And of course love is not limited to humans. in the new Animal Affection theme we published today, affectionate couples of many species nuzzle, kiss, play, groom, and nap together in happy companionship.

The Lovebirds and Lacy Hearts themes are not new, but the images in them are as pretty now as they were when we first published them. And don’t forget to pick up some Chocolates!

If you don’t have Windows 7, or prefer to use a single desktop image, check out the Valentine wallpapers on the Holidays and seasons tab of the wallpapers page.

For a total change of pace from sweet romance to futuristic high-speed shoot-em-up, check out the brand new Bullet Asylum theme! Get a preview of UberGeek’s gorgeous graphics, and prepare yourself for the game’s February 8th launch on Windows Phone, with the luminously glossy visuals and techy laserlike sounds in the theme.

The next two themes showcase artwork submitted to the open call by two amazing artists, Cameron Bashaw and Guo Bo. Cameron’s darkly dramatic fractal art evokes spiral nebulae, ice crystals, feathers, and swirling smoke.

Guo Bo’s stylishly tasty Fun Fruit artwork explores the colorful worlds inside slices of kiwi, lemon, watermelon, and more.

In the next few weeks we’ll have a lot more new stuff, including a theme for Chickens Can’t Fly and several that feature the works of fine photographers who are participating in the open call. So keep on visiting the Windows Personalization gallery for new Windows 7 themes and wallpapers.

The question now is: How can we convince everybody else?

A few months ago we created the Suggestion Box for your feature suggestions for future versions of Windows Phone. Your passion and creativity has floored us. So now we’ve made a new place for your advertising and promotion suggestions. In other words, How would you get the word out about Windows Phone?

We’re looking for ad concepts, contest ideas, social media campaigns, and whatever other wacky but worthwhile ideas you can up with (think Ben Rudolph’s recent Smoked by Windows Phone challenge). Click here to submit an idea (and find out what stuff our lawyers don’t want see).

Can’t wait to see what you come up with!

If you live in one of these countries, tapping on the Marketplace tile will soon (it might a few hours for all the lights to come on) put loads of great apps and games at your fingertips. One important caveat: Your phone will need to have Windows Phone 7.5 installed to access the new stores. (Look here for update instructions.)

If you’re a developer and want to make sure your app lands in one of these new stores, make sure to check out Todd Brix’s post today on the Developer Blog.

Happy downloading!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, if you’d like your existing apps to reach Windows Phone owners in these new places, just log into App Hub and select them from the list—or choose “worldwide” if you want your app to appear in all 41 of the markets Marketplace is now available in. (You’ll need to do this even if you’ve previously opted to make your app available globally.) Here’s a quick walkthrough.

Just a reminder that apps submitted to the Marketplaces for Indonesia, Malaysia and China (which is accepting apps but not yet open to consumers) will be subject to additional requirements due to local laws, regulations, or norms. For more details, see the Application Certification Requirements. If your app fails certification because of these additional requirements, you’ll need to update and resubmit it, or uncheck the submission boxes for those markets.

That’s it for now.

We build IE for customers who use Windows. IE9 is the browser designed to give Windows 7 customers the fastest, safest, and most private browsing experience – putting the focus on the thing that matters most – your favorite sites.

If you haven’t had a look at IE recently and are ready for change, here are some reasons we think IE9 might be the browser for you.

1. Browse without being browsed. If keeping your personal information private online is important to you, Internet Explorer is the browser that respects your privacy and puts you in charge. By using Tracking Protection and the other privacy features in IE9, you are in control of who is tracking your actions online – not advertisers.

2. Experience the Web, faster. When you browse with Internet Explorer 9, your favorite sites load crazy fast – faster than two other well-known browsers according to recent real world site performance tests from Laptop magazine and Strangeloop web development firm. As we have said before, we believe real world scenarios around page load times are the right way to measure how you experience a faster Web while you browse.

