Month: February 2013

Technology

Internet Explorer 10 Now Available for Windows 7

on February 26, 2013

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Today Microsoft finally releases Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7. Internet Explorer is 20% faster for real world web sites and there is also a 60% increase in support modern web standards.

As mentioned on the IEBlog today, Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7…

improves performance across the board with faster page loading, faster interactivity, and faster JavaScript performance, while reducing CPU usage and improving battery life on mobile PCs.

The biggest news on the Windows 7 front is performance.

IE 10 for Windows 7 in the real world is 20 percent faster than IE 9. We spent a lot of time on this.

Read more

Download

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MobileTechnology

Nokia Lumia phones to get more exclusive Windows Phone apps

on February 26, 2013

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More Nokia announcements today on exclusive Nokia Lumia apps…

  • GoPro app
  • Burton and  Burton Sequencer apps
  • Foursquare app
  • Tumblr (official) app

Finally Nokia has struck a deal with Dreamworks Animation. Dreamworks will use Nokia’s API to create rich, interactive entertainment experiences exclusively for Nokia devices. No details on what ‘interactive entertainment experiences’ are coming, but we should know more later this year and hopefully see them in the second half of 2013.

Read more

Enjoy!

DevelopmentMobileTechnology

Windows Phone Dev Center App

on February 25, 2013

Came across a great Windows Phone app that lets you track your app and provides all kinds of great data about it.

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656aa01c-fc78-4ab8-af67-7caf668ab4aeDev Center

Good app developers know how to keep their customers happy. The Windows Phone Dev Center app (preview) gives you all that great data about how your app is doing in the real world to help you make it the best it can be. Access download and crash trends, and read user reviews quickly from your phone.

IMPORTANT: This app requires a Windows Phone Dev Center account and won’t work without one.

Key features:

• Secure connection to Windows Phone Dev Center.
• Downloads and crash trends for 5d, 1m, 6m, and 1y periods.
• User reviews translated to a language of your choice.
• Live Tile updates of new downloads and crashes.
• Ability to share links to your apps.
• Payment info.

Check it out:

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/dev-center/2d3063c2-4b29-4e69-9c03-50b67b0e6aec

MobileTechnology

Nokia Ships New HERE Location Apps for Windows Phone 8

on February 25, 2013

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Excellent post on new announcements for Nokia HERE location apps. Read more.

HERE Maps, HERE Drive Beta and HERE Transit are all available for all Windows Phone 8 smartphone users.

HERE Drive+ and HERE City Lens remain an exclusive for Nokia Lumia devices.

Enjoy!

MobileTechnology

Nokia Lumia 920 Voted Smartphone of the Year

on February 22, 2013

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Read more

I love my Nokia Lumia 920.

Development

null is not false

on February 21, 2013

I came across some interesting C# posts on “null is not false” by Eric Lippert. Thought I would share the links.

Null is not false – Part 1

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2012/03/26/null-is-not-false.aspx

Null is not false – Part 2

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2012/04/13/10293219.aspx

Enjoy!

Development

Interesting post on ADO.NET Entity Framework VS Microsoft Data Access Application block

on February 20, 2013

I came across an interesting post today on Entity Framework 4.0 vs Data Access Application Block that I thought I would share…

http://forums.asp.net/post/4170460.aspx

Personally, I prefer to use Entity Framework. It’s cleaner and more flexible in my opinion.

Also, Enterprise Library is still at Version 5.0, while Entity Framework is constantly being updated. EF 5.0 is out now and it’s a lot better compared to EF 4.x, especially with regard to performance. Work is already underway for version 6 and beyond, plus Entity Framework has been open sourced.

To me, the Data Access Application Block that is part of Enterprise Library is dead. It’s not really maintained and it’s no longer the preferred data access technology recommended by Microsoft.

Enjoy!

Development

Calculating Bitmasks in PowerShell

on February 19, 2013

Excellent post on calculating bitmasks in PowerShell…

http://www.jasonstrate.com/2013/02/calculate-bitmasks-in-powershell/

Development

How To: Delete a Team Project from your Team Foundation Service Collection

on February 6, 2013

I came across a post in the MSDN Forums on how to delete a project from your TF Service.

“For some time now Buck Hodges has had a nice BLOG post about deleting team projects from Team Foundation Service collections. Not trying to reinvent the wheel but I thought it valuable to have it here in our support forum, too.

Basically, to delete a team project from your Team Foundation Service collection you will need Visual Studio 2012 (or just Team Explorer 2012, which is free here). These provide you with the "tfsdeleteproject.exe" command line tool, which you run thusly:

tfsdeleteproject /collection:https://<Your Collection>.VisualStudio.com/DefaultCollection <"Project Name">

Don’t forget the "/DefaultCollection" bit.”

Thanks Trevor for providing this.

Reference

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/TFService/thread/81997146-a64f-43fb-9952-57d71542cd11

Development

Microsoft Announces Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) CTP

on February 5, 2013

On January 30 2013, Microsoft announced the availability of the Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2).

As mentioned in the announcement, there is going to be a ton of cool new capabilities coming in Update 2. With that said, not all of them are available in the CTP, but many are.

The significant improvements in this CTP can be categorized into the following groups:

  1. Agile Planning
  2. Quality Enablement
  3. Line of Business Development
  4. Developer Experience

Developer Experience

Here are a couple screenshots for what’s been changed/added for a developer experience.

Visual Studio Blue Theme. Time and time again, you hear people asking that they bring back the VS2010 theme. Well it looks like the included the “Blue” theme that was previously available on the Visual Studio Gallery:

vs2012_update2_ctp_blue_theme

CodeMap and Debugger Integration. You can now easily add a call stack to a CodeMap to explore the code dependencies from your debugging session:

vs2012_update2_ctp_codemap

Blend for Visual Studio 2012. Finally, Blend has been added back into VS2012, which includes support for WPF, Silverlight and Sketchflow:

vs2012_update2_ctp_blend

NOTE: This CTP is not a “go-live” CTP and is for evaluation purposes only.

Head over to the post for complete details on what’s coming.

I’m looking forward to this update and can’t wait to hear about other cool new capabilities.

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