News|Dec 9, 2015

Join the Azure Service Fabric Party with Free Party Clusters

Want to learn more about Azure’s Service Fabric?  Now you can host your apps for free on Microsoft’s new “Party” clusters.  These free public clusters are short lived instances that offer developers a chance to try out their apps on Azure before being blown away every 2 hours. Each party cluster is the same and…
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Blogs|Dec 8, 2015

A Quick Look at F# In Visual Studio Code

It’s F# Advent time again! This is a yearly event the F# community comes together for the month of December and each person releases an F# related post on a day of their choosing. Today is that day for me this year. With the recent announcement at Microsoft’s Connect() conference, Visual Studio Code now has…
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News|Dec 7, 2015

Microsoft Open Sources the Chakra JavaScript Engine

One of the best new features of Microsoft’s Edge browser is its fast execution of JavaScript.  This feature is build on a newly designed execution engine that Microsoft calls Chakra.  This weekend at JSConf Microsoft announced that they are releasing the Chakra Engine to Open Source on GitHub. Unlike other open source announcements, the code…
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News|Nov 30, 2015

Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 Released

Microsoft has dropped Visual Studio 2015 Update 1 less than two weeks after it was announced during the Connect() conference.  Included in this release are new features such as support for Android Marshmallow and iOS 9 in Apache Cordova apps, new Universal Windows apps tooling, ASP.NET RC1, and the latest .NET framework (4.6.1). This release features…
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Humor|Nov 20, 2015

Happy Birthday Windows!

Microsoft Windows 1.0 was launched 30 years ago today.  To celebrate, here’s a commercial from 1986 featuring a pixelized yet ever-excited Steve Ballmer going all Ron Popeil on the US… except Nebraska.  Apparently they were using OS/2.  
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News|Nov 17, 2015

New Developer Features in EdgeHTML 13

Microsoft’s big November Windows 10 update carried with it some significant improvements not only in the OS but also in the Edge browser and the components it exposes to developers.  EdgeHTML, the core rendering engine got updates including better HTML5 Support while Chakra, the Javascript execution engine got improved ES7/ES2016 support including async functions. EdgeHTML…
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How To|Nov 16, 2015

Azure Event Hubs Primer

Event Hubs are part of the Azure Service Bus service and are designed for extremely high speed ingestion of data such as in an IoT environment.  At full scale, they can process 1 million events per second and are the basis for Azure’s Application Insights service.  Event Hubs implement a stream model that can be…
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Blogs|Nov 7, 2015

WintellectPowerShell Now on the PowerShell Gallery

Getting and installing modules is easier than ever with the PowerShell Gallery and PowerShellGet. Instead of downloading and extracting files into your PowerShell modules directory, a simple call to Install-Module takes care of everything for you. Today I’ve published my WintellectPowerShell module. Now you can install and get started setting up Visual Studio to access…
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How To|Nov 6, 2015

First Impressions of the Xamarin Inspector

One of the pain points of using Xamarin Forms is that, just to see updates of any UI updates via XAML, you still need to save your changes, recompile, and relaunch the application. What’s more, is that you’d have to do this on each platform you’re targeting to make sure the UI looks good on…
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How To|Nov 5, 2015

Node.js is Just a Cog

When I talk to developers about node.js, a conversation usually goes something like this: “I heard node.js is a great platform for developing web applications.” You have to think about a web application in a series of parts. Saying that node.js is a great platform for developing web applications is like saying Java or C#…
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News|Nov 3, 2015

Microsoft Connect() Virtual Conference Preview

Last year Microsoft reached out to developers via a global virtual conference aptly named Connect().  During that conference they announced the .NET Open Source initiatives for Linux and Mac and also revealed the Visual Studio Code editor for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  This year’s conference promises more revelations with keynotes and presentations from developer favorites like…
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