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

12 Nov 2016

Connect(); 2016–Next Week!

Conferences

Starting next Wednesday, November 16th, Microsoft is holding it’s third Connect(); event!If you make use of any of the development tools provided by Microsoft, Xamarin (now part of Microsoft), the .NET Foundation, etc. then you should tune in to see what’s coming next from Microsoft. The on-line event lasts Wednesday thru Friday with the 3rd day focusing on training.The addition of a training day is new this year for the Connect(); event and looks to provide a couple of options:Option 1:Join Microsoft Virtual Academy expert instructors for free virtual training on Day 3 including in-depth explorations of the innovative technologies…

10 Oct 2016

Visual Studio “15” Preview 5

Visual Studio, Visual Studio "15"

A little less than a week ago, Microsoft released Visual Studio “15” Preview 5. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the yet-to-be-named version of Visual Studio there are a ton of new features! While I’ve included the short list below you can check out the full list, including details, here.What’s New?New Installation ExperienceVisual Studio FeedbackVisual Studio IDELive Architecture Dependency ValidationDeveloper Command PromptDebugging and DiagnosticsVisual C++C# and Visual BasicF#R and Python ToolsJavaScript and TypeScriptXAML DiagnosticsVisual Studio Tools for Apache CordovaVisual Studio Tools for Universal Windows App DevelopmentXamarinNuGetDeveloper Analytics ToolsTeam ExplorerSQL Server Data ToolsOffice Developer Tools for Visual StudioVisual…

01 Oct 2016

Learning to Live with Android

Android, Windows Phone

So, it’s been just over four months since I switched to Android (from Windows mobile) and I’ve slowly but surely been learning to live within the Android ecosystem. While I still appreciate the vast selection of apps available in the Google Play Store there are still plenty of things I’m not overly excited about when it comes to Android. In my post, Android:Two Weeks In, I talk about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. While I can’t resolve all the “bad and ugly” issues, I’d like to highlight one app that has helped me cope a bit better than…

09 Sep 2016

Editing Markdown in Visual Studio 2015

Add-ins & Extensions, Visual Studio 2015

It seems that every day I find myself editing markdown files more and more. I like the simplicity of markdown when it comes to creating documentation. While I realize that markdown isn’t nearly as flexible as full-on HTML I like that it forces me to keep my documents simple and clean.I’ve tried a LOT of markdown editors. I’ve tried on-line editors as well as editors I’ve installed on Windows. For me, personally, I prefer to have the editor installed on my machine in case I want to edit documents offline.Lots of Choices!For the past couple of years I’ve been using…

01 Sep 2016

VSTS Build Agent Selection Demystified

Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Build

One of the (many!) features I like about Visual Studio Team Services is that, while I can create my build definitions in the cloud-hosted service, I do not have to rely on the hosted build agents to run my builds. This is important because my builds might rely on specialized software that isn’t installed on the hosted agents. It’s also possible that my build processes rely on access to other resources on my local network that is not exposed to the Internet. In the case of the company I work for, we have several on-premises build servers each running multiple…

10 Aug 2016

PSA: Hosted XAML Builds Ending Soon

Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Build

Earlier this year, Microsoft posted/updated some information on the Hosted Pool (i.e. where you run your automated builds in Visual Studio Team Services – i.e. VSTS). One item of interest in that post is that the hosted XAML build controller is planned to be shut down sometime next month (September, 2016).For accounts created after on or after April, 2016, access to the hosted XAML build controller was never provided, so this should not be an issue. However, if you have XAML builds running in VSTS, or were planning on migrating XAML builds to VSTS, you should take note.Here is the…

08 Aug 2016

Tulsa TechFest–Slides

API, Azure DevOps, Conferences, Extensions

I first presented at the Tulsa TechFest in 2007, the second year for the conference. Since then I have only missed presenting one or two times (that I can recall). My oldest son (12) was able to attend this year as well and he really enjoyed the Gaming/Dev/Design track! The conference is really done well. I recommend you check it out next year if you’re in the area.This year, I had the pleasure to present two talks:Using REST with VSTS & TFSTeam Foundation Server (TFS) has been around for over a decade now(!) and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has…

09 Jul 2016

Markdown to WordPress Extension Published

Azure DevOps, Utilities

While I will always be a developer at heart (have been more many, many years!) by day I lead an enterprise architecture team consisting of four enterprise architects and four enterprise applications developers (along with an assortment of other contractors that help out with various development and architectural "hygiene" tasks). One area I continually push my team to excel in is communication. One of the various conduits we make use of is a WordPress-based site (hosted internally within our organization). For various reasons I won't go into in this post, we chose WordPress over SharePoint as the repository for the…

08 Jul 2016

VS Code + Ctrl+Shift+S = Wat?!

Tips, Visual Studio Code

Like many of you out there, I’ve been using Visual Studio (literally) ever since there was a Visual Studio (and Visual InterDev prior to that). One of the keyboard shortcuts that has been burned into the muscle memory of my left hand for years now is CTRL+SHIFT+S which is a common shortcut for “Save All”. I can’t claim that this keyboard shortcut has consistently mapped to “Save All” for the life of Visual Studio but it has definitely been around for quite a while (if not its entire life).I also can’t claim that CTRL+SHIFT+S is a well-known universal key combination…

06 Jul 2016

Creating a File in VSTS with APIs

API, Visual Studio Online

Following along the same line as some of the previous API examples I've posted I thought I'd post an example on how to make use of the VSTS APIs to create a new file in a VSTS-based Git repo. This can be handy if you need to get a file into VSTS but don't want to mess around with calling out to the Git command line or making use of various Git libraries. If you're new to calling the VSTS REST APIs or you are new to this series of articles then I would recommend you check out the other…