Developers are developers. Designers are designers. It reminds me of the quote, "East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," from Rudyard Kipling's poem The Ballad of East and West. While that is indeed true with compass points, you can't develop websites without an eye to design. If a site looks clunky or is tough to navigate, no one will go there. I once again turn to the blogosphere to see what I can find.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 04/25/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, has been doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post, looking at some of the themes available for Visual Studio.
Everybody wants a nice work environment. One that is suited to their tastes and temperament and helps them feel positive about their job.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 04/18/20170 comments
Technology continues to change at a dizzying pace. While that is of course true, it's also practically a cliché. What also changes, and indeed more significantly, are the development practices that go along with those technological advancements. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), agile, DevOps—those have all evolved along the way as well. ALM has been around long enough so there are some venerable references, should you feel the need to beef up your collection of ALM books. If you're thinking of adding a few titles to your development bookshelf, here’s a look at a few ALM books you might want to consider.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 04/12/20170 comments
If you’re developing apps or services for the web, you’re bound to be using ASP.NET. This language framework is one of Microsoft’s gifts to the development world for building dynamic web sites, apps and services. It has been around since early 2002. It actually succeeded Microsoft's Active Server Pages (hence the ASP in ASP.NET) technology.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/31/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, will be doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his look at some of the new features in Visual Studio 2017.
Microsoft filled hours of YouTube space this month with the launch of Visual Studio 2017 including this kickoff by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who touted the release as designed to empower developers to build any app on any platform.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/27/20170 comments
Visual Studio Magazine Editor-in-Chief Michael Domingo found this Visual Studio 2017 infographic helpful, and we hope you will too!
Microsoft added a ton of new features and updated functionality to Visual Studio 2017. There is also a lot of partner technology now incorporated directly into the IDE, like Redgate’s database features and Parasoft’s integrated unit testing. There has been a lot going on in the development pipeline throughout the last year since Build 2016. It’s a lot to keep track of, so having a summarized list of all Visual Studio 2017’s new and updated features—both the standard features you use every day, and some unique hidden gems—can help keep you on track.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/21/20170 comments
If you're developing mobile apps, you’re developing with Xamarin. Today we look at some of the sharpest Xamarin blogs out there for developers.
This is the official Xamarin blog, so there is plenty of good stuff in here – from individual tips and tricks to links to Xamarin-related webcasts and other resources. Most, if not all, of the contributors are Microsoft employees—including the Xamarin guy James Montemagno, who has presented before and will certainly present again at Visual Studio Live!
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/14/20170 comments
The Calls for Presentations are NOW OPEN for the following events:
We asked Rockford Lhotka, Visual Studio Live! Conference Co-Chair and Modern Apps Live! Conference Chair, to bring to light the lack of speaker diversity at tech conferences and how we can work to fix it. Here's what he said:
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/08/20170 comments
Howdy readers, Lafe here. About once a month, my partner in crime, Rich Seeley, will be doing technical takeovers of this blog. Here's his latest post, focused on fixing high CPU usage issues in Visual Studio.
The cause of a problem can be obvious.
You spill your coffee into the keyboard of your old laptop and it stops functioning.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 03/06/20170 comments
We all like to be faster and more efficient. We also like doing things the easier way, or slightly easier way. It’s human nature. So I have always been a huge fan of things like keyboard shortcuts. When you’re deep in the groove, the last thing you want to do is lift your hands from the keyboard to go mousing about looking for a toolbar command. Thankfully, at least when it comes to working with SQL Server, shortcuts abound.
More
Posted by Lafe Low on 02/23/20170 comments