If you installed the latest MVVM Light version for Windows 8, you may encounter an issue where code snippets are not displayed correctly in the Intellisense popup. I am working on a fix, but for now here is how you can solve the issue manually. The code snippets MVVM Light, when installed correctly, will install a set of code snippets that are very useful to allow you to type less code. As I use to say, code is where bugs are, so you want to type as little of that as possible ;) With code snippets,...
What is ALMing in Hinglish => Introduction दूसरे वीडियो में शुभ्रा माजी, आदित्य अग्रवाल और सृष्टि श्रीधर से चर्चा करेंगे विंडोज 8 मेट्रो स्टाइल ऍप्लिकेशन्स की मैनुअल टैस्टिंग के बारे में. टीम हमें माइक्रोसॉफ्ट टेस्ट प्रबंधक 2011 के माध्यम से एक डेमो देंगी विंडोज 8 मेट्रो स्टाइल ऍप्लिकेशन्स की मैनुअल टैस्टिंग की. ALMing in Hinglish–Windows 8 Metro Style App manual testing using MTM11 In this second in the series of videos I bring to you Shubhra Maji who is a Program Manager on the Visual Studio...
I just pushed the following to Codeplex: A new MVVM Light project template for Windows 8 Consumer Preview. This template appears in the File, New Project dialog and allows you to create a Metro style app already wired with MVVM Light. An updated Windows 8 installer for MVVM Light. Preconditions: This installs MVVM Light for Windows 8 only. You can install it side-by-side with the standard MVVM Light for Silverlight, WPF and Windows Phone. Where do I get it? You can download the MSI from: http://mvvmlight.codeplex.c...
So, day 1 of DevWeek. Lots and lots of Windows 8 and WinRT, as you would expect. The keynote had some actual content in it, fleshed out some of the details of how your apps linked into the Metro infrastructure, and confirmed that there would indeed be an enterprise version of the app store available for Metro apps.) However, that's, not what I want to focus this post on. What I do want to focus on is this: Windows 8 does not make .NET developers obsolete. Phew! .NET in the New Ecosystem In all the...
Everyone loves naming conventions and product code names :) I’ve see a few people mislead by blogs and so called “.com press” to the point of confusion about what Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh and Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 actually are in reality. So let’s clarify: Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh – is the name of the refresh update to Windows Phone OS that allows for broad reach to new markets and languages, previously not supported in Windows Phone 7.5 OS. This update also provides support for market specific...
In my last blog I talked about a new WP7 utility application. My intention at the time was to build a Wi-Fi strength meter, but after some research, I discovered that Microsoft has that part of the phone sandboxed. Its not a big deal now, but I hope they unlock those features in a future update as it could lead to some real cool applications. So what now? Well at first, I felt I was at a crossroads on application ideas. I still plan to release Mixtio Reader, but until I get some other issues worked...
This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search,...
With the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version out in the open and the Visual Studio 11 Beta also available, I’ve been putting some more effort into trying them both out. The first impression of the new Visual Studio 11 build was: Why doesn’t it work at all on Windows 8?! The issues I encountered were odd to say the least. Visual Studio did install correctly, which was a good sign, but when I started it, I was greeted with a multitude of popups each telling me that some package could not be loaded....
I’m frequently impressed by the additions and changes to Windows as I spend more time on the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Here, for example, is how a the progress is now shown for a copy across my home network. I think this is demonstrating to me how the destination is not able to keep up with the flow. I’m now intrigued to see if there is anything I need to do to improve performance...
I decided to download and install the Windows 8 and Visual Studio 11 previews. I figured I had an Acer Inspire One netbook that BARELY met min specs that was holding down paper (as on does with an Acer netbook....) I will not tell you about the installation of Win8. This is because I had my brother download and install it. I will say that he had already downloaded and created the install package on a USB drive. I gave him the netbook at 1PM. He sent me a text saying it was done at 5PM. To me, that's...
This blog post started as a simple one, but grew to be quite large and time consuming. I am splitting it, because I really want to publish the first findings already. Stay tuned for more! I am sure that you heard that Windows 8 was released last week in an early although quite stable stage called "consumer preview". Windows 8 is an interesting mix of touch-based and mouse/keyboard based system. Some aspects are a bit annoying (see my post about the "split personalities" in Win8 to see what I mean!)...
