Development
Most of us spend our time in Visual Studio writing .NET code within a Visual Studio solution. Given this situation we find it very easy to integrate with Team Foundation Server for our source control and have a well known work pattern. But what happens when you want to use TFS as source control for non-Microsoft development? The most important thing to remember is that source control should be as transparent as possible to the developer. If the particular language or product does not have an Integrated...
Posted On Friday, February 03, 2012 12:58 PM | Feedback (0)
A co-worker was showing me an in phone scripting environment on the iPhone and I knew I had seen one mentioned for the Windows Phone before. TouchDevelop is an app from Microsoft Research that allows you to create small applications that do a wide variety of operations including using most of the capabilities of the device. So could this be a fun way for us geeks to waste some time while waiting for our oil to be change or a table to open up at your favorite restaurant? So what does this language...
Posted On Tuesday, December 20, 2011 8:29 AM | Feedback (0)
The main way that Twitter provides feeds is through JSON. Unfortunately the version of the .NET Framework that is on the phone does not include the System.Runtime.Serializatio... namespace. Rather than trying to brute force the JSON feed I have been looking into using the Newtonsoft JSON.NET library. The first thing that I ran into with JSON.NET is that the documentation is severely tilted to the serialization side with almost no mention of deserialization. This would have been my preferred approach...
Posted On Wednesday, December 14, 2011 7:27 AM | Feedback (2)
While looking for a free alternative to Sketchflow I landed on the Cacoo web site. Any developer who decides to use the free Visual Studio tools may find themselves doing the same search. The base functionality of Cacoo is free although there are certain features that have fees attached to them such as extended stencils and templates. Cacoo doesn’t seem to have a template for WP7. It does have templates for iOS and Android development so I started with the Android template and started modidfying...
Posted On Monday, November 21, 2011 4:21 PM | Feedback (0)
The discovery phase of any project is both exciting and critical to the project’s success. There are several key points that you need to keep in mind as you navigate this process. The first thing you need to understand is who the players in the project are and what their motivations are for the project. Leaving out a key stakeholder in the resulting product is one of the easiest ways to doom your project to fail. The better the quality of the input you have at this early phase the better chance you...
Posted On Friday, November 18, 2011 2:55 PM | Feedback (0)
I was listening to .NET Rocks episode #713 and it got me thinking about a number of SharePoint related topics. I have been working with SharePoint since the 2001 product came out and have watched it evolve over the years. Today SharePoint is one of the most powerful and flexible products in the market. Of course that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement (a lot of improvement in fact) and with much power comes much responsibility. My main gripe these days is that you have to develop on a...
Posted On Thursday, November 10, 2011 4:53 PM | Feedback (0)
If you have not developed with styles in Silverlight/XAML then it can be challenging and resources can be sparse depending on how deep you get. One thing that you need to understand is what level you can apply styles and how much they can cascade. What I am finding is that this doesn’t go to the level that we are used to in HTML and CSS. While styles can be defined at a page level if you want to share styles throughout your application they should be defined in the App.xaml file. This is of course...
Posted On Thursday, November 10, 2011 6:56 AM | Feedback (0)
Memory leaks can cause strange and unexpected behaviors in your applications. Of course in this day of managed code we don’t see it as often as we used to and many of us are getting rusty in our skill to eliminate these problems. Recently I ended up with a misbehaving Outlook 2007 add-in which resulted in time spent with Microsoft support. The first thing that came out of that was a way to detect if an Outlook 2007 is experiencing memory leaks. Below is a command line command that seems to report...
Posted On Wednesday, October 26, 2011 9:38 AM | Feedback (0)
NuGet is a topic that I have been hearing about for a while, especially from Clark Sell. I figured it was about time to take a dive into it and see what it was all about. The description of NuGet makes it seem like magic to add dependencies to your code projects. Of course there is always an explanation for how the trick works. In this case it is by using a package and a definition of how resources should be added to your project. One of the interesting aspects of using NuGet is the UI. The fact...
Posted On Thursday, October 20, 2011 9:29 AM | Feedback (0)
It was another engaging presentation at this month’s CITAG meeting as Joe Hummel presented functional programming and its implementation using F#. Some times it is fun to attack a mind bending problem and this was one of those times. Leaning about functional programming caused about the same brain cramps as moving from procedural to object oriented for the first time. Of course when you start to get it the effect is almost euphoric. I would suggest that if you haven’t looked into functional programming...
Posted On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 8:48 AM | Feedback (0)
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