Now’s a great time to get started with Windows Phone 7. The launch of the first hardware is coming up in just weeks now, and all of the developer tools are out and in the final versions ready for launch.

I spent a while this morning becoming somewhat baffled at the apparent lack of simple-to-use Timing features in .NET 4 in Silverlight. All I wanted was a simple solution to call a certain method inside the current scope and thread ever few seconds. However, many of the timing solutions are designed to work in a multi-thread manner, which takes everything out of scope and does not permit the required access to resources that I had in the standard scope.

Long story short, you can make use of System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer to solve this problem. Here are the code samples.

Last Friday you may have noticed I took a day out and went to Birmingham for an event called “The Guathon”. Part of a 2-day series of presentations by Microsoft VP for the Developer Division, the event was an all-day series of presentations by Scott (hence “Guathon”) covering a wide range of topics, from new features of Visual Studio 2010, .NET4, ASP .NET MVC 2, Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 Series.

I took literally pages of notes while Scott was speaking, and I want to write a lot of them up into posts that hopefully people who weren’t at the event will find useful. But there are a few titbits of information I’d like to share now, mostly surrounding Silverlight 4 and Windows Phone 7 Series.