Getting Internet Calendar Feeds on a Windows Phone 7

I use TripIt.com, which exposes a nice iCal calendar feed for my travel details. At first I didn’t see a way to subscribe to my TripIt iCal feed on my Windows Phone 7. But if you’ve setup your Windows Phone 7 with a Windows Live account, here’s an easy way to subscribe to iCal feeds and have them show up on your Windows Phone 7:

1. From a desktop, sign in to your Windows Live account at www.live.com
2. Choose Calendar from the Hotmail menu at the top of the page
3. Choose Subscribe from the calendar tool bar
   
   
4. Select Subscribe to a public calendar radio button, and provide your calendar iCal feed and calendar name in the text boxes, choose a color, then click the Subscribe to calendar button.
   
   
5. Windows Live / Hotmail will process the request and you’ll be returned back to your Hotmail Calendar. You should see your new calendar on the left-hand side.
   
   
6. Now change to your Windows Phone 7.
7. Go to the Settings application, then tap emails + accounts
8. On your list of accounts, tap and hold the Windows Live account, then choose Sync from the menu.
9. Return to the home screen and select the Calendar application
10. Choose settings from the Calendar menu
11. Choose which Calendars you want to include in your Calendar view and assign the colors.

Note: I use a custom domain with my Windows Live account and don’t use the Hotmail email account but can still use the calendar features. You can also disable the Hotmail email on the phone if you’re not using it.

Free Windows Phone avatar prop for Xbox 360 owners

The Xbox 360 is a great place to advertise Windows Phone 7 as the phone’s Xbox Live features are designed to appeal to console gamers. Now gamers can learn about Windows Phone and get a free avatar prop for their trouble.

Here’s what to do:

• On the Xbox 360, switch to the Inside Xbox section of the dashboard.
• Find the tile that reads: Get a free Windows Phone for your avatar/Your avatar is the special guest on Hot Apps with Laura Foy (it’s marked as an Advertisement).
• Watch the video and then…
• You’ll see a zoomed-in view of a Windows Phone. Navigate the cursor to the “Keep the phone!” tile. Click it and download the avatar prop.

Hurry, this is probably a limited time offer.

That’s it! Have your avatar call my avatar. We’ll go out for ice cream.

Fix for "Add STS Reference" missing in Visual Studio 2010

If for some reason, you reset your designer settings or revert to an older version, you will notice that the add STS reference command is no longer available.

To resolve this:

1. Run Visual Studio Command Prompt in administrator mode
2. Run the following commands
   

   cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\"
   devenv.exe /ResetAddin Microsoft.IdentityModel.Tools.VS.VSAddin.FederationAddin

   
   

Getting TFS to Remember You

If you’re like me, you do a lot of development work inside of Virtual Machines. Sometimes these VM’s are not joined to the Windows Domain, so when you launch Visual Studio and access any of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) features, TFS prompts you for your domain credentials. This credentials box does not have the familiar “Remember my credentials” checkbox.

To get TFS to remember who you are:

1. From the Windows Start menu, open the Control Panel
2. Click on User Accounts, then Credential Manager
3. Click “Add a Windows credential”
4. Fill in the fields:
   • In the Internet or network address field, enter the host name of your TFS server
   • In the Username field, enter your domain\username
   • In the Password field, enter your password
   • Click OK

Now, next time Visual Studio needs to access the TFS server it will use these credentials instead of prompting you.

Note: If you change your domain password, you will need to manually update your stored credential.

Add the Weather to SharePoint by using the RSS Viewer Web Part

The out-of-the-box SharePoint RSS Viewer Web Part can be used more than just displaying a list of articles from your favorite blog or website. After the RSS Viewer Web Part downloads the feed, the web part uses XSLT to transform the RSS Feed from XML into HTML, and then your browser renders that HTML as human readable text. By changing the XSLT, you can create a different visual output. The following steps outline how to create a Weather RSS Viewer Web Part.

Step 1 – Add the RSS Viewer Web Part

Navigate to the page where you want to add the web part.

Change the page mode to edit, by selecting Edit Page from the Site Actions menu.

Then click on the Add a Web Part link in the appropriate zone.

Select the Default category.

Select the RSS Viewer Web Part.

Verify the correct zone is listed where you want the web part added.

Click the Add button to add the RSS Viewer Web Part to your page.

SharePoint will add the web part to the specified zone. The new web part will display a message that the RSS Viewer has not been configured, click on the link in the message to open the tool pane.

In the tool pane, enter the following URL as the RSS Feed URL, replacing 80202 with your 5 digit zip code.

http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=80202

Next, click the XSL Editor button, this will open a Text Editor window with the XSLT loaded. Replace the current XSLT with the contents of the Weather XLST file.

Click the Save button on the Text Dialog window, then click OK on the RSS Viewer Web Part Tool Pane. When the page refreshes you should have your weather information displayed like above.

The SharePoint RSS Viewer Web Part can be used to display many different types of information by simply editing the XSLT.