A Developer's Life » Software Development, 42, and everything in between

12 Sep 2013

Visual Studio 2013 RC Released

Visual Studio

This post is a couple of days behind but I thought I’d go ahead and put out a few links to help spread the word a little more :-). As of September 9th, Visual Studio 2013 RC (Release Candidate) was made available for download on the Visual Studio web site. This is a “go live” release which means you can run Visual Studio 2013 RC in a production environment and there will be a supported upgrade path to Visual Studio 2013 RTM.Visual Studio 2013 is expected to RTM along with Windows 8.1 GA (General Availability) which is slated for October…

12 Sep 2013

Straight to Desktop in Windows 8.1

Windows 8

If you find you spend more time in the Desktop than you do the Start Screen then you may want to consider setting the desktop as the default start mode for your PC.To configure your PC to go to the desktop when you logon or close all apps on a screen, follow these steps:1. From the Start screen, start typing “Taskbar” and select the “Taskbar and Navigation” option from the list. This will display the Taskbar and Navigation properties dialog.2. Click on the Navigation tab.3. Check the “When I sign in or close all apps on a screen…” checkbox. This…

12 Sep 2013

TFS Build Manager for VS 2013 Updated

Add-ins & Extensions, TFS, Utilities

Today, the Community TFS Build Extensions on CodePlex released an update to the Community TFS Build Manager VS2013 add-in. If you spend any time at all managing multiple build definitions, build results, and/or build servers, then you need to give this add-in a try.Updates & fixes include:NEW - Search and replace workspace mappings NEW - Filter Build Definitions via text NEW - Access build logs in web access NEW - Build Duration and Agent Name columns NEW - Friendly Trigger Names NEW - Easily queue high priority builds NEW - Clone to Project FIX - Case insensitive comparisons when changing…

21 Aug 2013

Windows Phone App Studio–My First App

Windows Phone

Recently, Microsoft made available the Windows Phone App Studio (beta). The purpose of the Windows Phone App Studio is to make it simple for anyone with a great Windows Phone app idea to create, test, and share an app without installing any development tools.Getting StartedYou can sign up for a free account at the link above and give it a try for yourself. Note, however, that you may have to wait up to a day to get a registration code.Once you’ve signed in, click on the Create link to get started with building your first app. You will have the…

17 Aug 2013

InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview

Release Management

Last month, Microsoft announced that it had completed its acquisition of InRelease – a release management product built for Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) by InCycle Software.InRelease for Visual Studio 2013 Preview is the essential suite of release and deployment tools available to automate deployment of applications across the desktop, the server, and the cloud.Essentially, InRelease provides your teams with a continuous delivery solution that automates the release process for TFS. Based on a business workflow, InRelease can provide you with faster and simpler deliveries of your applications to multiple environments, including production.A trial version of InRelease is now available…

17 Aug 2013

TFS Agile Poker for Windows 8

ALM, TFS, Utilities, Windows 8

If you have been involved with agile software development in any form or fashion, chances are you’ve spent some time estimating effort or relative size of user stories. This is often done by selecting a card from a special planning poker deck. A typical planning poker deck is based on a Fibonacci sequence (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…) though the sequence is sometimes modified after 13 for even numbers (e.g. 20, 40, 100). This process works fairly well when all participants are located relatively close to each other (i.e. in the same room). What if the team members…

11 Aug 2013

On-line Training

Training

Pluralsight – 593; 10-day free trial; Recently acquired PeepCode and TrainSignal. Wintellect NOW – 108; $29/mo; $319/annual; a few free videos available to watch; provides egghead – 46; free; currently all AngularJS videos (streamed from YouTube) jQuery – all things jQuery & everything is open source Microsoft Virtual Academy – free; includes self-assessments

01 Aug 2013

MSDN Improved

General News

Today, Microsoft launched an updated and improved version of its Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) site. Although many developers rely upon web-based search results to get them to the content they need within MSDN, the site is also used by many (sometimes newer) developers as an entry point into the vast set of developer resources provided by Microsoft. You may also visit MSDN simply to catch up with what’s new in development technology.With that said, there were a few things that Microsoft targeted with this update (as taken from Brian Harry’s post on this subject):Simple: We designed the site to help…

25 Jun 2013

My First Experience with the AGENT Smartwatch SDK

For Fun, Smartwatch

If you follow the smartwatch industry at all, it’s likely you’ve heard of at least a couple of up and coming offerings. One is the Pebble smartwatch, one of Kickstarter’s great success stories. This project had an initial goal of raising $100,000 and ended up raising over $1,000,000! I backed the Pebble project and was super excited when it showed up a few months ago.Although I don’t use an iPhone for day-to-day use (I really love my Nokia Lumia 920), I do own one so I was able to link it with the Pebble and play around. After trying out…

08 Jun 2013

Demystifying Microsoft’s Git Offering

Git, TFS

Although Microsoft is definitely late to the distributed version control (DVC) game, they’re pretty much in the game now and their DVC offering is only getting better. In order to provide distributed capabilities within its current version control offering, Team Foundation Server, the Visual Studio team had to make a decision: build something brand new (possibly proprietary) or build on one of the standard DVC platforms. They decided to go with the latter and build upon Git. A great decision as far as I am concerned. But, Before That… Before we get to the Visual Studio offering, let’s take a…