3. Your favorite sites just one-click away. IE9’s site pinning allows you to put your favorite sites directly on your Windows 7 taskbar with one-click access and live updates. Tweets, friends and family status updates, stocks, sports and weather can now live on your taskbar, giving you a front row seat to the information you care about most.

4. Browse worry free. If you are concerned about your safety online, IE9 protects you from the threats faced on the web today – better than any other browser. Whether it’s dangerous downloads, phishing websites or harmful links, IE9 makes sure you stay safe.

5. A more beautiful Web: With IE9’s support for HTML5 and industry-leading hardware acceleration, we are helping developers to push the limits of what is possible on the web today. Whether it is the addictive gameplay of Cut the Rope or a truly immersive way for music fans to enjoy the band they love, we give developers a platform to push the limits of what was previously thought possible and push their creativity.

Try IE9 out for yourself and start experiencing the safest, fastest and most reliable way to browse the Web on Windows.

Ryan Gavin
General Manager, Internet Explorer Business and Marketing

I got nearly 1000 responses since we kicked things off (thanks to everyone who sent in a story!), and out of those, here are our 20 winners:

• @GeoffEff - I REALLY wish my Galaxy Nexus would stop rebooting while I'm on the phone. #DROIDRAGE @BenThePCGuy
• @hippie_mom - @BenThePCGuy At least once a day, I get the pleasure of my phone crashing. Who has time for that? #DROIDRAGE
• @HunterRemington - @benthepcguy how about going through five G2X's and two Sensations in five months, if that isn't #droidrage what is? @windowsphone #WP7
• @MonyelleMingo - @BenThePCGuy 4 phones in 3 months. 3 hard resets in 6 months. I am dying alive from #DROIDRAGE & cannot wait for my new @windowsphone!
• @foodiegrrrl - @BenThePCGuy Wrote a haiku about my Droid: "You make me so sad. No updates available. Windows phone next time!" #DROIDRAGE
• @JuicelessJamie - @BenThePCGuy 140 characters isn't enough to spell out every pain that my DroidX produces #droidrage
• @SomeoneKrozey - @BenThePCGuy My Droid phone forces me to restart to read a text. #Droidrage so hard I'd even consider WinMo 6.5 an Upgrade at this point!
• @mistahclutch - My phone has frozen 3 times in the past 4hrs to the point of having to take out the battery. #samsungexhibit #tmobile #droidrage
• @blackibiza - @BenThePCGuy #DROIDRAGE apps stay always loaded in memory and you have to use a task manager to kill them. For battery's lifetime's safe
• @RawbMarley- @BenThePCGuy Love that exciting sound of a new incoming message. Hate it when it reads "Congratulations! You won a new laptop!" #DROIDRAGE
• @UnfriendlyMoose - @BenThePCGuy My phone became completely irrelavant a few weeks after it came out and will not get a update to the newer OS. #DROIDRAGE
• @adamismobile - @BenThePCGuy Showing my boss something on my phone and an ad about finding a new job pops up in the notification bar. #DROIDRAGE
• @agent2609- @benthepcguy And don't get me started on battery life, task killers, and TouchWiz. #DROIDRAGE
• @Pinkie678 - @benthePcguy Challenged my friend to a #smokedByWindowPhone competition... Lets just say I owe my friend $$$. Pls upgrade me! #droidrage
• @ShanoukBachchan - @BenThePCGuy at any point of time, my 'phone reboots > apps downloaded'. Avoid Android #DROIDRAGE
• @gremsems - @BenThePCGuy Could go on for wks about issues w Android,seeing my sister,brother,mother and girlfriend all come to me complaining #DROIDRAGE
• @fabiopablo95 - @BenThePCGuy Android crashes even when i (try) unlock the screen..i bought it only because other phones was too expensive for me #DROIDRAGE
• @OursTeh1337 - @BenThePCGuy got home from working late. Finally got to sleep only to be woken up an hour later by phone restarting after crash. #droidrage
• @Hobby_Chick654 - @BenThePCGuy Battery issues, freezing, worried about malware, viruses... my DroidX gives me more trouble than my 2 teenage kids #droidrage
• @Wakka420 - @benthepcguy my girlfriends droid incredible calls me on accident all the time, even when they are side by side. Its annoying. #droidrage

If you’re one of the lucky winners all you need to do to claim your prize send me an email with your name, Twitter handle, address and phone number.  Be sure to include the subject “I won the second round of #DROIDRAGE Phones!” so I can find your mail in my inbox!

