Tag | Software Posts
This week has been an interesting one. Lots of ups and downs in the XNA Community and lots of things that we’re not sure yet if it’s an up or down. One of the biggest changes that happened was that the Top Downloads list on Xbox.com and on the Xbox dashboard is now calculated differently for Xbox LIVE Indie Games. It’s still not clear what impact this is going to have (although I know it feels pretty clear to some of you in the community!) but this lead to some interesting things. One, we got to ...
If you are: a senior technologist (Application Architect, Senior Developer or similar) with strong experience in developing solutions using the Windows platform (Visual Studio, SQL Server, IIS etc) fancy working for Microsoft UK and are not put off by these pictures of my team (and it is before 1st May 2011) then I would highly recommend you check out the job posting for two positions as Architect Evangelists in my team. My personal ideal “new colleague” would also: Enjoy online FPS gaming and be ...
Async is short for asynchronous, the ability to start a block of code and immediately return to the calling code. This is the opposite of synchronous, where the code goes off and performs a block of code and doesn’t return to the caller until it’s done. If you’re going to Tech-Ed this year, be sure to check out their sessions on language support of async. The crux of this post examines what async means to the user experience. Much of the discussion of async these days focuses on how easy the next ...
After several months of research, review and revision, a white paper I wrote for the SQL Azure team, “NoSQL and the Windows Azure Platform”, has been published by Microsoft. If you go to http://www.microsoft.com/wi... and do a find within the page for “NoSQL” you’ll see a link for it. If you’d rather download the PDF directly, you can do so by clicking here. The 25-page (not including cover and TOC) paper provides an introduction to NoSQL database technology, and its major subcategories, ...
Yesterday I had a brush with multi-channel digital marketing that worked. Here is the story. To set the stage, we have to go back a few months when replaced my aging laptop with a new Mac and migrated my Windows operating system on to Parallels. Once the migration was complete an offer was presented to me. It was a trial for anti-virus or maybe anti-spyware software with a name that began with a K and seemed foreign to me. I declined. Now jumping ahead to yesterday, I was watching TV and I recognized ...
Now that Mix11 is over, Microsoft’s next big conference is Tech-Ed 2011, which happens May 16th through May 19th in Atlanta, GA. Each of Microsoft’s conferences have a theme; Mix is about the Web, PDC is about new and upcoming technologies, and there are many more. The focus of Tech-Ed is on current Microsoft technologies. In other words, you would go there to learn about the software that you can use today to get your work done. If you haven’t been there yet, Atlanta is a nice city and the surrounding ...
Following the TMG installation wizard, you are advised to run Windows Update and install all updates, before installing TMG. As a good citizen, I therefore installed all updates and Internet Explorer 9. At the end of the installation of the TMG software I tried to start the TMG management console. The following two errors were displayed and the management console did not function. Error messages The easiest way to solve this, is by removing Internet Explorer 9. There is a workaround available. To ...
If you are: Involved in developing software products (aka an Independent Software Vendor) or Considering a “move to the cloud” or both! Then you should consider joining one or both of these Microsoft UK created LinkedIn groups intended to foster discussion amongst your peers in the industry. Both groups are fairly new but growing and there is already some great discussion happening on them. UKISVDEV - Developers, Software Architects and CTOs in UK ISVs This group is for UK based developers, software ...
I am very excited to help share this news with you today! I feel as excited today as I was when Windows Phone 7 developer story was revealed at MIX10 last year. I see so many more application scenarios with the new tools and features in Windows Phone 7. There has been a few announcements made at MIX11 – let me recap some of what I find important. There was not a disclosure or showing of any new end-user features. There is a commitment to delivering the next update later this year as a free updates ...
Client + cloud computing is a disruptive, new computing platform, combining diverse client devices – PCs, smartphones, sensors, and single-function and embedded devices – with the unlimited, on-demand computation and data storage offered by cloud computing services such as Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft’s Windows Azure. As with every advance in computing, programming is a fundamental challenge as client + cloud computing combines many difficult aspects of software development. Orleans is a software framework ...
