04 Apr 2014

Build 2014-Day 1

Conferences
The first day was a busy day of announcements from Microsoft. There are far too many to list here (I’m sure I’d miss some!) and I could spend hours (or days) writing up the details of each announcement. I’d rather call out some of the announcements that I personally found to be more interesting. WinJS In case you’re not familiar with WinJS, it is a JavaScript library originally released as part of Windows 8 to aid in developing Windows Store apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. WinJS 2.0 was released with Windows 8.1 and is now in version 2.1 adding…
Read More
02 Apr 2014

Build 2014–Day 0

Conferences
Today, thousands of developers from around the world descended upon San Francisco for Microsoft’s flagship developer conference – Build. Although the conference doesn’t officially kick off until tomorrow, there was still plenty going on to keep the nerd in me occupied! :-) Shortly after checking into my hotel room and grabbing some lunch (at Super Duper Burgers – yummy!) I participated in a mini focus group at the Microsoft offices near the Moscone Center. Along with one other enterprise architect (there were other groups before/after us as well) we spent about an hour and a half answering questions for the…
Read More
19 Mar 2014

Office Lens for Windows Phone

Windows Phone
A couple of days ago, Microsoft published Office Lens, a new app, to the Windows Phone store. Simply put, it’s like having a scanner built into your phone. You can take pictures of whiteboards, business cards, or anything else for that matter and the images will be enhanced and automatically added to the Quick Notes section of OneNote. Office Lens will also scan the text (if any) in your snapshots allowing you to more easily search for your images. There are three modes in Office Lens: Photo – allows you to easily take pictures and have them automatically added to…
Read More
18 Mar 2014

Omaha ALM User Group Meeting, 3/18/2014

User Group
[Update: The slides for this meeting are now available here] It’s a bit short notice but the next ALM User Group meeting is tonight at 6:00 PM. Here are the details: Topic Life Outside of TFS - Ever wondered what ALM tools are out there besides TFS?  Is it better to go best-of-suite or best-of-breed?  This talk will be your chance to learn! CSGi writes, builds, deploys, and maintains millions of lines of code across multiple languages and platforms.  It has been undergoing an agile transformation for a number of years now.  Early on in that process, they adopted the…
Read More
23 Jan 2014

Using Git and Visual Studio Online (Part 1 of 4)

User Group, Visual Studio 2013, Visual Studio Online
At our latest Omaha ALM User Group meeting, a couple of nights ago, Paul Oliver gave a talk on using Git with Visual Studio Online (formerly known as Team Foundation Service). Even though we didn’t record his session Paul has decided to do a set of screencasts of his talk. The first of four parts is now available on YouTube which you can watch below. [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FgR9cwXhc8#t=23] We will post the links to the remaining videos as Paul gets them produced.
Read More
21 Jan 2014

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Released

Visual Studio 2013
The final release of Update 1 for Visual Studio 2013 is now available. This update consists mainly of a collection of bug fixes and there is no update for Team Foundation Server 2013 with this release (there will be an update to TFS with the release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2). You can see the list of fixed issues in KB2911573. Here are the links for the various updates: Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Release Management for Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 Remote Tools for Visual Studio 2013 Update 1
Read More
17 Jan 2014

Omaha ALM User Group Meeting, 1/21/2014

User Group
The Omaha ALM User Group will be hosting its next meeting on Tuesday, January 21st at Farm Credit Services of America. Here are the details... Topic Git Workflow with Visual Studio Online - If your team currently uses Team Foundation Server and TFS Source Control and you’re wondering about what it will look like to move to Team Foundation Service (and Git) in the cloud, this talk is for you. Our team has now moved two projects and we haven’t looked back. I’ll talk about some of the hiccups and difficulties and how we overcame them. I’ll also share some…
Read More
17 Jan 2014

Cloud Load Testing Service Webinar

Testing, Visual Studio 2013
On January 23rd, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team is hosting a live Cloud Load Testing webinar which will be led by Charles Sterling and Manas Maheshwari.  With the introduction of Visual Studio Online launched in November 2013, software engineering teams now have a set of services that are available to them including the new Cloud Load Testing Service to help you easily discover performance issues of your application when it is being used at scale.  The Cloud Load Testing Service helps you execute load tests using Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 by taking care of the infrastructure, management, and administering of the…
Read More
31 Dec 2013

Windows 8 BitLocker Recovery Keys

OneDrive, Tips, Windows 8, Windows 8.1
With an ever-growing concern around data security, it’s no surprise that many companies (and individuals) make use of Microsoft’s BitLocker drive encryption technology. BitLocker, once enabled, will encrypt your entire drive (or drives) on your computer (e.g. desktop, laptop, or tablet). As long as your computer continues to run “normally”, things are hunky dory. However, if you end up in a “recovery” situation with your computer, you will need a BitLocker recovery key. Not just any recovery key, but a specific key that will work only with your computer. You’ll know you need your recovery key when you are presented…
Read More
27 Dec 2013

10 Enterprise Apps for Your Windows Phone

Windows Phone
With the Windows Phone Store now exceeding 200,000 apps, it’s no surprise that it’s getting easier to find the most of the popular apps from competitor’s ecosystems. Although there are many ways to categorize available apps, I like to think of them all as loosely fitting within one of three categories: Consumer apps – these are the everyday apps that you might use such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat, etc. Enterprise apps – these are the apps that you are likely to use in a business-oriented situation such as at work or while traveling for business. Examples might include e-mail…
Read More