With so many new technologies and toolsets coming to the forefront, universal apps, collaboration, mobile apps -- you've got to stay on your toes just to keep up in the development world. There's increasing emphasis on "softer" skills like intuitive app design and drafting precision DevOps processes, as well as continued top-notch development with some of the newer tools and technologies like NoSQL, AngularJS and Roslyn. Whew -- that's a lot!
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Posted by Lafe Low on 11/05/20150 comments
As 2015 moves into our collective rearview mirror, this feels like a good to time to take stock of all the Visual Studio Live! goodness that has happened in the last 10 months.
Las Vegas, March 16–20
Our first event of the year, Las Vegas, always attracts a lively crowd, because, you know, it's Vegas. Oh, and St. Patrick's Day. But the attendees got their fill of learning, too, as the keynotes were hard-hitting, from John Montgomery's and Kieran Mockford's Visual Studio 2015 preview to the sharp-witted, eye-opening address from Billy Hollis.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 10/29/20150 comments
Ted Neward is one of the most popular speakers on the Visual Studio Live! circuit. You can usually find him, when not speaking, holding court with several attendees talking coding languages or recounting his latest adventures behind a barbeque grill.
We recently caught up with Neward, who's also The Working Programmer columnist for MSDN Magazine, and had a chance to find out what makes him tick.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 07/21/20150 comments
Brian Noyes certainly didn't follow a typical entry into the world of software development. He didn't grow up programming and using computers. He didn't like typical geek things. In fact, he was quite the polar opposite for the first few decades of his life.
He grew up surfing in Carlsbad, Calif., and wasn't into traditional sports. He went to the Naval Academy, flew F-14 Tomcats, and graduated from Top Gun and the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. He studied Aerospace Engineering both at the U.S. Naval Academy and at Naval Postgraduate School.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 05/20/20150 comments
For years, ASP.NET developers have used cookie-based authentication sessions (also called Forms authentication) to secure their Web pages. There's nothing wrong with doing that for your server-rendered pages, but as people start moving into developing Single-Page Applications with frameworks such as Angular, they need to realize that leveraging the cookie-based session for the client JavaScript Web API (AJAX) calls opens them up to a Cross-Site-Request-Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) attack.
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Posted by Brian Noyes on 05/20/20150 comments
Whenever you create a C# class definition, consider adding one extra method so you can automatically sort object instances. It's easy and well worth the minimal extra effort. For example, suppose you've defined:
public class Employee
{
public string name;
public string title;
// methods here
}
If you enhance the class as follows:
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Posted by James McCaffrey on 05/18/20150 comments
The primary reason you might want to use WCF RIA Services with Visual Studio LightSwitch/Cloud Business Apps (SharePoint) is to:
- Combine more than one entity into a single entity.
- Eliminate unnecessary columns in an entity to improve performance (otherwise large amounts of data, such as pictures, will be transmitted even when they're not shown).
- Implement calculated fields that let you search and sort resulting values.
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Posted by Michael Washington on 05/12/20150 comments
If you've ever read MSDN Magazine or Visual Studio Magazine, or attended a Visual Studio Live! event, you've probably come across Dr. James McCaffrey. Dr. McCaffrey works at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., but he spends a lot of time writing articles and presenting at developer events.
Dr. McCaffrey is fascinated by any form of activity that involves human interaction and combinatorial mathematics. Some examples of that include analyzing gambling games, such as "Blackjack Switch," and the study of betting behavior associated with professional sports. He enjoys examining software systems that have designs influenced by the behavior of biological systems, such as genetic algorithms and simulated bee colony algorithms, especially when applied to large-scale data mining and analysis.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 05/06/20150 comments
If you've read any materials on Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM), Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) or Xamarin, chances are you've seen the work of Laurent Bugnion. Based in Zurich, Switzerland, he is a prolific writer and speaker in the software development world. He's the author of the well-known open source framework MVVM Light Toolkit for Windows Phone, Windows Store, WPF, Xamarin, and of the popular Pluralsight reference course about MVVM Light. He's also the senior director for IdentityMine, a Microsoft gold partner for technologies such as WPF, Xamarin, Pixelsense, Windows Store, Windows Phone, Xbox and, generally, UX.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 05/05/20150 comments
Fiddler is a great help when diagnosing problems with Web sites, investigating performance concerns and modifying requests sent to Web servers. Because mobile devices are responsible for more traffic to Web sites, you should know how to use Fiddler for mobile clients, as well.
You can simply run Fiddler on your PC on its default port of 8888, configure it to "allow remote computers to connect" in Fiddler Options on the Connections tab, and ensure any firewall allows traffic on that port. Use ipconfig on the PC to determine its IP address. Then set the proxy server on the mobile device to point at the given IP address and port 8888.
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Posted by Robert Boedigheimer on 05/01/20150 comments