A long overdue post. For months I haven’t posted to this blog and I feel terribly guilty at having neglected it. So here goes a brand new post. A coupe of weeks ago, Silverlightshow.net concluded their annual Ecocontest and announced a bunch of deserving winners who win passes to attend Mix 11 at Las Vegas. About the contest: Silverlightshow conducts an annual Ecocontest promoting eco-awareness. This year’s theme was Deforestation. Participants were asked to develop a Silverlight based application ...
ROOTS is a forum for presentation, debate and study of current trends within information technology, agile methods and software design. ROOTS is aimed at software developers, project managers, testers, designers, architects and usability professionals. The conference is organized over three days with keynotes, lectures, workshops and lightning talks of exceptional quality. Our tracks will typically focus on craftsmanship, methods and quality. More information: http://rootsconf.no/ ...
I have been an avid reader all of my life. Everything from SciFi and Fantasy to Technical Books and a little of everything in between. Being a geek, I was of course an early adopter of eBooks. Over time my eBook collection became huge, on the order of over 10,000 books and publications. Long before I reached that point I needed a way to manage that collection. After several different attempts I finally settled on a program called Calibre (pronounced cali-ber according to the developer) which I have ...
This post is from a very good friend of mine, Billy Hollis. He’s got some interesting food for thought and I think you’ll enjoy his perspective! For over 15 years now, our industry has been struggling with a crucial tradeoff. We can get broad reach via standards, or we can get the best possible user experience with applications that take advantage of particular devices or platforms. It's a stereotype that people in software development tend to be code and technology centric and not user centric. ...
I recently asked question this question as a post on the Microsoft modeling and tools forum: Various Microsoft attempts at MDD have failed or been put on the back burner: WhiteHorse, Software Factories, Oslo. Does Microsoft have any strategy for Model Driven Development? Will any of the forementioned tools ever see the light of day? Stuart Kent responded to my question here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/stu... - Have a look at his post: ...
In this Issue: Michael Crump, Jeremy Likness, Matthew Delisle, Xianzhong Zhu, Nigel Sampson, Jeff Prosise(-2-), Andrea Boschin, Mike Ormond, Jeff Wilcox, and Bil Simser. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Scaling and Anti-Aliasing Issues" Jeremy Likness WP7: "AgFx Windows Phone App and Data Caching Framework" Jeff Wilcox Shoutouts: The tool Mike Ormond discussed in a post listed below is WP7 Screenshot Tool by Cory Smith DiscountASP.NET has a post up about the latest SQL Injection attack going ...
It seems odd that in 2011 there is no such thing as a requirements capture language. Martin Fowler describes this as the yawning crevice of doom in software - http://martinfowler.com/bli... , http://www.infoq.com/news/2... When I am building code it is ludicrous that I need to read a perpetually changing 50 page Word document or Excel spreadsheet, or worse a set of UML diagrams that are totally disconnected from reality. We need a standardized ...
I am in the proccess of putting together a demo machine. i arleady have a Windows 7 VM with the essentials for SharePoint Deveopment. But I spent some part of the weekend putting together a demo machine and after some thinking I decided to share some points that you might want to consider when putting together a Development or Demo machine as a SharePoint Developer\Consultant. I also welcome any comments and opinions or rebuttles to any of these points. I spent some time and put together a WIndows ...
In many respects is not really fair to compare these two products, as they are mostly targeted toward two different markets, however, the HP Slate 500 is the best offering that Microsoft and it’s partners have put forward to compete head-on with Apple and the rapidly growing tablet/slate market. As way of background I have been a Windows Tablet PC user since the product was first released as an extended version of Windows XP. I started by testing a Panasonic Toughbook convertible, moved on to what ...