Thanks to everyone who sent in their story!  And remember to follow me on Twitter to share your story, ask a question, or say hi.

While the greater reach of IE9 worldwide is great for all Windows 7 customers, things are really looking up for users and developers in the US.  In the US, IE9 picked up almost two points of share, hitting 36.2% usage share in January.

Source: Net Applications, January 2012.

This continues to be great news for consumers and developers alike who can benefit from the richer web experiences and standards support in IE9.  We look forward to even more growth of IE9 on Windows 7 in the upcoming months.

If you haven’t already made the move to Internet Explorer 9 on Windows 7, try it by visiting www.beautyoftheweb.com.

Roger Capriotti
Director, Internet Explorer Marketing

Case in point: A post today from Josh Henretig of Microsoft’s Environmental Sustainability team. 

Josh recently combed Marketplace looking for planet-friendly apps and apps that can help promote green thinking. Even if this isn’t stuff you think about often, I bet you’ll still find a couple interesting apps worth downloading. He’s found apps for saving gas, apps for environmental news, apps for recycling info—even an app for reporting someone who dumps paint down the storm drain. Only caveat: Some of these apps are available only in certain countries. Check out his list.

What could cause 90 MB of usage in a garbage-collected runtime? There could be several causes:

• Allocating too much.
• Long living objects that bloat working set.
• Holding on to references unintentionally leading to memory leaks.

Applications allocating too much could end up with working sets breaching this threshold; applications with a large working set might eventually exit with an “Out of Memory” exception; and holding on to references unintentionally can lead to memory leaks causing working set to increase steadily and stealthily, eventually leading to the application exiting with an “Out of Memory” exception.

Up until the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 release, application developers had to guard against this by programmatically instrumenting their code with specific framework method calls and track memory usage. These methods included the following:

• System.GC.GetTotalMemory
• Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceExtendedProperties.DeviceTotalMemory
• Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceExtendedProperties.ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage
• Microsoft.Phone.Info.DeviceExtendedProperties.ApplicationPeakMemoryUsage

But beyond that there was little help from the tools.

The Windows Phone SDK 7.1 addresses this through the introduction to profiling tools to analyze the execution, visual, and memory characteristics of an application.

Install the SDK now, and let us walk through the Memory Profiler as we investigate a case of a memory leak caused by unintentionally holding on to references.

A Sample Application

Consider this application that has two pages, and where the second page renders several images within a grid, and where one may navigate between pages.

Page2 has 4 images controls within a grid control that is bitmapcached. During the initialization of Page2, it binds the 4 image controls to jpeg images and registers for an event handler.

The two pages look as follows:

As we try out the application going back and forth between the pages a few times, observe that memory usage keeps going up; there is a memory leak.

Visualizing the leak

To delve deeper into this leak further let us run this application through the Memory Profiler using the following steps:

1. Invoke the Profiler, choose “Memory (managed object allocation and texture usage)”, and launch the application. Note the memory used by the application at the top of the screen.
2. Click on Go To Page2. This will launch Page2, and display the 4 flower images.
3. Click on the back button.
4. Click on ‘Force GC’. Note the memory used by the application at the top of the screen. Observe that it does not go down.
5. Repeat steps 2, 3, 4 four more times.
6. Now click on ‘Stop Profiling’.

We should see a graph like the following:

As expected memory usage is steadily growing.

Analysis

Select a range, from before the start of the first plateau to just after the after the start of the last plateau, for analysis. Once analysis is complete, using Performance Warnings as the starting point, navigate to the Heap Summary view. We should see a table similar to the following:

Note that the memory held by Retained Silverlight Visuals at End is large as compared to that held by just managed objects. So, let’s drill down into these retained Silverlight visuals.

