Windows Phone IsoStoreSpy is a great utility for interrogating the Windows Phone Iso Store when developing applications. It usually if you want to check to see if files are being created correctly, and identifying what is in a file on the phone’s local store. IsoStoreSpy can pier into both the emulator and physical device. It also provides some other functionality like being able to create ringtones, but I haven’t used that. I had a brand new install of Windows 8 with Visual Studio 2012, and not a lot of old components installed. This was a fresh install, so the most recent versions of most things were already installed. When I tried to install IsoStoreSpy with the ClickOnce installation, it error’d out indicating that version 3.5 of System.Data.SqlCE needed to be installed in the GAC. For some reason it wasn’t, although I would’ve assumed that Visual Studio would’ve had that in…

From the Windows Phone Developer Blog: “Windows Phone 8 is out, the tools are available, and devices are about to be released—it’s time to get coding. As an added incentive, for the next 8 days individual developers can register for a Dev Center account for just $8 (a 92 percent savings). Please note because this is a very limited time offer. You’ll be charged $99 USD or equivalent in your local currency, and we’ll refund the difference in the next 30 to 45 days. Watch for more details on Dev Center soon.” So, if you’re interested in getting your apps on the Windows Phone platform, this is a great way to get started. For more information, check out this blog post.

Today marks the official release of Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”.  Around lunchtime, the status on the “Where’s My Update?” page for most carriers was switched to “Delivering Update”.  Although I didn’t receive an OTA notification that an update was available, I got home and plugged my phone in and the Zune software immediately came up with the Update screen. Since I am in the developer program, my phone, a Samsung Focus, was registered and had the beta build (7712) of Mango installed on it.  Many wondered how this was going to work for developers running the beta code, and whether they would have to use their backups to return to “NoDo” before applying the the update. The good news was the first update I received was the actual Mango update building the code to the RTM level of 7720.  I then received a second update which cleaned up “beta stuff”. …