If you are going to be in the Washington D.C. area on April 28th, and you want to learn more about both Scrum, and how to utilize Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2010, then you really need to attend the free 1-day seminar, “Agile Scrum Development Practices with the Experts”. This event is being hosted by Ken Schwaber, one of the co-founders of the Scrum process, as well as Richard Hundhausen, who, in addition to his many qualifications, has helped develop the official Microsoft “Professional Scrum ...
Doing some final prep for speaking at this week’s Winnipeg IE9/WP7 bootcamp and ran into an issue with one of the demos. It’s a picture taking sample, showing how to programmatically implement functionality to interact with the phone’s camera. In the emulator everything worked fine, but when I deployed to my device I’d continually get a “User Cancelled” message after trying to snap a pic (this was coded in the event that the user cancelled taking the picture). A quick ping to WP7 MVP Mark Arteaga ...
Some of you have probably already seen Google’s April 1st announcement of their technology to use “Motion Sensing” to control Gmail. I betcha Google probably didn’t think of Kinect when making that spoof or perhaps they did which is why it sound plausible in a remote way. Anyways the FAST crew have brought responded to the spoof with demoing their Software doing just that. i.e. having motion control for Gmail using a Kinect and custom software of theirs. Actually this seems very feasible if you could ...
Lately I've been pretty critical of the Scrum process, primarily for not containing fail-safes for when things start to go wrong. I spoke with some pretty passionate Scrum Masters who told me, "Don't blame Scrum for a team's failure to adopt it." And I've reached the point where I agree. For any team considering Scrum I have this advice: If you are afraid of Extreme Programming understand you'll get limited benefits from adopting Scrum. You may get to a point where you work is visible and tracked ...
I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while and finally did!! Don’t let the title fool you, it could have been “Modern Object Oriented development with .NET”. In the context of improving an existing active project (brownfield) this books walks you through separation of concerns, isolating dependencies, test driven development and many other concepts in a very practical and easy to understand way. They also cover many of the political, cultural and personality issues you will face working with ...
Introduction I recently came across a handy tool that can be used as a setup bootstrapper for windows. Its called dotNetInstaller and can be found at http://dotnetinstaller.code... This tool allows the user to distribute a single compressed, executable packaged setup with all the pre-requisites. It is very customisable. For the purposes of demonstration i will use the scenario that we encountered with our software distribution: We have 4 pre-requisites that need to be checked and installed ...
If you hate being a mindless drone in some Illogical software sweatshop, switch to T4. Note that you cannot use reflection - you must use EnvDTE or your VS instance will lock. Use the T4Toolbox to access the current TransformContext to pull classes from files. Apply an iteration to generate properties in the target class that use the model source class for backing properties and change notification. It just works! <#@ templatedebug="true" hostSpecific="true" #> <#@ outputextension=".cs" ...
(these are lifted verbatim from Microsoft here, here and here and are presented below only because it’s convenient to have them lumped altogether…) Getting Started with Windows Phone Windows Phone development platform supports both XNA Framework and Silverlight. This unit takes you through the step-by-step creation of your first Windows Phone Silverlight application. Hands-On Labs · Hello Windows Phone This lab intends to be the classic "Hello World" application, introducing you to the tools and ...
Back in August I blogged about an issue I was having with VS.NET 2010. I had installed it on a clean pave of Windows 7 64-bit, but I was getting weird issues with the designer for ASP.NET and I couldn’t add EF files into my projects. The weirdest part was that when I went to the properties of my project, the framework version drop list was empty…no frameworks, 2, 3, 3.5, or 4, were listed! Now to be sure, my graphics above are tongue in cheek, and the VS.NET team has actually been fantastic in reaching ...
MSDN WP7 Beginner Training WP7 Development for Absolute Beginners in 64 parts on channel9 Windows Phone Developer Quickstarts on the AppHub WP7 Offline Training Course WP7Comp - Red Gate Software competition site seeking submissions for WP7 apps that developers will love (competition now finished). List of Entries. WP7 Developers Blog Credit card Processing on WP7 Shawn Wildermuth’s Phoney application now available on codeplex Jeremy Likeness - UltraLight.mvvm Laurent Bugnion – MVVMLight (lot’s of ...
