Yes I may be a bit biased as I am a software developer and am able to write WP8 apps. I haven't written any apps that I have put in the store, but as a developer, whenever I do play around with the development tools, I am constantly blown away as easy and smooth the whole dev experience is and how easy it is to find code samples and help I need. Apart from that, I have never owned an iPhone or android as my main phone, I have spent many hours using iTouch devices, iPads and my wifes Android smartphone, and based on that I would never consider anything other than a Windows 8 phone. I have not ever had a single instance after over 2 years of using Windows 7 and 8 phones of things like- "why the heck is that happenning"? or "Why is this so slow" or "Thats not very intuitive". Time after time I am saying things like "Thats so easy" or "Thats cool" Especially with the recent developer preview for the 8.1 version, so many awesome additions. The only thing I can say that really erks me time and time again, has nothing to do with the operating system but with the Nokia Lumia 920 itself. The 3 touch buttons at the bottom of the phgone are so sensitive that if the side of my hand touches the very edge of that area next to the search button, and it is hard not to, the phone goes into Bing. That touch area is so sensitive that I put 15 layers of scotch tape over the buttons and it didn't make any noticeable difference. Whenever I ask people what they think of Windows phones, the most common answer I hear is that there are not enough apps. Then I ask, OK what app does it not have and usually they answer with some dumb game that they like. That tells me that when someone has it in their head that product X is the best, it is very easy to come up with reasons why product Y is not as good. You hear a lot of negative comments from Non WP8 users but very few from WP8 users.

I have been using them for 3 years for a handful of sites. I have had no major issues. The biggest I had was last month when one of my sites slowed to a crawl. I contacted them via their web site online chat (I find the best and fastest way) and they confirmed within a few minutes that there was indeed an issue. They opened a ticket for me and the next day it was fixed. It was something to do with a full log, in their words "the log had grown up" Their web dashboard gives me everything I need and works well most of the time but sometimes it gives an error and needs to be refeshed. I cannot comment on the 'hostability' of high traffic sites. I have static sites, PHP, dotnetnuke sites, NopCommerce sites and custom ASP.net sites all working fine. I am also hosing some REST data services I developed. Now that being said, we are getting a ton of stuff for dirt cheap- unlimited web sites, unlimited traffic (I think), unmimited domains, unlimited sql server (lite) databases and mySQL, easy to configure ftp, decent admin panel, etc. We were also offered one free SSL cert and dedicated IP address. We were recently contacted by them and told they will be doing a major upgrade of our system at no additional cost including going to server 2012, sql server 2012 (not lite), redundant 10GM pipes, more ram, faster processor, etc. I don't know if possibly everyone gets the same upgrade and they just make it look like you get it because you have been a good customer... He had been doing our own web hosting on our own equipment for over 10 years but it is a no-brainer to go with someone like Arvixe and put money in our own pockets every month instead of paying for our own power, crappy Interner pipe etc... Heres a link to one of the sites we host on Arvixe: this ones PHP hosted on windows server: http://ssiaudio.com

My ASP.net application uses a common class I added to my App_Code folder which has all of the methods I use more than once throughout the application. Because this class is used in the masterpage, almost all site aspx pages and multiple usercontrols, I am instantiating the class multiple times in each request. I am instantiating the class in the page_load of pages and controls and then setting it to nothing on each page_unload. There is nothing in the class that needs to maintain state between requests. Is there a better way to do this or is that the normal approach? It seems so inefficient to me to be creating/destroying the class in every code behind file. I was wondering if there would be any advantage to putting the class in each users session for re-use for the lifetime of the session. I don't know if there would be any advantage to that approach or not. i was thinking of checking (each time I instantiate) if the object is in session and if not add it and if its already in session, return the object. I guess I could do that in the objects constructor. Any suggestions much appreciated Heres what I am doing in every code behind file now:

Dim c As New CommonCode()

Public ReadOnly Property C As CommonCode
    Get
        If C Is Nothing Then C = New CommonCode
        Return C
    End Get
End Property

Protected Sub btnPostComment_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs)

Dim name As String = IIf(txtName.Text = [String].Empty, "Anonymous", txtName.Text)
If txtComments.Text <> [String].Empty Then
c.PostComment(ID, name, txtComments.Text, RadRating.Value)
End If
End Sub

Protected Sub Page_Unload(sender As Object, e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Unload
c = Nothing
End Sub