Devhammer Blog

Windows 8: 30 to Launch

Tue, 29 May 2012 18:24:39 GMT

Here's a great opportunity for developers in San Francisco and New York (more cities are coming...see below) to get a jumpstart on building great Windows 8 Metro style apps, with the possibility of getting early access to the Windows Store so yours can be one of the first apps that users of Windows 8 are able to buy when the new operating system is released. Here are the details:

Your Idea Realized in 30 Days!

Be Part of the World’s Largest Opportunity for App Developers.

With 525 million Windows 7 licenses sold, millions of people await Windows 8 apps. Create a Windows 8 app in 30 days and then attend a Microsoft App Excellence Lab to get your app ready for the Windows Store.

If your app meets our quality criteria, you’ll receive a token to register your account and then submit your app to the Store. To help you get there, we’ve organized a series of 30 to Launch events across the US. Join us over four weeks to make your app idea come to life. And you’ll also have an opportunity to win great prizes!*

*See the official rules for the Windows 8 events.

Dates for San Francisco and New York are set, stay tuned for our next round of events in Philadelphia at SeedPhilly in July and Seattle at SURF incubator in mid-June.

Upcoming Events for May 29th, 2012

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:36:40 GMT

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next week (or so) for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and user group events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

MD

Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Bring your apps to life with tile and notifications
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 6:00 PM, Chevy Chase, MD
Tiles draw users back into your app by awakening your tile on the Start screen. Notifications delivered through the Windows Push Notification Service draw your users back into your app even when it's not running. In this session you will learn how to implement Tiles and Notifications and how to create tiles that let users personalize their Start screen by creating deep links to specific places within your app.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

TechNet Events Presents - IT Camp: The Future of IT
Thursday, May 31, 2012 9:00 AM, Chevy Chase, MD
Mark your calendar, set up a reminder, and join us at our IT Camp as we further “The Future of IT” event series. We will begin with the essentials of Microsoft Hyper-V and advance to real-world topics on Hyper-V manager, virtual networks, processes and operations on virtual machines, etc. This is an exciting opportunity to learn Hyper-V with hands-on* experience and gain technical insights of the technology in a relative short period of time. For many It professionals, a TechNet event is also a gathering to connect with those with similar professional interests and grow the community. Come and take this important step to get started on becoming the next private cloud expert in your organization. Seating is limited so reserve your place now!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

VS11 for Windows 8: Beyond Code: App Development for the Modern World
Thursday, June 07, 2012 6:00 PM, Chevy Chase, MD
Details to follow!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Online

TechNet Webcast: Microsoft IT Transactional SQL Replication Best Practices
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 9:30 AM, Online
Do your transactional SQL replication systems keep falling behind or breaking? If so, this webcast is for you. This webcast discusses the transactional replication best practices that have greatly improved stability, simplified management, and enhanced performance of replication environments throughout Microsoft IT.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft Developer Tools Webcast Series: Developer Desktop Asset Management
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 2:00 PM, n/a, Online
This webcast is intended for individuals who maintain System Center or some other asset management system and/or those responsible for license administration and compliance. It is a deeply technical webcast and will focus primarily on the MSDN Developer Desktop Inventory Kit, a resource dedicated to helping simplify the ongoing knowledge of what is installed on a developer’s machine, how to effectively manage those environments and how to know you are compliant and properly licensed. Attendees should be a mix of IT and Systems Administrators, Procurement & Licensing personnel, and Development managers & leads.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Building Metro style apps with XAML: What .NET developers need to know
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 2:00 PM, Online
If you are experienced with .NET or Silverlight and are already familiar with XAML, this session will teach you everything you need to know to create a Metro style app for Windows 8. This session will cover updates to familiar features and explore concepts that are new for Windows 8. This session will show you how to turn your XAML skills into money-making Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft Developer Tools Webcast Series: MSDN Administration via VLSC
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 2:00 PM, n/a, Online
This session is intended for individuals who work with developer licenses, procurement, Microsoft Agreements or Resellers and who would like to better understand the Visual Studio and MSDN Subscriptions licensing. During this webcast, we will demo the Microsoft Volume License Service Center web site, how to drill down to the MSDN licensing portion, assign licenses to users, help them register their MSDN subscriptions and generally how to manage those users. We will also highlight some new products and technologies that assist with these efforts, such as System Center’s Asset Inventory Service, the MSDN Developer Desktop Kit and some helpful process tools to make developer administration less painful and more efficient.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Azure Florida Association - Getting a Handle on Azure: Diagnostic & Management by Michael Wood
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 6:30 PM, , Online
05/30/2012 - 3PM ET - Online - *** THE MEETING HAS BEEN MOVED TO 3PM ET ***
Please register here to attend this meeting: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/513292550

