11 Jul 2015

Blog Issues

General News
For anyone that follows my blog at all, you have likely noticed that over the past few days (weeks?) it has been a bit unstable. At first, it was a minor annoyance but it eventually escalated to the point where the site was down more than it was up. I finally contacted my hosting provider (Arvixe) and they informed me that they had a corrupted InnoDB (storage engine for MySQL) that needed to be recovered and that they were working to get everything back up and running. I was happy to wake up this morning with this link informing me…
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24 May 2015

Using OneNote for Publishing to WordPress

Uncategorized
Recently, Microsoft announced three new OneNote partners - CloudHQ, Equil and WordPress. I find this exciting for the following reasons: I maintain my blog in WordPress I currently use Live Writer to create and publish my posts Live Writer hasn't seen any love from Microsoft in a long time so I'm happy to see that I can now use OneNote to compose my posts if I want to start weaning myself from Live Writer :-) If you are a WordPress user and are interested in making use of this new WordPress plugin, you can find the full installation instructions here.…
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18 May 2015

VSO Status Inspector Extension for Visual Studio

Utilities, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
If you are a long-time user of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online (VSO) then there is a decent chance that you’ve had to endure one or more “hiccups” over the past year or so. Today, if VSO seems to be running a little slow – or not at all – you probably go out to the VSO Support page to check the current status of VSO. There, you will see something like this at the top of the page: Clicking on the Visual Studio Service Blog link will take you to a page with more details (if there are issues being…
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01 May 2015

Microsoft HoloLens–Hands on at Build 2015

Conferences, HoloLens, Windows 10
During the last few minutes of the Day 1 Keynote at Build 2015, Microsoft’s Alex Kipman announced that “hundreds” of HoloLens devices had been brought to Build for developers to try out. There was instant excitement that was just as quickly followed up with disappointment. Alex went on to explain that attendees were required to sign up (via a web site) for a chance at getting their hands on the much-anticipated device. I, along with a friend that joined me at Build, signed up immediately. A few hours later, we both received e-mail messages letting us know that we were…
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08 Apr 2015

Building with Microsoft Tools–For FREE!

Azure, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online
With two of Microsoft’s primary competitors (Apple and Google) offering their development tools free of charge (Xcode and Android Studio, respectively) have you ever wished you could develop on Microsoft’s platforms for FREE? Well… if you didn’t already know that Microsoft offers a good number of development tools and services for free, then read on Visual StudioAlthough it hasn’t been around long (it was announced at last year’s Connect(); event) Microsoft now provides, for no charge, Visual Studio Community 2013. This edition is essentially the same product as Visual Studio 2013 Professional – with a few restrictions placed on usage.Visual…
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06 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Professional

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As announced recently, Microsoft is merging the Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate editions into a single, new edition – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise. This is a free upgrade for active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscribers – until your subscription renews. At the point of renewal, there will be a slight increase in price (actual price will vary based on whether or not you are buying a single subscription or if your company has a volume licensing agreement, etc.) to maintain the Enterprise subscription.I recently wrote up a comparison between Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN and Visual Studio…
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04 Apr 2015

VS 2013 Premium vs. VS 2015 Enterprise

Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio 2015
As I recently covered, Microsoft has announced that the Visual Studio Premium with MSDN and Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN editions will be combined into a single, new edition for Visual Studio 2015 – Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise with MSDN.If you have an active Visual Studio 2013 Premium w/MSDN subscription, you will be upgraded, for FREE, to the Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise w/MSDN edition when the final product becomes available later this year. Once your subscription runs out, however, you will have to start paying for the new Enterprise edition (because the Premium edition will no longer exist).Although the price…
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03 Apr 2015

2015 Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference

Conferences and Training
MVP V-ConfThe MVP Virtual Conference (MVP V-Conf) is a brand new, virtual (and free!), two-day event that will be held this year on Thursday, May 14th and Friday, May 15th.These sessions will be presented by Americas’ Region Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), who are exceptional community leaders who are passionate about sharing their real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with their IT Pro, developer and consumer communities around the world.The theme of this first conference is “The Power of Community” where we will showcase how the community can help one another learn, thrive and grow, and demonstrate how Microsoft’s MVPs shape…
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31 Mar 2015

Meet the Visual Studio 2015 Family

Visual Studio 2015
Today, Microsoft announced the editions of Visual Studio 2015 that will be available when Visual Studio 2015 is made available later this summer. You might recall that they announced Visual Studio Community Edition last November (read more about its features here). They have now gone a step further and revamped the remaining Visual Studio editions for the 2015 release.The short version of this announcement is that Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate are being combined into a singled, new edition – Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN. With this change, the three primary Visual Studio editions are:Visual Studio Community 2015Visual…
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15 Feb 2015

Visual Studio Online Search–Get in Now!

Visual Studio Online
Most anyone that has been using a version control system for any amount of time has come to that point in their development career where they’ve asked the question – “I know I’ve seen that code before but where?” You don’t want to go through the hassle of having to recreate something you (or someone else) has already spent a great deal of time and effort building, testing and tweaking until it fits your needs perfectly. You just want to find it and reuse it!If your version control system happens to be Team Foundation Server or Visual Studio Online then…
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