14 Sep 2012

Get TeamCompanion for Free (if you act fast)!

Utilities, Visual Studio
With the launch of Visual Studio 2012, Ekobit sim-ships TeamCompanion 4.7.  If you are not familiar with TeamCompanion, it integrates many of the Team Foundation client features within Microsoft Outlook.  For example, with TeamCompanion, you can easily create Work Items with an e-mail (or vice- versa).  You can also create new Outlook Tasks from Work Items.  There are many other features, such as scheduled Work Item queries, available within TeamCompanion that can simply make life easier for those of us who spend their days working with TFS (click here for further details). If you act fast – i.e. between now…
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10 Sep 2012

Introduction to Windows 8 Development–Go Metro!

Conferences, Windows 8
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at this year’s Heartland Developers Conference (HDC).  I gave an introductory talk on developing “Metro” applications for Windows 8.  The goal of the talk was to cover some of the basic features that every developer writing Windows 8 apps would have to face when first getting started.  Some of these features include: Obtaining Windows 8 Obtaining the developers tools – e.g. Visual Studio 2012 Understanding the Windows Runtime framework Specific application features such as: Roaming data (e.g. app settings) to the cloud Contracts and extensions Using the File Picker Implementing application settings…
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05 Sep 2012

How Many Windows 8 Apps are in the Windows Store?

Tips, Windows 8
Although there are roughly one bazillion (yes, I made that number up :-) “desktop” apps currently available that will run on Windows 8, the number of Metro “Windows Store” apps still measures in the hundreds (not hundreds of thousands, just hundreds).  If you’re curious about how many Windows Store apps are available in your marketplace, follow these steps: Launch the Windows Store app. Open the Charms Bar and tap Search (or press Logo+Q). Enter * (an asterisk) as the search term and press Enter (ensure Store is the selected search source). As of the time of writing this, there are…
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02 Aug 2012

HDC-Connect Format for Events

Conferences, General News
Overview We are currently working on a set of mobile applications (Windows Phone, iOS, and Android) that will be used to scan QR Codes for conference attendee badges.  We want the information contained within the QR code to be basic contact information that is useful to both a conference vendor as well as other conference attendees.  When looking at the various standard QR Code formats, a couple of them stood out: vCard and meCard. The vCard format contains fields for everything we wanted to store but also included fields we didn’t care about (e.g. address, city, zip, country, and URL). …
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02 Aug 2012

Visual Studio 2012 Available August 15th + Windows 8

Visual Studio 2012, Windows 8
Today Microsoft announced that the final build of Visual Studio 2012 has been completed.  The final bits will be available for download from MSDN and “elsewhere” on August 15th.  The official launch will be on September 12th via an on-line event.  You can find out more about the launch event here: http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com/ Also from Microsoft, today they announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 8.  Windows 8 will be generally available on new machines as well as on-line on October 26th.  For more information about Windows 8 visit the Building Windows 8 blog.
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20 Jun 2012

Highlights of the Windows Phone Summit

Windows Phone
Today, Microsoft held their first ever Windows Phone Summit.  Although the event lasted only two hours, there was quite a bit of information provided, lots of questions answered, and several questions still left to be answered.  Below are some of highlights of the event (in no particular order): Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will both utilize a Shared Windows Core Device drivers can be built once to support Windows 8 as well as Windows Phone 8 Support for multi-core chipsets A total of three screen resolutions to be supported: 800x400 (current resolution for Windows Phone 7.x) 1280x768 1280x720 Support…
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15 Jun 2012

Visual Studio 2012 / TFS 2012 Links

Guidance, TFS, TFS 2012, Visual Studio
If you’ve been following the progress of Visual Studio 2012 closely chances are you’ve already downloaded the recently released Release Candidate.  If not, then I’ve provided a handy list of links below to get you started.  I’ve also included some handy reference and guidance links as well. Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate Visual Studio 2012 RC downloads home page Visual Studio Ultimate 2012 RC Visual Studio Premium 2012 RC Visual Studio Professional 2012 RC Visual Studio Test Professional 2012 RC Visual Studio Express 2012 RC for Web Visual Studio Express 2012 RC for Windows 8 IntelliTrace Collector for Visual Studio…
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12 Jun 2012

TFS Preview Updated; No Longer Requires Invite

Team Foundation Service
If you’ve been wanting a chance to try out Microsoft’s Team Foundation Service (formerly known as TFS on Azure) but haven’t been able to obtain one of the coveted invitation codes then wait no longer!  Microsoft has officially removed the invitation requirement and has opened up their TFS Preview site to the masses.  You can now create your very own TFS projects in the cloud! If you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s TFS Service, it is essentially a subset of the “TFS on Premises” features (in some cases, a superset) made available in the cloud.  Some of the features provided within…
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31 May 2012

Visual Studio 2012/TFS 2012 RC Released

TFS 2012, Visual Studio 2012
The Visual Studio 2102 (formerly Visual Studio "11") Release Candidate (RC) and Team Foundation Server 2012 RC has been released by Microsoft.  The downloads are available now on the MSDN Subscribers Download site and I would expect the downloads to be available on the usual non-subscriber sites soon. Check out this post from Brian Harry for a quick run down on some of the details. Here are some other useful links from the above post: Visual Studio Product website Eclipse update site for the latest Team Explorer Everywhere preview or the download page Overall summary of changes since the Beta…
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09 May 2012

Visual Studio 11 UI Changes Coming…

Visual Studio 2012
When Visual Studio 11 Beta was released a few months back there were some drastic changes to the overall user interface (UI) within Visual Studio.  Namely, the UI was pretty much devoid of all color (short of various shades of gray).  Needless to say there was a tremendous amount of feedback provided to Microsoft pleading for a little color in their beloved IDE (as well as fewer ALL CAPS VERBIAGE). Well, as it turns out, Microsoft has listened to the feedback and have posted some screenshots of the upcoming Visual Studio Release Candidate (RC) release which shows that some color…
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