Developing for the cloud does take a slightly different mindset. While most of your current skills with .NET will simply transfer to the cloud, there are some considerations when working with Microsoft Windows Azure. In this presentation we will talk about the basics of how to manage your Azure applications in the cloud beyond using the Portal website and how to determine what’s going on when things go wrong. We’ll cover using PowerShell and other command line tools, how the diagnostics manager works and how to get your performance/logging data out of the cloud.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Building Windows 8 Metro style UIs
Wednesday, June 06, 2012 2:00 PM, Online
Windows 8 introduces a new and ready-to-use set of user interface controls to help create beautiful Metro style apps quickly. Learn about these powerful and highly flexible controls and how to use them to implement the common patterns that deliver great Windows 8 Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

PA

Philly Area SharePoint User Group
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 5:30 PM, Blue Bell, PA
Join us on May 30th, 2012 to learn about when and why to utilize remote BLOB storage as well as increasing user adoption of SharePoint.

Remote BLOB Storage
In this session you will learn about what Remote BLOB Storage is, and why you may want to start using it.

SharePoint Features That Help Promote User Adoption
By default, there are a multitude of features in SharePoint 2010 that are not enabled which enhance your SharePoint. We'll review how enabling these features will help to quickly provide value to your end users. They will find SharePoint easier to interact with and be more efficient in their work. they will find content faster and see how SharePoint coexists with other productivity tools. Consequently, they see the value, use it more, and that is when SharePoint really comes alive!

The meeting is free, but space is limited so REGISTER NOW!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

An Evening with Scott Hanselman
Thursday, May 31, 2012 5:30 PM, Dresher, PA
Scott will present all things ASP.NET, MVC, IIS, Azure, .NET, and Visual Studio

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

TechNet Events Presents - IT Camp: The Future of IT
Thursday, June 07, 2012 9:00 AM, Malvern, PA
Mark your calendar, set up a reminder, and join us at our IT Camp as we further “The Future of IT” event series. We will begin with the essentials of Microsoft Hyper-V and advance to real-world topics on Hyper-V manager, virtual networks, processes and operations on virtual machines, etc. This is an exciting opportunity to learn Hyper-V with hands-on* experience and gain technical insights of the technology in a relative short period of time. For many It professionals, a TechNet event is also a gathering to connect with those with similar professional interests and grow the community. Come and take this important step to get started on becoming the next private cloud expert in your organization. Seating is limited so reserve your place now!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

SQL Saturday #121
Saturday, June 09, 2012 7:00 AM, Malvern, PA
SQLSaturday is a training event for SQL Server professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server. This is an all day event featuring approximately 35-40 sessions in DBA, Database development, Business Intelligence, and professional development. This event will be held Jun 9 2012 at 45 Liberty Blvd., Suite 210, Malvern, PA 19355.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

VA

RADNUG May Meeting: Going beyond the Soft in Software: Programming with Kinect and .NET Gadgeteer
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 6:30 PM, Spotsylvania, VA
Rappahannock Developers .NET User Group's May meeting.

*SPECIAL 5th Tuesday Meeting*

Join Microsoft Developer Evangelist G. Andrew Duthie (aka Devhammer) for a tour of some of the fun new ways you can leverage your .NET coding skills to drive hardware. We’ll look at the Kinect SDK for Windows, as well as the .NET Micro Framework, and the brand-new .NET Gadgeteer open hardware specification, and how its modular architecture opens up the world of embedded device development and rapid prototyping to even those who’ve never held a soldering iron.
Learn about both fun and practical things you can do by adding a little spice of hardware to your software recipes in this demo-driven talk!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Windows Azure Camp
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 9:00 AM, Reston, VA
1.The Azure Platform– An Overview- Let’s start off the day with a dive into Windows Azure. We’ll talk about what Windows Azure offers, from hosting applications to durable storage. We’ll look at Windows Azure roles types, hosting web applications and worker processes. We’ll also cover durable storage options, both traditional relational database that is offered as SQL Azure, or more cloud-centric offerings in Windows Azure Storage for files, semi-structured data, and queues.

2.Hands on @home with Azure- For this hands-on portion of the day, we’ll work on the @home with Windows Azure project (http://distributedcomputing.cloudapp.net). The @home project will give you a solid understanding of using Windows Azure in a project that contributes back to Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project. We’ll walk through the code, provisioning an account, and getting the application deployed and running.

3.Caching – A Scalable Middle Tier- Creating a stateless application is a difficult but fundamental aspect of building a scalable application in the cloud. In this session, we’ll talk about the Windows Azure Cache service and using it as a middle tier to maintain state and cache objects that can be shared by multiple instances.

4.SQL Azure, Data Sync, and Reporting- SQL Azure offers a scalable database as a service without having to configure and maintain hardware. We’ll look at the subtle differences between on premises SQL Server databases and SQL Azure, and how Data Sync can be used to synchronize data between multiple databases both in the cloud and on premises. We’ll also look at SQL Azure Reporting.

