Why Should You Attend Codestock?

Codestock? If you aren’t familiar with Codestock, then you should be, especially if you live anywhere in the southeast. Codestock is a regional tech conference hosted in Knoxville, TN, and has been going on since 2007. It is consistently a great conference with incredible speakers and technical content at a very reasonable price. Ok, so…

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced custom renderers in Xamarin Forms and presented a pair of custom renderers – one for Android, and one for Windows Phone – that extended the Xamarin Forms Button control to honor the BorderRadius, BorderWidth, and BorderColor properties on all platforms. In Part 2, we’ll use what we…

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 1

Xamarin Forms includes an assortment of “views,” more commonly known as controls, to help you build cross-platform UIs using XAML. Each control has a default appearance, and each control exposes properties that allow you to customize its appearance. But what if you’re handed a set of UI requirements that can’t be achieved using those properties?…

Analyzing Control Flow with Roslyn

The other day my co-worker Jeffrey Richter and I were discussing my latest infatuation, Roslyn analyzers. As we bounced around a few ideas one came to the forefront; every catch block should throw. This is not a hard and fast rule, but eating an exception, especially accidentally, has caused more bugs in .NET than we…

Learn Roslyn at the Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference

Mark your calendars for May 14-15, 2015 for the free 2015 Microsoft MVP Virtual Conference. This is a Microsoft sponsored conference where Microsoft Valuable Professionals (MVPs) will be presenting five different tracks for world wide consumption: IT Pro, Developer, Consumer, LATAM (Spanish), and Brazil (Portuguese). Obviously, I’ll be in the Developer track, but I’m really…

More Wintellect.Analyzers and Some Lessons Learned Writing Roslyn Analyzers

Over the last few months I have been having a wonderful time developing Roslyn analyzers and code fixes. You can find all the Wintellect.Analyzers code at Wintellect’s GitHub page. If you would like to include these analyzers in your own Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6 project, install the NuGet package by executing the following in…

Access Data Easier with F# Type Providers

One of the most interesting things about F# is their type providers. Don Syme, just a couple of years ago, did a post giving examples of using 12 type providers that is still quite relevant. Just taking a look at these examples you can see how easy it is to get started with them when…

Building Contoso Cookbook with Xamarin Forms

Using NavigationPage, TabbedPage, ListView and Other Goodies in Xamarin Forms to Build Rich Multipage Apps In my previous posts introducing developers to Xamarin Forms, I presented an RPN calculator app that runs on multiple platforms, and then built on that to describe how to respond to orientation changes in Xamarin Forms apps. A calculator provides…

ng-whoa! Top 3 takeaways from ng-conf Day 1

ng-whoa! ng-conf, Day 1 Yesterday was a pretty amazing lead up to the first official day of the conference. It certainly didn’t disappoint, what with all surprises the organizers put into place. However, today everyone was pretty eager to hear the opening talk from Brad Green and Igor Minar about both the current state of…

What Javascript Framework should you be using?

What Javascript Framework should you be using? This seems to be the question everybody is asking … and everybody seems to have a different answer. I’m here at ng-conf 2015. Is AngularJS the answer? Angular has a particular opinion about how to build a Javascript application. But other popular alternatives exist. Ember.js prescribes a set of…

ng-conf 2015 – Office Apps Hack-a-thon

The night before ng-conf 2015 started, there were a number of lightning talks and hack-night activities. You might be surprised to see Microsoft as part of the mix. With the lure of several Xbox Ones to give away, there ended up being 11 teams competing for the prizes. Josh Carroll and I represented “Team Wintellect”.…