This past week was just massive in the amount of Betas, evaluations, review guides and educational material that were released. We saw Windows 8 come out in a Customer Preview, the same for Windows 8 Server. There are plenty of things to go over and review, but that is a number of posts coming. If you have been using the TFS Preview, then you pretty much had an idea what you would be looking for in TFS coming out and of course the announcement of TFS Express was exciting. Anyhow, here are a couple...
It is about time to look at the new .NET Framework 4.5 release along with the brand new Visual Studio 11 Beta 1. Besides the new features I wanted to see if the massive performance complaints have been taken and addressed. First the good things. VS11 Beta 1 does start a lot quicker as its predecessors. It is nearly as fast as VS2008 which was from the performance aspect the best release since VS6. This is great news. Below are some numbers I did compile on my Windows 7 x32 PC with a Intel Duo 6600...
From Brian Keller: “I’m very pleased to announce the availability of the Visual Studio 11 Beta ALM Virtual Machine along with 6 hands-on-labs / demo scripts. This marks an exciting milestone in our journey towards RTM. You can now roll up your sleeves and start learning about the many capabilities we announced at TechEd North America last year and have been talking about in greater detail since then. You can download and install the beta of Visual Studio 11 (and Team Foundation Server 11, .NET Framework...
Update: Posted the video of “MVVM Applied” below. This week I was “on tour” in Belgium and Netherlands and presented 3 times: “MVVM Applied, From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8” (in Belgium and Netherlands) The goal of this session was to make people feel confident that the skills they acquired working in various XAML frameworks (Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF, Surface, etc) are going to help them tremendously when developing Windows 8 applications. It was a session packed with code,...
If you tried to build applications for Windows 8 with XAML/C#, you may have noticed an annoying issue: If you have a list controls (for example a GridView) and you bind the ItemsSource property to a property of type ObservableCollection<Som... on your ViewModel, the GridView is not updated when the collection’s content changes. The CollectionChanged event is raised properly, but it is not honored by the binding system. Thankfully, this is a temporary bug, and it should be solved in the...
Today I gave a talk in TechDays in Belgium about MVVM in Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. This was the first time I gave that particular talk, and in addition keep in mind this is a developer preview, meaning that it is not finished, and not always stable. I had a few surprises with this build. For example from time to time, the new “Metro style applications” just cannot be launched anymore. Nothing that a simple reboot cannot fix… but I’ll come back to that in a moment. A couple of...
We’re only in February, but the rest of the 10 months left in 2012 look to be very interesting in the Microsoft space with products that Developers and IT Pros will find intriguing. Redmond Channel Partner posted a great article outlining what products we can expect to make an appearance this year and when. Some highlights: Windows 8/Windows Server 8 Well we all know this is coming, and that it will be a huge focus of Microsoft’s marketing (once their people are actually allowed to talk about it)....
One of the new data controls in Windows 8 Metro is the ListView. The ListView does the same thing as the ListBox, plus more. In this post, I’ll build on the TwitterClient, from my previous post: Windows 8 Composition and Content. and show how to refactor the ListBox to a ListView. I’ll also mention a few of the differences between the two controls. Refactor ListBox to ListView To save you a little time, I’ll show you the XAML for the ListBox, from my previous post. Then I’ll follow up with changes...
This was a big week for Windows 8 news (given the relative secrecy around the whole project). At the beginning of the week we learned that the Consumer Preview (fka the "Beta") of Windows 8 will be released at the very end of the month in concert with the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona (MWC). Then, just yesterday, Windows and Windows Live Division President Steven Sinofsky uploaded an 8600+ word post to the Building Windows 8 blog detailing Microsoft's plans for Windows on ARM (i.e....
Composition is an integral part of Windows 8 UI design from both aesthetic and logical perspectives. This post modified my previous post, Refactoring Windows 8 Code-Behind to MVVM. adding to the variety of compositional examples. I’ll start with an explanation of composition in Windows 8, modify the previous code to show the power of composition, and then highlight a few more existing examples of where composition naturally fits into the Windows 8 UI environment. Understanding Windows 8 Composition...
