Blogs|Apr 3, 2015

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?…
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Blogs|Mar 30, 2015

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…
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How To|Mar 26, 2015

Four Steps to Building Your First Web App with Azure App Service

One of the best things about Windows Azure, or perhaps one of the most confusing, is that there are many ways to accomplish a task.  In this post I’ve attempted to describe what I believe to be the shortest path to a working Web App using Microsoft’s recently announced App Service.  This version doesn’t require…
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Blogs|Mar 23, 2015

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…
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Blogs|Mar 20, 2015

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…
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How To|Mar 12, 2015

Adding gulp to Visual Studio Online Builds

At one of our Code in the Cloud camps someone asked me how they could integrate front-end build tasks in the Visual Studio Online (VSO) build process. Lately we’ve been adding great support for gulp/grunt/bower into our Visual Studio IDE (check out this post from Scott Hanselman to learn more). But I have to admit…
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Blogs|Mar 11, 2015

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…
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News|Mar 10, 2015

Microsoft Releases Application Insights SDK for Java

Microsoft is extending the features of their Application Insights service to Java applications with a new SDK. It seems each week holds a new release that demonstrates the further opening of the Microsoft developer landscape to previously uncharted territories.  This week is no exception as Microsoft’s ALM Blog has announced a new Java SDK for the…
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Blogs|Mar 9, 2015

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…
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Blogs|Mar 4, 2015

ng-init @ ng-conf 2015

ng-conf: Day 0 It’s only the first day at ng-conf 2015 but I am already pretty pumped about the next few days. There are of course going to be some cool things going on tonight even before the conference gets started. For instance there is a pretty interesting “Building Microsoft Office Apps with AngularJS Hackathon”…
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Blogs|Mar 2, 2015

Responding to Orientation Changes in Xamarin Forms

Last week, I published the first in a series of articles on building cross-platform mobile apps with Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin Forms. In it, I presented an RPN calculator app that works on Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. One subject I didn’t address in that article was how to respond to orientation changes in…
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