wintellect-blogs|Apr 18, 2014

Sharing Views in Universal Apps

My previous two blog posts presented a pair of universal apps named Contoso Cookbook and MyComix Reader. Universal apps are apps that run on Windows and Windows Phone and, in the future, on other devices such as Xbox Ones. When you create a universal app in Visual Studio, the resulting solution contains three projects: a…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 16, 2014

WintellectNOW Author Blog Round Up: April

It’s time for this month’s blog round-up! Check out what our authors have been creating over the past month!  This month in MSDN Magazine, Rachel Appel looks at the many new enhancements in features in Windows 8.1 designed to help developers innovate and built the best creations possible. Curious about the substantial update to the…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 16, 2014

WintellectNOW in India

Later this week, Wintellect’s Jeff Prosise, Todd Fine, and Sara Faatz are making their way to India for the Great Indian Developer Summit in Bangalore.  While they are there, they will be participating in the conference (both as speaker and exhibitors), sponsoring a special evening with the Bangalore .NET User Group, meeting with partners, customers,…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 16, 2014

WintellectRAW: Jeremy Likness

Welcome to WintellectRAW – featurettes about your favorite authors.  Each month we’ll give you a quick glimpse into the life of a WintellectNOW author – how they got their start, some of their hobbies, their favorite projects, and more!   This month we feature Wintellect Principal Consultant, Jeremy Likness.  A Microsoft MVP, author, presenter, and…
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wintellect-blogs|Apr 14, 2014

More Fun with Universal Apps: MyComix Reader

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the new universal app model that Microsoft introduced at BUILD 2014. In that post, I introduced a version of Contoso Cookbook that runs on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. That sample covered the basics of universal apps, including using a shared project to share code and…
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Blogs|Apr 11, 2014

Showing the Onscreen Keyboard in Silverlight OOB Applications

Update – 4/10/2014  Wow!  Quite a lot has happened since I originally posted this.  Certainly one of the biggest changes is the diminished role that Silverlight now plays in both enterprise and consumer applications.  However, I’ve noticed that this particular blog post is still getting some attention, so I figured I’d try to provide some…
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Blogs|Apr 10, 2014

Initializing the Microsoft Azure SDK 2.3 Storage Emulator

Last night I worked my way through some dev tool updates and happened to install both SQL Server 2014 and the new Azure SDK 2.3. I prefer to host the databases for the storage emulator in my primary SQL Server instance instead of the default LocalDB, and had grown accustomed to running the command-line DSInit.exe…
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Blogs|Apr 9, 2014

Windows Server 2012 Essentials Client Restore vs. Microsoft Surface Pro

In this corner we have a Microsoft Surface Pro that needs to have a full client restore. In that corner we have Microsoft’s own Windows Server 2012 Essentials that contains said full client backup. Let’s get ready to rumble! ™ (I hope I don’t owe Michael Buffer money for using his trademark. He’s made over…
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Blogs|Apr 8, 2014

Handling Extremely Large Data Sets in Silverlight

While writing Chapter 14 of my book, Designing Silverlight Business Applications: Best Practices for Using Silverlight Effectively in the Enterprise (Microsoft .NET Development Series) I focused on an area that is quite common with line of business applications: extremely large data sets. In the example I generated almost 1,000,000 contact rows to illustrate how they…
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Blogs|Apr 8, 2014

Hosting HTML in Silverlight (not Out of Browser)

Some Silverlight projects may require that you render HTML content – perhaps a non-Silverlight control or web page. Unfortunately unless the project runs Out of Browser (OOB) the WebBrowser control isn’t an option. What can you do? While there is no easy solution to truly embed HTML inside of the Silverlight rendering engine, it is…
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Blogs|Apr 7, 2014

Initial ASUS Vivo Tab Note 8 Review

Eight days ago I went through the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief in about 490 milliseconds as I watched my Surface Pro fall out of my backpack and kiss the concrete directly on the upper right hand corner. I didn’t even have to open the Type Cover to know that the glass would have made…
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Blogs|Apr 6, 2014

Building Universal Apps with Visual Studio 2013 Update 2

One of the most exciting pronouncements at the 2014 BUILD conference was Microsoft’s introduction of “universal apps,” which run on PCs, tablets, and phones. According to Microsoft, universal apps will one day run on Xboxes, too. The universal app represents the first step in a convergence that Microsoft has been seeking for a long time…
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