In my previous post, Using LINQ to Twitter in Windows 8 Metro Apps, I cheated a little (some might say a lot) on my UI architecture by using code-behind. In this post, I’ll make it all better by showing you how to separate the model and interaction logic from the UI design – proper separation of concerns. I’ll accomplish this with a pattern, named Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), which is widely used for WPF, Silverlight, and (soon) Windows 8 Metro Apps. I’ll start by discussing what MVVM is, move to...
While the title of this post suggests focus on LINQ to Twitter, it also indicates that I’ll be discussing how to build a Windows 8 Metro application. The application itself will display a list of tweets from Twitter’s public feed. In the sections that follow, you’ll read background information on pre-requisites to understanding the post, learn how to get LINQ to Twitter working with Visual Studio 11, and then see a step-by-step on how the application is built. Getting Started You can build Metro...
Installing Windows 8 Developer Preview isn’t always simple. It was troublesome on a 32-bit machine, but much easier on x64. Since Win8’s debut at Build last September, VirtualBox supports installing Win8 natively, so you’ll want to download the latest version of VirtualBox to make sure you don’t have problems. Another good option is VMWare. They have a free product, VMWare Player, that runs well. The only problem is it doesn’t have native Win8 support, but don’t let that get in the way. This blog...
I attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to follow and cover Microsoft, both in terms of its announcements at the show, and those of its competitors. From that standpoint, and since Microsoft announced that this year’s CES would be its last, I attended again this year and I think it was the best CES Microsoft’s had since I started attending. But the reasons for that are unexpected and surprising. Let me give you a little more context and explain why. Microsoft has, since 1998, delivered the kickoff...
A little more than three months ago, Microsoft hosted the //build/ conference at which they unveiled the upcoming version of Windows (commonly called Windows 8, though I don’t know if the marketing folks have accepted the fact that that is the name most of us are expecting for it yet). They released to the developer world a build of it called the Windows Developer Preview (and Windows Server Developer Preview) along with various tools for creating the new “Metro style” apps. I wasn’t able to make...
Every now and then I go to Tiobe to see their ratings on the popularity of programming languages. Usually there is nothing exciting out there, just a few small moves of languages so I was interested to see in December Tiobe had a headline of C++ about to be dethroned by C# Looking at the stats, sure enough, according to Tiobe C# is on the verge of taking the number 3 spot. It will be interesting to see what happens when Windows 8 hits the market with what seemed to be a revival of C++ during Microsoft’s...
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening"...
As someone who works a lot on Silverlight and as someone who have presented lots of trainings / talks over Silverlight; i am been getting a lot of questions based on future of Silverlight. Is Silverlight dead? http://www.zdnet.com/blog/m... These are often from end-clients, managers, architects or even consumers. Sometimes also from guys who have little exposure to Silverlight; but still want to engage in the conversation as it is "happening"...
So, to step back up on my soapbox for a quick moment. The buzz and the noise around jQuery and Client Side development in general is growing and at a fairly rapid pace. This of course is good and bad. It’s good because our applications are becoming more and more user friendly and the visual appeal is increasing exponentially a well. Plus, as developers, we get to develop some pretty awesome functionality that before we would have had to crack open Visual Studio to get the same results. It’s definitely...
Don’t miss out on these great session with Markus Egger in the Dallas office! Where: Microsoft Dallas Office – 7000 SR-161 (George Bush Turnpike), Dallas, TX 75039 When: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 – 1:30 – 4:30 PM Signup for this FREE event in Dallas Join Markus Egger, Microsoft RD and one of the longest running MVPs, for an afternoon of free information. CODE Magazine and EPS Software are in a unique position to share information based on real world experience in projects that are either our own...
Here we go! After the Microsoft team released version 5 of Silverlight yesterday, MVVM Light is available for this version of the framework too. I did not create the installer yet (that will take a few more days), but you can download the source code and build it yourself easily. Source code on Codeplex. Instructions to build the code. With this latest release, this puts the number of supported frameworks to 8: .NET 3.5 SP1, .NET 4, Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7.0,...