For the last three years the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group has been the only community in the Chicago area for Software Architects, Enterprise Architects, Infrastructure Architects and Database Architects. Suddenly this is changing. The first change was a special interest group created by member of the Chicago .NET Users Group (CNUG). This has just started in the last couple of months. Now it was just announced that IASA is finally launching a Chicago chapter. This is something ...
You want to avoid the pitfalls of object oriented design? Then this is the right place to start. Use Flow-Oriented Analysis (FOA) and –Design (FOD or just FD for Flow-Design) to understand a problem domain and design a software solution. Flow-Orientation as described here is related to Flow-Based Programming, Event-Based Programming, Business Process Modelling, and even Event-Driven Architectures. But even though “thinking in flows” is not new, I found it helpful to deviate from those precursors ...
The Campwoood Source Monitor at http://www.campwoodsw.com/s... says in its introduction "The freeware program SourceMonitor lets you see inside your software source code to find out how much code you have and to identify the relative complexity of your modules. For example, you can use SourceMonitor to identify the code that is most likely to contain defects and thus warrants formal review. SourceMonitor, written in C++, runs through your code at high speed, typically at least 10,000 ...
Today's $10 Deal of the day offer from Apress at http://www.apress.com/info/... is "Silverlight 4 Business Intelligence Software Business Intelligence (BI) software allows you to view different components of a business using a single visual platform, which makes comprehending mountains of data easier. This book shows BI concepts put into action using Silverlight 4." It was previously on on Feb/11 ...
The day has finally come: Microsoft has released a web browser that is awesome. On Monday night, Microsoft officially introduced the world to the latest edition to its product family: Internet Explorer 9. That makes March 14, 2011 (also known as PI day) the official birthday of Microsoft’s rebirth in the world of web browsing. Just like any big event, you take some time to celebrate. Here are a few things that you can do to celebrate the return of Internet Explorer. 1. Download It If you’re not a ...
MVPs are well known for their good heart (like the GeekGive initiative shows) and Client App Dev MVP Gregor Biswanger is no exception. At the latest MVP summit (beginning of March 2011), he took over a DVD about WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 and asked a few Microsoft superstars to sign it. Right now, the DVD is auctioned on eBay and of course the proceeds will go to a charitable work: The German League against Cancer (Deutsche Krebshilfe). The post is in German and English (scroll down for the English ...
What is cloud computing? Is hosting the same thing as cloud computing? Are you running a cloud if you already use virtual machines? What is the difference between Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and a cloud provider? And the list goes on… these questions keep coming up and all try to fundamentally explain what “cloud” means relative to other concepts. At the risk of over simplification, answering these questions becomes simpler once you understand the primary foundations of cloud computing: Elasticity ...
In the last month or so I have been able to test and experience first hand the offering from discountasp.net for hosted TFS 2010. This first part is a description of the setup process for the account itself and getting some additional information on what you will find through the portal on their site. Not long ago, I posted a little tidbit on hosting TFS. Through it I also did a shameless plug to my employer, our services and the type of hosting we recommend. So, wouldn’t me running on discountasp.net ...
Here are the latest update from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Worlds that went live this month. Here are some of the latest numbers: Windows Phone Marketplace currently offers more than 9,000 quality apps and games and enjoys a base of over 32,000 registered developers, delivering an average of 100 new apps every day. There have been over 1 million downloads of the developers tools for Windows Phone 7. Trial version help you sell more Trials result in higher sales by the numbers: Users like trials ...
As of today, I will be partnering with Sevensteps when it comes to developing great Surface, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 7 Touch applications. Below you’ll find the press release we sent out today. I am looking forward to this partnership and expect great things coming from us both in the future! Dennis Vroegop, Microsoft MVP, joins Sevensteps partner network 1 March 2011, Seattle / Amersfoort Today Dennis Vroegop and Bart Roozendaal, both Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft Surface, ...
