This just in: Applications that are mere gimmicks — think Lighter, iFart and IQ Test — lose the attention of smartphone owners after being just used a few times.

Flurry Inc., a San Francisco-based startup that tracks the apps marketplace, recently conducted a study of more than 1,800 apps, 75 million consumers and four mobile platforms: iPhone, BlackBerry, Android and JavaME. The goal was to determine user retention rates across multiple categories over a 90-day period and to see if consumers returned to use a downloaded application within subsequent periods lasting 30, 60 and 90 days. It found that:

• News & reference apps are used the most — more than once a day at a rate of 11 times per week.
• Social networking apps are used six times a week.
• Health and fitness apps are used 7 times a week.
• Games are used 7.4 times a week.
• Book-related apps are used 10 times a week. (Which to me means it’s only a matter of time before Apple tries to turn the iPod touch/iPhone into e-book readers)

A convention-based object-object mapper.

AutoMapper uses a fluent configuration API to define an object-object mapping strategy. AutoMapper uses a convention-based matching algorithm to match up source to destination values. Currently, AutoMapper is geared towards model projection scenarios to flatten complex object models to DTOs and other simple objects, whose design is better suited for serialization, communication, messaging, or simply an anti-corruption layer between the domain and application layer.

New to AutoMapper? Check out the Getting Started page first.

Check out the Roadmap to see what I'm looking at for future releases.

General Features

Flattening
Projection
Configuration Validation
Lists and Arrays
Nested Mappings
Custom Type Converters
Custom Value Resolvers
Custom Value Formatters
Null Substitution

Thanks James (@bakasan) for the tip!

Moments ago Microsoft launched WebsiteSpark, a new program to provide web developers and designers free copies of Microsoft development tools, applications and server licenses for a period of three years. The program is the third and latest launch as part of the ’spark’ series of outreach and support programs designed to engage communities with new Microsoft products. The initial programs to launch were BizSpark, for startups, and DreamSpark, for students.

The WebsiteSpark program announced today provides eligible individuals or organizations with 3-year licenses of Visual Studio 2008, Expression Studio, Expression Web (also part of studio), Windows Web Server, SQL Server and DotNetPanel. To be eligible, an organization or individual developer must be in the business of building web applications or websites for others (ie. clients) and also have no more than 10 employees.

I recall as a young developer constantly bitching about the cost of development tools, which was a real barrier of entry. Microsoft bundled QBASIC with DOS, which spawned a whole generation of developers, but for those who were looking to learn further there was a real commercial barrier because of the price of good compilers and tools. Most of us ended up ripping these tools off by downloading them – which meant that we all became familiar with certain tools (like the old VC++) and then ended up getting real jobs where we would use them. Microsoft have obviously caught on and have realized that they need to lower the barrier for some parts of the market (as with academic discounts) in order to bring Microsoft tools, and in-turn platforms/servers (and services!), into development shops and to developers.

There is a broader motive here – Microsoft want to eventually sell you on the entire platform. But who cares, because frankly, their developer tools have long been the best available (queue flame war). I could never have imagined such programs coming out of Microsoft all that long ago, especially combined with support for more open source (PHP), supporting an open implementation of the entire .NET platform and executives like Scott Guthrie who are not only blogging, put publishing their email addresses so that anybody who has a problem signing up with the program can email him (it is scottgu@microsoft.com, btw).

Over a year ago, Craig and I were up in Redmond explaining our deployment strategies to the TFS guys at Microsoft. One trick we had up our sleeves was a Web.config transformation per environment. Looks like the guys liked the idea and integrated it into Visual Studio 2010. :)

http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2009/03/web-deployment-webconfig-transformati...