Hey there everyone, Lafe here. And once again, every month or so my fellow Visual Studio Live! blogger Rich Seeley will present a more technical approach to these blog posts. His latest post covers some of the tools out there that make debugging a bit easier for JavaScript devs.
Every JavaScript programmer would be happy to learn that debugging is being made easier.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 03/20/20180 comments
Xamarin continues to be the hot toolset for developing cross-platform mobile apps. Xamarin the company was originally founded in 2011 by the engineers who developed Mono. Microsoft swooped in and acquired Xamarin in February, 2016. Now it operates in lock-step with Visual Studio as the preferred dev environment for mobile apps.
As you would expect, Microsoft provides dazzlingly clear step-by-step tutorials on its newly acquired mobile app cross-platform development environment. “Once you've done the steps in Setup and install and Verify your Xamarin environment, this walkthrough shows you how to build a basic Xamarin app (shown below) with native UI layers. With native UI, shared code resides in a portable class library (PCL) and the individual platform projects contain the UI definitions.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 03/15/20180 comments
Microservices design patterns are software design patterns that generates reusable autonomous services. The goal for developers using microservices is to accelerate application releases. By using microservices, developers can deploy each individual microservice independently, if desired.
They have their strengths and drawbacks (thankfully more strengths) and there are many more examples of when they are appropriate to use than not. Here are some listings of top microservices and their use cases we found in the blog-iverse.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 02/28/20180 comments
Hey there everyone, Lafe here again. And once again, every month or so my fellow Visual Studio Live! blogger Rich Seeley will present a more technical approach to these blog posts. His latest post details some of the clamoring and confusion going on around C#, most notably that C# fans are being left out in the cold when it comes to AI.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 02/15/20180 comments
In this corner, we have waterfall. Long the champion of the sequential approach through the typical development phases such as design, development, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Developers work through each phase in order, like a "waterfall" cascading down over the rocks.
And in this corner, we have agile. Sometimes you'll see it as big Agile with a capital A, other times as little agile with a lowercase a. Agile is certainly a livelier approach, taking an adaptive and flexible role in the planning, development, delivery, and continuous updating stages. Instead of doing one phase at a time, teams work on all phases, all the time.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 01/30/20180 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, which goes over the fundamentals of implementing Scrum using Visual Studio.
Even if you are new to Scrum you probably know that basically it's an agile programming methodology that can be used with Visual Studio. In keeping with the agile philosophy, Scrum is the opposite of the old step-by-step "waterfall" approach to application development where there is a lengthy product planning stage, then the programming, then the testing, and if everything works perfectly, which it almost never does, deploying. The waterfall approach, which dates back to an era where IT had huge water cooled mainframes running in air conditioned computer rooms, is not likely to work well where businesses need mobile apps for the immediate gratification of consumers who may change their minds daily if not hourly.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 01/19/20180 comments
As you develop new apps, your data model changes by necessity. Entity Framework Core migrations—or EF Core migrations as the cool kids call them—help you keep your data model in sync with the database. It helps your apps run smoothly as they evolve and as you develop new apps that might draw upon the same database. Here are a few tutorials we found that can help ease the process:
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Posted by Lafe Low on 12/21/20170 comments
As we wrap up 2017, we hope it was a good year for you. It was a good year for us—great events, new technologies, lots going on. Looking ahead to 2018, we're filling out the calendar for the Visual Studio Live! events for next year—our 25th year of bringing you Visual Studio Live! We have the dates and locations set, so you can start making tentative plans. We even have the agenda for the Las Vegas event in March posted, so you can start crafting your schedule.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 12/14/20170 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, which looks at how your Visual Studio wallpaper can help your productivity.
To some developers this may seem like a silly question. Who cares about the wallpaper of all things when you're on a deadline project that is not exactly going swimmingly and it seems like everybody in the world is breathing down your neck?
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Posted by Lafe Low on 10/19/20170 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, which looks at some resources for Visual Studio Reporting Services.
If you're beginning your Visual Studio career or perhaps even if you are a veteran user, generating sales and other business reports may seem like a challenge.
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Posted by Lafe Low on 09/28/20170 comments