That's truly amazing compared to how my under-warranty, defective (would throw errors constantly when plugged into any PC via USB port and therefore couldn't be recognized by the PC as being connected) Lumia 1020 was handled by Microsoft a while ago - they refused for months to fix or replace it. Wouldn't admit for months that it was even within the warranty period - because I didn't save the receipt - even though the warranty period is 1 year and the phones had only been on the market for about 6 months. Sent it in for warranty repair and they sent it back to me unfixed because of tiny chip in the corner of the screen (and not even a part of the screen with pixels on it) - declaring it out-of-warranty for that reason. Argued with multiple tiers of "support" people over 4 months until planning to sue them in my Town's small claims court (would have cost me $10 and they would've had to fly in a defense lawyer - more than the cost of the phone). Telling them that got me a new phone, so it eventually turned out OK, but only after 4-5 months of anger & stress with a non-working phone. That's really a terrible way to treat any customer, and in particular a developer and tech community leader who is trying to promote your products.

You just can't trust Apples from China, even if they are certified organic.

In most places I've worked, "software engineers" and even "developers" considered being referred to as a "coder" or a "programmer" an insult, whether intentional or not.

Just as a data point - I have not been experiencing these problems (and have been a member since 2002) & mostly use CP with IE11 on Windows 8.1 desktop. Good luck!

I've never noticed that on my desktop/laptop running 8.1, but I can tell you that my wife's PC (running Windows 7) did stuff like that for a few weeks back in February and she thought it was just IE acting badly (which of course, is completely believable). Then one day she couldn't open any of her files, because some CryptoLocker malware had been encrypting all of the files on her hard-drive and was now blackmailing her to pay them $750 in bitcoin via a secure site using the Tor browser. So... I'd suggest running MalwareBytes or something similar, just in case.

Which version of Xamarin did you try? The latest version seems much improved.

Similar items seem to be going for between $20 and $50 on eBay[^]

Yes - most of my games were made in XNA (not MonoGame) and target WP7.1 (Windows Phone 7.5), which allows also them to also run on WP8 & WP8.1. May not be able to build them with the latest versions of Visual Studio though - use VS2010/VS2012 for XNA/Silverlight WP7.x apps.

Might be, not sure. They are a Microsoft Certified Partner as they claim to be: http://pinpoint.microsoft.com/en-US/partners/Tech-Supply-King-4299278462[^], although that is the lowest level of partnership with Microsoft. It would be quite easy for just about any company to obtain it, but at least it shows the company is a real company and not just someone pretending to be a real company. Still for a few hundred dollars and a credit card, just about anyone can set up a business and basic website within a few hours. It does seem odd though that they use billing-secure-server.com for their shopping cart instead of using their main site.

Yo mama!

Perhaps the comma before "%ProgramFiles%... is causing an issue?

its vs. it's, then vs. than, lose vs. loose - never could understand why so many people don't know the difference

On the positive side, they are starting to have more info online about the controls, recently open-sourced them, and are having a webinar on Kendo UI on May 7th at 11am ET - you can register for it here: http://www.telerik.com/campaigns/kendo-ui-build-free

You can also open it with Win+X keypress - worked in Windows 8 too, but had fewer items and no arrow-key support. Not quite the old Start Menu, but has it's basic features. Why they just didn't put in the Windows 7 Start Menu is beyond comprehension - would've saved them a lot of backlash from users. The one that's coming that they showed at //build/ looks very modern... hopefully coming soon.

Perhaps this is proof that Microsoft Research is working on Time Travel! ;)

After a site user answers a straw poll on the homepage, I think it would be more useful to show the user the current poll results instead of the question again whenever the user revisits the homepage. That way the user can keep up on the results and also be certain that (s)he already answered the question.

When it's working on IE11/Win8.1, I get the HTML formatting that you mentioned above, and while that's a little annoying (because it's hard to find stuff when going into HTML view), I can live with that. But to me, the "copy/paste doesn't work" line actually means that sometimes (read: very frequently) when I copy/paste into WYSIWYG/design view, the paste action crashes IE and on restarting IE, I have lost all of my edits since the last save. That made using design-view impossible, and HTML view just doesn't fly for a long article. This is why I decided to write my article in Expression Web and then send CP the file when it was done. Not sure if this belongs here or in the Site Bugs forum... ?

I also don't know why it would be in Microsoft's best interest to drop the Desktop UI or relegate it to a back corner. There are still many people with mice and keyboards who are quite happy with the desktop UI and their legacy Win32 software. Killing off the desktop or de-emphasizing its value, would make these people have to seriously reconsider whether their next PC is Windows or Mac - because once you take away legacy software & legacy device support, Mac OS is arguably an equivalent product (or better?), and even more-so for someone who already owns an iPad or iPhone. With Apple's announcement this week that Mac OS and iWork updates will be free forever, the TCO element is swinging into Apple's favor - it's a huge power-play - indicating that Apple knows its earnings and profits are not from Mac OS, but from iOS devices and app sales. More Mac OS users solidifies their developer base squarely on Apple products and emboldens their eco-system. Microsoft should be very wary of doing any more damage to the Desktop UI. They already ticked-off a lot of users with Windows 8's downgrading of the desktop UI and 8.1 didn't do much to change that. Sooner or later, desktop users might just start kissing Windows goodbye if this keeps up.

I've found Nokia's DVLUP[^] site to be a great WP8 dev-community site that encourages wpdevs to create new apps & games & improve them by rewarding devs with prizes - gift cards, smartphones, tablets, advertising, xbox 360, and other cool stuff. This month Nokia added 20 countries in which DVLUP is now available. If yours is one of them, I recommend checking it out.

Well, actually, I'm equating Microsoft's stock price with whether I've entered an alternate universe, but I see your point. :cool: