After developing Windows Phone 7 applications in my spare time over the last year, I've collected an assortment of tools that make developing apps so much easier than when I first jumped in to Silverlight/Windows Phone 7 development. I only wish I'd know about them all when I first started down the Windows Phone 7 path. Whether you are just starting out or have been developing Windows Phone 7 apps for a while now, there’s something here for everyone.

While working on soon-to-be-released projects there has often been a need to make a staging/testing website publicly accessible for client testing. This is a slippery slope if search engine spiders get in and index your site before the rest of the world is meant to see it (it happens more than you’d like to think) – If it happens to be a website you are building for something that the rest of the world shouldn’t see yet such as a product/service launch, having it leak too early can often make or break you. They have a word that describes this very fear of spiders  – it’s called Arachnophobia.

While recently working on the live tile implementation for my Windows Phone 7 hobby project InTheKnow, I had a need to implement Unix Time Zone support using a TZ database. This list of Time Zones is widely used by Unix systems around the world as their source of Time Zone information. Sadly Microsoft’s .Net framework doesn’t have any support for this library – but like other parts of the framework that developers have found to be lacking, there is a library out there to fill the gap.

Last year i started on a project that allows easy tracking of page views, events and transactions to your Google Analytics account without using JavaScript or a Browser simply using a .Net wrapper. This became GaDotNet. Over the Past 6 months i have had well over 2,000 downloads and many thank you emails so obviously people are finding a use for my code – this can only be a good thing. Now it is time for the project to grow up – so I've moved it to a remotely hosted source repository – CodePlex.

So It’s been about a year or so since I've written any Facebook applications for clients, and in that time quite a lot has changed in the space. There are quite a list of available libraries you can use to write Facebook applications in .Net with, so it can be sometime daunting to pick one as your favourite. This can be further complicated by the fact that for a lot of people, when they first go to write a Facebook application some of the jargon thrown around can be confusing when you know nothing about the Facebook API – what approach should you take? does having ASP.Net MVC or Silverlight support make the library a good one?

A lot of great open source projects have come along to help developers who, like me, have to offer backwards support to Internet Explorer 6 through to 8. CSS3 Pie is a pretty cool new project by Jason Johnston from 321 Creative. Want to support a lot of the great new CSS3 additions in Internet Explorer? Looks like there’s an alternative.

So last week i released my new open source project GaDotNet, which allows you to track page views, events and soon to be supported, transactions, in your .net applications natively. I’ve had so much awesome feedback from the .net community, and have been busily adding features. Today i release the next version that supports events.

So today is the day that a little side project I've been working on sees the days of light. GoogleAnalyticsDotNet allows you to log a page view to Google Analytics from code behind of a website or from within a web service or win forms project without needing to use the Google JavaScript code, or even use web browser at all.