How To|May 3, 2016

Submit Your Bot to Microsoft’s Directory

Bots are the future, Microsoft proclaimed at this year’s Build conference, and now the company is inviting developers to submit their own for inclusion in a publicly-available bot directory. In an email to developers cited on Windows Central, Microsoft said it was seeking submissions of chat bots made using its open-source Bot Framework. The Framework, announced…
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How To|Jan 21, 2016

How to Make Your App Visible in Windows Store

Windows Store has long been plagued with complaints about the low quality of apps, prevalence of spam, and the fact that popular apps are unavailable or missing key features. It’s a problem for Microsoft, which urgently wants to inspire more developers to build universal Windows apps. In its quest to improve the quality of apps…
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How To|Jan 8, 2016

How to Build a Microsoft Band App When You Don’t Have a Band

Want to try your hand at building apps for Microsoft Band, but don’t actually own the device? Or perhaps you just don’t want to worry about keeping your Band nearby or charged up. Two Microsoft developers in the UK have created code that mimics the official Microsoft Band SDK, allowing them to generate band data…
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how-to|Dec 14, 2015

Jumping Off the Deep End of Node.js with Kevin Griffin

In this webinar, Kevin Griffin provides an overview of everything you need to know to get started with Node.js from it’s history, to how to serve web pages and how to extend Node.js using NPM. After a brief discussion of the origins of Node.js in the Google V8 platform, Kevin discusses Node.js performance and the pros…
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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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how-to|Nov 13, 2015

Quantum Computing 101

Who needs a real quantum computer to start writing code?  While there is no working quantum computer in production, the belief that a working version will exist soon has prompted Microsoft Research’s QuArC team to build a new quantum computer simulator called LIQUi|>.  The researchers are hoping that, using LIQUi|>, computer scientists at Microsoft and other…
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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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How To|Oct 20, 2015

What Developers Need to Know About Docker

Docker is an application virtualization service based on features of the Linux operating system.  It provides a way to share a host OS, and using a virtualized filesystem, install and run Linux based apps in an isolated environment called a container.    The following diagram shows how Docker is different from Virtual Machines. Docker Architecture Docker…
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How To|Oct 14, 2015

A Microsoft Project Orleans Primer

If you’ve been wanting to learn more about Microsoft’s Project Orleans programming model, this primer will give you the basic concepts you need to understand to get started. Actor Based Programming Actor based programming is designed to allow for objects representing multiple instances of related real-world artifacts to interact as independent single threaded entities in…
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How To|Sep 23, 2015

Quick Tip: Add Developer Command Prompt Here

While it’s certainly not a new trick, it’s often useful to be able to get to a development command prompt quickly from File Explorer.  You can add that feature easily using the INF files published by Daniel Cazzulino on GitHub. To install the Developer Command Prompt Here context menu, just download the package from GitHub,…
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How To|Sep 18, 2015

Tasks are (still) not threads and async is not parallel

    I talk to a lot of developers who are either new to .NET or are moving from an older version to the newer platform and tools. As such I’m always trying to think of new ways to describe the nature of Tasks vs Threads and async vs parallel. Modern .NET development is steeped…
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