Microsoft just released the version 5 of Silverlight! It’s a great news and I really want to congratulate the whole team on this impressive collective effort. The official announcement is on the Silverlight team blog! The purpose of this article is not to be exhaustive about the list of features (there have been, and will be, many more very detailed articles such as this series on the Silverlight blog) but rather to explain why this version in particular makes me happy to be a Silverlight developer...
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the forthcoming release of BizTalk Server 2010 R2 on the BizTalk Server blog site. This is advanced notice, given that this new version will ship six months after the release of Windows 8, expected in the second half of next year. On this basis, we can expect the new version of BizTalk Server to arrive in 2013. Given the BizTalk team’s previous record of name changes, I wonder if this will eventually be released as BizTalk Server 2013. Microsoft has been refreshingly...
Today is the first day of my fourth year at IdentityMine. I can hardly believe how fast it went, and how exciting the trip has been so far. In the past three years, I have had the chance to work on exciting technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation (which is still very much active, and even more exciting since we now have the possibility to add Kinect interactions to any WPF application!), Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 (for which we have a lot of work right now), Microsoft Surface (for which...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, Manas Patnaik, Jeff Blankenburg, Doug Mair, Jon Galloway, Richard Bartholomew, Peter Bromberg, Joel Reyes, Zeben Chen, Navneet Gupta, and Cathy Sullivan. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using ASP.NET PageMethods With Silverlight" Peter Bromberg WP7: "Leveraging Background Services and Agents in Windows Phone 7 (Mango)" Jon Galloway Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Debugging Contracts using Windows Simulator" Cathy Sullivan LightSwitch: "LightSwitch: It Is About The Money (It...
In this Issue: Michael Collier, Samidip Basu, Jesse Liberty, Dhananjay Kumar, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #16: Isolated Storage Explorer" Samidip Basu Metro/WinRT/W8: "1360x768x32 Resolution in Windows 8 in VirtualBox" Michael Crump Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual Studio #LightSwitch Daily is up Alex Golesh releases a Silverlight 5-friendly version of his external map manifest file tool: Utility:...
My Lenovo ThinkPad's built-in screen maxes at 1366x768x32. I wanted to use that same resolution with Windows 8 Developer Preview inside of VirtualBox. So, what did I do? Downloaded the latest build of VirtualBox v4.1.6 (because it supports Windows 8 x64) Installed Windows 8 Developer Preview in VirtualBox as I did earlier this year. Installed Guest Additions. Ran the CustomVideoMode described in this blog post. …and quickly found out that I didn’t have the option to use 1366x768x32 inside of VirtualBox...
The software industry lives within an interesting paradox. IT in the enterprise moves slowly and cautiously, upgrading only when safe and necessary. IT interests intentionally live in the past. On the other hand, developers, and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) not only want to use the latest and greatest technologies, but this constituency prides itself on gauging tech’s future, and basing its present-day strategy upon it. Normally, we as an industry manage this paradox with a shrug of the shoulder...
(DISCLAIMER: Yes there are lots of more elegant ISO software beside the free Microsoft one I’m about to show. But free is free and it has been tested and works for me for making advance bootable USB drives. That is another story. Look up Windows 8 Developer Preview for that one on BING.) For those of use that work with new technology all the time we accumulate a lot of ISO files and have to burn them to CD/DVD’s quite often. But we now have machines without burner in the corporate environment. We...
In this Issue: XAMLGeek, WindowsPhoneGeek, Nigel Sampson, Jesse Liberty, Sumit Dutta(-2-), Dave Bost, Jared Bienz, Joost van Schaik, and Michael Crump. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 7 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "Using MVVMLight, ItemsControl, Blend and behaviors to make a ‘heads up compass’" Joost van Schaik Metro/WinRT/W8: "“Badevand” for Windows 8" XAMLGeek Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's latest Visual...
Remember how I blogged about rolling with the punches? So today my buddy and Prairie Dev Con speaker James Chambers went to present on Microsoft MVC. He brought his fancy new Dell XPS laptop, which he had used to do presentations and stream internet video to a projector before. But today, the technology gods were not smiling… James tries to connect his laptop to the projector. Nothing. The projector just can’t recognize the connection. Realize that we’ve already had two sessions in that room already,...
