working on that I found quite interesting. Certain page had a list of items and an item can be selected in a master/detail fashion. All this is done with AJAX via an UpdatePanel. When the page is opened for the first time everything works fine but if the user selects an item and then refreshes the page the next item selection simply does not work. It throws event validation error and all this happens only in Firefox. All other browsers work like a charm...

   This is my second article giving tips for playing the wonderful Windows Phone game ARMED!. If you have not done so yet you should check part 0.

   This article will deal with some subtleties with the game's interface that can prove important in actual game. In competitive gaming execution is often more important than strategy and while ARMED! does not require sharp reflexes and good aim like Quake or accurate and fast multitasking like StarCraft there is still room for better execution...

   I love ARMED. It is a turn based strategy game currently exclusive for Windows Phone. I never expected a mobile game to be so cool and make me play it for so long. However I have a problem with it. It is not challenging anymore. I hardly hit anyone who can beat me on the ladder. At the moment I am writing this I occupy the first place and I have lost a total of five games (not counting all the cases I accidentally hit the search button). So I decided to create this strategy guide hoping that other players will read it and improve their game. I do not claim that this is the best and only strategy but I was able to get first on the leaderboards by using it. I would be happy if more players manage to beat me either with my own strategy or one devised to counter it. For the rest of this article I will assume you have have at least played ARMED! the tutorial...