For the last few months I have been secretly working away at the second version of an application that we initially released a few years ago. It’s called MaxCut and it is a free panel/cut optimizer for the woodwork, glass and metal industry. One of the motivations for writing MaxCut was to get an end to end experience in developing an application for general consumption. From the early days of v1 of MaxCut I would get the odd email thanking me for the software and then listing a few suggestions on ...
(This is my first review as a part of the GeeksWithBlogs.net Influencers program. It’s a program in which I (and the others who have been selected for it) get the opportunity to check out new products and services and write reviews about them. We don’t get paid for this, but we do generally get to keep a copy of the software or retain an account for some period of time on the service that we review. In this case I received a copy of Red Gate Software’s ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0, which was released ...
Billy Hollis, my Visual Studio Live! colleague and fellow Microsoft Regional Director said recently, and I am paraphrasing, that the computing world, especially on the consumer side, has shifted from one of building hardware and software that makes things possible to do, to building products and technologies that make things easy to do. Billy crystalized things perfectly, as he often does. In this new world of “easy to do,” Apple has done very well and Microsoft has struggled. In the old world, customers ...
For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process. Not me. I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience. First, I cloned my entire hard drive onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER. The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I ...
Timothy recently posted “Microsoft Shows Off Radical New UI, Could Be Used In Windows 8” on Slashdot. I took such grave exception to his post that I found it necessary to my senses to write this blog. We need to go back many years to the days of hand cranked calculators and early main frame computers. These devices had singular purposes – they were “number crunchers” used to make accounting easier. The front facing display in early mainframes was “blinken lights.” The calculators did provide printing ...
The Past A few years ago my small software company made the jump from storing code on a shared folder to source code control. At the time we had evaluated a few of the options and settled on Tortoise SVN. The main motivation for going the SVN route was that we found a great plugin for Visual Studio that allowed us to avoid the command prompt for uploading changes (like I said we are windows programmers… command prompt bad!! ) and it was free. Up to now we have been pretty happy with SVN as it removed ...
Exciting news. I am proud to announce that Glenn Block from Microsoft will be coming all the way from Seattle to Scotland on the 12th March to talk to you!. Glenn is a PM on the WCF team working on Microsoft’s future HTTP and REST stack and has been involved in some pretty exciting and ground-breaking Microsoft development mind-shifts in recent times. Don’t miss the chance to hear him speak and ask him questions. The day will be split into two parts. Favourite subjects from The Block The first couple ...
William Pietri over at Agile Focus has written an interesting article entitled, "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)" in which he talks about how agile development has fallen into a common trap where large companies are now spending a lot of money hiring agile (Scrum) consultants just so that they can say they are agile, but all the while avoiding any change that is required by Scrum. It echoes the questions that I've been asking for a while, "Can a fortune 500 company actually do agile development?" ...
Here is the quick answer: Go into your client e software (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.) for the account you are working on (usually default). Set the SMTP server to smtp.gmail.com Set the username as your gmail account user name (e.g. myname@gmail.com). Gmail will need the username and password you use for that account, so if your default is set to some other email, be sure to set the username and password to that value, or click on the checkbox for username/password. Check TLS as the secure connection. ...
Hi and welcome! I'm a software developer and this is my geeks blog. I have 20 years Visual Studio mainly C++, MFC, ATL and now, thankfully, C# and I am embarking on the new world (well new to me) of WPF, so I thought I would try and capture my successful...and not so successful...WPF experiences with the geek world. So where to start? WPF? What I know so far... From wiki..."Windows Presentation Foundation (or WPF) is a graphical subsystem for rendering user interfaces in Windows-based applications." ...
Today's $10 PDF book from Apress at http://www.apress.com/info/... is: Beginning Microsoft Office 2010 With Beginning Microsoft Office 2010, you’ll take a hands-on approach to learning everything, new and old, that the world’s most popular productivity software suite has to offer ...