In this Issue: Michael Crump, Andrea Boschin, Michael Sync, WindowsPhoneGeek(-2-), Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Antoni Dol, Walter Ferrari, and Jeff Blankenburg(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "10 Laps around Silverlight 5 (Part 6 of 10)" Michael Crump WP7: "31 Days of Mango | Day #2: Device Status" Jeff Blankenburg Metro/WinRT/W8: "Lighting up your C# Metro apps by being a Share Target" Derik Whittaker Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael...
In this Issue: Pontus Wittenmark, Jeff Blankenburg(-2-), Colin Eberhardt, Charles Petzold, Dhananjay Kumar, Igor, Beth Massi, Kunal Chowdhury(-2-), Shawn Wildermuth, XAMLNinja, and Peter Kuhn(-2-). Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Silverlight Page Navigation Framework - Learn about UriMapper" Kunal Chowdhury WP7: "31 Days of Mango" Jeff Blankenburg WinRT/Metro/W8: "An Introduction to Semantic Zoom in Windows 8 Metro" Colin Eberhardt LightSwitch: "Common Validation Rules in LightSwitch Business Applications"...
Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for SilverlightShow Top 5 News for October 31 - November 06, 2011. Here are the top 5 news on SilverlightShow for last week: Silverlight Best Practices: Data-Centric Applications Top 5 SilverlightShow Ebooks for October, 2011 Do LOB Applications Require Good Usability? Silverlight Navigation Framework tip: using the XAML escape sequence Silverlight Skills Carry Over to Windows 8 'Metro Style' Apps Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay...
In this Issue: Colin Eberhardt, WindowsPhoneGeek, John Papa, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar, Charles Petzold, Peter Kuhn, and Ollie Riches. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Display Total Records After Applying PagedCollectionView Filter" Asim Sajjad WP7: "Announcing: Phone as a Remote Control" Peter Kuhn Metro/WinRT: "Asynchronous Processing in Windows 8" Charles Petzold Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert Mountain Developers is up Michael Washington's...
In this Issue: Michael Washington, WindowsPhoneGeek, Jeremy Likness, Mike Taulty, Erno de Weerd, Jesse Liberty, Derik Whittaker, Sumit Dutta, Asim Sajjad, Dhananjay Kumar, and Avi Pilosof. Above the Fold: Silverlight: "Using Jounce Navigation to Create OOB Child Windows in Silverlight 5" Jeremy Likness WP7: "Video on How to work with WCF Services in Windows Phone 7" Dhananjay Kumar Metro/WinRT/WIndows 8: "Development Tip – Tab Control" Avi Pilosof LightSwitch: "Connecting To A .CSV or Excel File...
In this Issue: Andrea Boschin, Mark Monster, Antoni Dol, Chaitanya Venneti, Erik Arthur and Jeffrey Ferman, David Kelley, Jose Fajardo(-2-), Andy Beaulieu, Rudi Grobler, Chad Campbell, and Andrej Tozon. Above the Fold: VS2011: "Visual Studio XAML Designer: New Grid Features" WP7: "Statistics for your Windows Phone application (Google Analytics)" Mark Monster Metro/WinRT/Windows8: "Physics Games: Multi-targeting Windows 8 + Windows Phone 7" Andy Beaulieu Shoutouts: Michael Palermo's latest Desert...
Check out the Top Five most popular news at SilverlightShow for October 24 - 30, 2011. Here are the top 5 news on SilverlightShow for last week: Photoshop in METRO style Nokia giving away 25,000 Lumia 800 Windows Phones to developers Windows 8 Development Platform Clarified New Line of Business Features in Silverlight 5 – Using pInvoke Nokia’s First Two Windows Phones Are Here. And They’re Awesome Visit and bookmark SilverlightShow. Stay in the 'Light...
You must have heard about it. Windows 8 will all about Metro. Sure, you can run ‘old-school’ applications on the platform, but most attention these days is about the new user interface. The UI is based on the design language Metro, a design philosophy we first saw in Windows Phone. Nowadays you see more and more of Metro. The Microsoft website is loosely based on it, the Zune mediaplayer uses it and so on. So it wasn’t a surprise to see that Windows 8 is all about Metro. In this screenshot you see...