Blogs|Dec 20, 2012

The Mixed Bag of Windows 8 Chips

Ivy Bridge. Clover Tail. No, wait, Cloverview. ARM? Atom! Understanding the processors that drive today’s tablets and laptops is definitely like wading through alphabet soup. If the fact that there are two versions of the latest Windows operating system (Windows 8 and Windows RT) isn’t confusing enough, there are literally dozens of CPUs available and…
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Blogs|Dec 19, 2012

Acer Iconia W510 After 10 Days (or so)

I wanted to follow up on my initial review of the W510 after some longer real world usage. And heavy usage it is! I’m still hugely enamored with Outlook 2013 on a tablet so found myself grabbing it for that initial round of emails when I start my day instead of sitting at my desk.…
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Blogs|Dec 18, 2012

The Future of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Development

Does the snapped view required for Windows 8 apps provide insights into the future of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development? Windows 8 app developers are required to create a snapped view for their applications. This is the one option for on screen multi-tasking in the Windows 8 world. The usefulness of this view…
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Blogs|Dec 12, 2012

Enumerating Cameras and Camera Locations on Your Surface RT

When I teach classes at Microsoft, I often precede a juicy tidbit of information or code sample with the statement “Here’s a good interview question for you.” Well, here’s a good interview question for you – especially if you want the interviewee out of your office as fast as humanly possible. How do you get…
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Blogs|Dec 10, 2012

Automatically Updating .SLN files to VS 2012

Visual Studio 2012 finally gave us backwards project compatibility so you can slide between VS 2010 and VS 2012 as you needed. It’s a great feature and one we’ve sorely needed for a long time. When I upgraded my projects to .NET 4.5 or the new C++ compiler, I did so inside the IDE. That…
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Blogs|Dec 9, 2012

Review: Acer Iconia W510 Intel Tablet and Windows 8

Living in Seattle has its benefits. It’s an amazing city as we’re on the ocean and only an hour from world class skiing in the mountains. We can now even smoke all the marijuana we want except it has to magically appear from the sky to be fully legal. Even better I could walk five…
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Blogs|Nov 26, 2012

Koch Snowflakes on Windows 8 with XAML

A few years back I wrote a little program that would generate Koch snowflakes in Silverlight. After brisk walk in the cold weather today, I decided it was time to port it over to Windows 8, more just to see how easy it would be. It turns out it only took about 5 minutes to…
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Blogs|Nov 24, 2012

It’s Deja Vu All Over Again… Timing… Timing… Timing… Azure Storage Keys and Your Computer’s Clock

< p class=”MsoNormal”> The demo code for my upcoming book on Windows Azure storage inexplicably began reporting that “The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden” on every operation. Investigating the problem using the integrated Visual Studio 2012 Server Explorer to view objects in cloud storage was also problematic… Visual Studio reported that the “current…
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Blogs|Nov 20, 2012

Introducing MyComix Reader, Version 0.5

As I wrote the Contoso Cookbook app and accompanying labs for Microsoft last winter, I found myself thinking that it would be cool to build another end-to-end Windows Store sample – one that could go beyond the basics and demonstrate fun features and programming techniques that Contoso Cookbook did not. At the same time, I’ve…
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Blogs|Nov 19, 2012

Manipulating Navigation State in Windows Store Apps

I received an interesting question from a customer today. He wanted to know how to manipulate the navigation history to skip a page in the backstack in a Windows Store app. In other words, he wanted to do in Windows 8 something similar to what NavigationService.RemoveBackEntry does in Windows Phone 7.1. The scenario he presented…
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Uncategorized|Nov 19, 2012

Building a JavaScript Event Aggregator using TypeScript

The event aggregator is a useful mechanism for decoupling notifications. Typically, notifications happen through events. In JavaScript, an event is a notification that happens as the result of an action. You can think of it as a notification that is triggered by something. We call the triggering of the event “raising” the event. Events are…
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Blogs|Nov 12, 2012

IntelliTrace: Making On Time Shipping Possible

Last week the Microsoft Central District asked me to come down and do a road show through Texas and Arkansas. What a road show it was; seven flights, six different hotels, and 20+ hours driving between places in six days. But it was all worth it because I got to talk about my favorite feature…
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