The Madison .NET User Group was very fortunate to have Al Pascual speak last night on Silverlight and GIS.  He had good demos and provided links to resources online that you should go check out.  Here is a link to his powerpoint presentation.

He currently works at ESRI and is working with mapping technologies and Silverlight.  Check out his blog and the presentation.

I posted an article on making a Panoramic Silverlight Application on the Windows Phone using Visual Studio 2010.   It's a simple example on how to build the app and navigate between screens using touch flicks.

I just posted an article on how to capture an image on the Windows Phone emulator using an Internet camera.  This was written using the Windows Phone Dev Tools April Refresh.  For all those developers who want to capture images on the Windows Phone but can't get access to the camera, this is a nice alternative so you can write apps that capture and manipulate images on the emulator.  Eventually Microsoft is sure to release an emulator that will access the camera hardware but until then try this out.

In a week of cancelled projects, Microsoft has cancelled the Courier tablet device.  The Courier device was an innovative folding, dual screen tablet device that was getting a lot of attention in the developer world.  A Microsoft team had developed a compelling tablet prototype but the company execs decided that they weren't going to bring the device into production at this time.  Microsoft spends a lot of money on research projects and prototypes to explore new possible interfaces and devices.  It's too bad we won't be seeing this device out in the wild.

It looks like HP has killed the Windows 7 slate tablet they've been working on.  The expectations were that a Windows 7 slate from HP was going to head to head with the Apple iPad.  Now it looks as though HP will be going back to the drawing board and using their newly acquired WebOS from Palm.  Obviously this will lower the overall cost of the device because HP will not have to pay licensing fees for Windows 7 and Microsoft apps.  It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the market.