Select Retained Silverlight Visuals at End and navigate to the Types view. In the Types view, sort the Total Size (Bytes) column in descending order. We should now see a table similar to the following:

Note that Grid and Page2 are the heavy consumers. We also notice right away that 5 instances of Page2 are hanging around. In our scenario, we navigated 5 times to Page2, remember?

Let’s look at what those 10 instances of the Grid are: click on the Grid and navigate to the Instances view. We should now see a table similar to the following:

Note that 5 of the instances are being allocated from Page2. Click on the hyperlink and you can go the line of code in XAML where the Grid is allocated.

To see what is the memory being retained by the visual tree rooted at a Grid instance, click on, say, the grid with the ID 33 (this is a grid allocated from Page2), and navigate to the Visual Tree view. We should now a table similar to the following:

Note the visual tree rooted at that grid instance. We can see the 4 contained image controls, as well as the Texture memory associated with the grid.

To cross check the association between the grid instance and Page2, we can go back to the Types view, select Page2, and navigate to the Instances view. We should then see a table similar to the following:

Notice that there are 5 instances created and none of them has been destroyed (i.e. garbage collected).

Now let’s look at the Visual Tree rooted at a Page2 instance. Select the first instance, and navigate to the Visual Tree. We should see a table similar to the following:

Again, we see the grid, its associated texture memory, and its contained image controls. Earlier we saw that 5 instances of Page2 were hanging around. That leak was causing the associated grid, images, and texture memory to not get cleaned up.

Now let us see why the Page2 instances were hanging around.

Go back to the Instances view, select the first Page2 instance, and navigate to the GC Roots view. Collapse the tree structures. We should see a table similar to the following:

Ignore the weak references (these do not prevent the GC from acting on the references). But look at the TouchFrameEventHandler; expand it and we should see a table similar to the following:

There are 5 chained event handlers! The first one was allocated from our assembly. The rest were cloned within mscorlib, as each page appended its own TouchFrameEventHandler (the event handler is implemented as a .Net Delegate type). That event handler is holding a reference to the page that in turn is preventing the page from being garbage collected.

So the eventhandlers references the Page2 instances, preventing it from being GC’d; and thus assets contained in Page2 are not cleaned up (the grid, associated texture memory, images).

Solved!

All that remains to be done is to find where that handler is being registered in our assembly.

Go back to Heap Summary, select Retained Allocations at End, navigate to the Types view, sort by Type Name column, and scroll down to locate the TouchFrameEventHandler. We should see the following:

To find out where that 1 instance was allocated in our application code, select the first entry, and navigate to the Methods view. You should see the following:

Click on the Allocating Method hyperlink, and you will jump to the method that did the allocation. You should see the following:

There, right at the bottom is the place where we register to the eventhandler! The step of registering stashes away a strong reference to this instance of the page within the event handler delegate. Unless the user unregisters this handler, the Page2 instance will remain alive (and consequently so too will the grid and the images, and the texture memory will not get cleaned up).

If you comment out the line that enregisters the handler, and rerun this scenario, here is the graph you would see:

Voilà!

Conclusion

Having a garbage collected runtime removes one of the biggest sources of program errors, memory allocation errors; you no longer have to worry about freeing memory which you no longer use. But leaks spring when you unintentionally hold on to object references that you no longer use. By providing a variety of Views on the applications memory usage the Memory Profiler can be a valuable tool to detect and fix such leaks.

But which one to get? I’m not the most hardware-savvy high-tech professional (shhh!), so I’m sometimes uncertain what specs I should look at when I shop for a new phone (beyond “Does it look cool?” and “How’s the camera?”).

So I decided to enlist the help of some hardware geeks around the office and create a beginner’s guide to hardware options and specs. Now, I think I finally know what AMOLED means—and what phone I want to get. Take a look and let me know what you think!

See the guide