As we inch closer to the release of Windows Phone 7 then it’s worth recapping on some bits and pieces. Firstly, in the UK both @MikeOrmond and @PaulFo are out and about looking to help you with application testing and deployment. Take a look at this post for details of the drop in clinics. Mike’s blog is also the place to be this year for information on Phone development.

Mike also points at this post by Brandon Watson on the Windows Phone Developer blog.The main thrust of the post is to announce the final release of the developer tools (16th September). There are some other useful resource links in there too.

If you’re one of the people representing the 300,000 downloads of the developer tools so far and thinking about releasing your application into the wild (well, the Marketplace) then the following points from the post will  be highly relevant:

1. Register at the marketplace today

2. Finish you application or game using the Beta tools

3. Download the final Windows Phone Developer Tools when they are released on September 16^th

4. Recompile your app or game using the final tools

5. Have your XAP ready for ingestion into the marketplace in early October when it opens

The @Microsoft twitter account pointed me at this short post on some editorially placed tags in the September issue of Architectural Digest. The tags themselves are branded with the logo of the magazine, which (see Why Has The Barcode Never Changed? on a similar subject)

In itself, this is an interesting way of linking physical media to virtual media in a continuous way.

The tags themselves can be read by a variety of devices (even the iPhone). There’s more info and download mechanisms at the Tag site.

If you’re interested in Tag, then it’s ridiculously easy to use:

• Go to http://tag.microsoft.com
• Sign in with a Live ID
• Create a tag which might contain a URL, plain text or a phone number to call
• Print/Distribute the resulting tag
• Monitor the success of the tag from the dashboard

Meantime if you want to see a cool video of a very smart kid building a tag with Rubik’s Cubes then look no further (thanks to Mel)

If you’re a student you can take advantage of the DreamSpark offer to submit and deploy apps for free on the Windows Phone Marketplace (alongside getting access to the professional development tools in the first place).

This video is worth a look in which they say “We’ve been working on our android app for two weeks, been working on this one [wp7 app] since 3pm [3 hours] and we’re at about the same stage.”

Mixest XAP #gdgtseattle from Anand Iyer on Vimeo.

It’s been a long week, and I’ve got an hour or two left before the weekend so it’s time to catch up on some noteworthy stuff. First up is this quite exciting release from the XNA Creators Club with a whole slew of tutorials and examples for building games on Windows Phone 7.

Tutorials range from basic programming techniques to gestures, to particles, to physics and sprites. Great resources.

You too could build something as cool as this.

The Archivist has been around for a little while, but if you haven’t used it yet, then here’s a quick example of how it works. The Archivist is, essentially, a tool to provide rapid analysis of Twitter activity against a given search term. For example, against the hash tag #zombies.

It overcomes a little of the drawbacks of Twitter search in that it maintains an archive (naturally) of the search term beyond the 7-day-ish horizon of Twitter search.

Kicking it off is as simple as bashing in the search term to the box shown above and clicking start analysis. Then you sit back and wait for the analysis to occur. The service is ‘elastic’ which means it needs a fangled explanation of how it works, but essentially the service will begin building up an archive from this point on.

If you log in with Twitter credentials then you can save the archive and return to it later. Logging back in, you’ll probably see something like this.

Here we can see two different archives I kicked off in mid-July. I became slightly concerned after hearing Jer Thorp’s talk at Thinking Digital that he used an Arduino kit connected to Twitter to warn him about impending alien invasion that I thought I’d set up a similar intelligence system.

Oddly, there are a lot of people tweeting about Aliens and Zombies, though from the volumes it seems like a zombie attack is more likely. We can then drill into a given archive, which gives a lot of simple information such as: top words in the search term, top users, and top urls.

Which we can then further drill into. Here we can have a look at the top #zombies tweeters.

Where we could explore a little more if we wanted to.

Finally, you can download the archive as a Zip, or view in Excel so you can take the data away and perform your own analysis. You can also compare two different archives. Here we can see #aliens compared to #zombies and frankly that spike at the end of July is a bit of a worry.

So it’s a useful tool as a bit of fun, or more likely as a simple way to analyze and retain tweets for an event or ongoing hash tag meme. Just don’t forget to set up the archive BEFORE the event starts!

Nothing like recovering from an arduous family holiday (planes, trains and automobiles what with a volcano, and big eurotunnel delays – meh!) than settling down with a copy of Edge magazine.

Lo and behold but friend and colleague @sithers is quoted in an article covering X48 Game Camp of which he is a champion. Worth a look at the whole article or the X48 site, but highlights for me included best team name of “Salt. Pepper. Now.” (after the recent Gordon Ramsay TV show) and the “5 Rules of Game Jamming”.

• Keep It Simple.
• Get It Working Fast.
• Do What You Know.
• Programmers Rule.
• Genius Steals.

Yes indeed – it’s time for Office and SharePoint 2010. There’ll be a bunch of material surrounding the new capabilities of this stuff at the launch site.

The SharePoint sessions went down well at the TechDays event and there’s clearly a lot of excitement around the web capabilities of Office. I’ve been spending some time (as a user) getting my head around the social capabilities of SharePoint and only just scratched the surface.

Talking of IE you can get your hands on the 2nd preview from the IE9 team here. You’ll probably remember that we announced we’d be pushing out regular previews throughout the development.

Once again, it’s not really a usable browser, but there are a host of new demos and progress to have a look at. The IE blog describes some of this stuff here.

One of the main bits of news here is that IE9 is hitting 68/100 on the Acid3 test.