5.Windows 8 and Azure – Better Together- The consumer preview of Windows 8 is out, and it’s the perfect time to ramp up on developing native Metro-style applications. In this session, we’ll give an overview of Windows 8, and delivering a richer user experience by leveraging a cloud backend.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Richmond SharePoint User Group May Meeting
Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:00 PM, Glen Allen, VA
Topic: SharePoint 2010: Service Pack 1: Remote Blob Storage

There is a lot of information to consider in the new SP1 guidance, and no previous announcement from Microsoft highlights the need and importance for every organization to consider remote blob storage as an integral part of their ECM strategy. SP1 is just as much about intelligent content management as it is about the evolution of the backend storage architecture. In this session, we will be going over the requirements necessary to support large databases in SharePoint 2010 SP1; High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and other requirements for supporting large databases.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Bring your apps to life with tile and notifications
Thursday, May 31, 2012 6:00 PM, Reston, VA
Tiles draw users back into your app by awakening your tile on the Start screen. Notifications delivered through the Windows Push Notification Service draw your users back into your app even when it's not running. In this session you will learn how to implement Tiles and Notifications and how to create tiles that let users personalize their Start screen by creating deep links to specific places within your app.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft Public Sector 1-Day Win8 Dev Camp Event
Tuesday, June 05, 2012 9:00 AM, Reston, VA
The agenda will include the following topics:
•Introduction to Windows 8 and the new Windows Store
•Designing a Metro Style App
•Building Metro Style Apps with HTML and JavaScript
•Building Metro Style Apps with XAML: What .NET Developers Need to Know
•Integrating the Windows 8 Experience with Contracts
•How and When Metro Style Apps Run
•Contoso CookBook Hands on Lab and General Hackathon

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

VS11 for Windows 8: Beyond Code: App Development for the Modern World
Tuesday, June 05, 2012 6:00 PM, Reston, VA
Details to follow!

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Want your events listed? You can add them here.

You can also add your events via the Community Megaphone web service API. You can get more information on the API, and how to sign up, at http://www.communitymegaphone.com/API.aspx. You can also email me for more information.

Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5 Released!

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:24:05 GMT

Wow...that didn't take long. Looks like the folks responsible for making Kinect for Windows an awesome tool for developers looking to add NUI features to their applications are eager to move the platform forward at a rapid pace, as they've just announced the availability of the Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5, less than 4 months after the 1.0 release!

Highlights of the new SDK and Runtime (from the above announcement):

Kinect Studio, our new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.
A set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to guide developers on best practices for the creation of Natural User Interfaces using Kinect.
The Face Tracking SDK, which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.
Significant sample code additions and improvements. There are many new samples in both C++ and C#, plus a “Basics” series of samples with language coverage in C++, C#, and Visual Basic.
SDK documentati on improvements, including new resources as well as migration of documentation to MSDN for easier discoverability and real-time updates.

The updated SDK also includes support for seated skeletal tracking, and Near Mode, which allows users to use Kinect from a closer position, including skeletal tracking.

That's definitely not all, but head on over to the announcement post to read the rest, or if you can't wait, go grab the new bits. And while the bits are downloading, enjoy this overview video from Rob Relyea:

Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 6 - Managing Animated Shapes

Mon, 21 May 2012 19:18:20 GMT

[This is part 6 of an ongoing series of posts examining the HTML5 Canvas element. In Part 1 of this series, I introduced Canvas and prepared a template to make further explorations a bit simpler, and also introduced JsFiddle, a neat tool for experimenting with and sharing web code. In Part 2, I demonstrated the ability of Canvas to allow your page background to shine through, and showed you how to render simple shapes on the drawing surface. In Part 3, I showed how to draw paths and text in Canvas. In Part 4, I showed how to transform the drawing context and scale, rotate, and skew your drawings. In Part 5, I introduced basic animation concepts, including the animation loop.]

The Part Where Things Get Messy

Now that you know how to get a shape moving across the screen, you're probably wondering what's next. Well, the truth is that the animation code we looked at in the previous installment of this series was fairly primitive, and if we tried to scale it to an animation or game with many shapes, we'd be writing a LOT of repetitive code, and we'd soon end up with a very messy batch of spaghetti.

Let's look at an updated version of the sample from Part 5, which adds a few more properties to track the size of our shape, the direction of the animation (up, down, left, or right), the speed of the shape's travel, etc. The updated example also includes 4 buttons for some rudimentary control of the direction of the animation (we'll look at handling user input in greater depth in a future installment). Click the Result tab to see the code in action.

Spaghetti Recipe

With the additional variables, we have much greater control over our shape, but we have no fewer than 8 separate variables controlling how our shape looks and behaves. What happens if we want to have 3 of these shapes on-screen at once? Following the pattern above, we'd end up with 24 variables to manage. You can probably see already that this is not going to work as the number of shapes we want to animate increases, as in the image at right.

So what we need is a way to structure our animation code that reduces the need to repeat ourselves, and makes managing multiple animated shapes easier. The answer is to define our shape as a JavaScript object, like so:

   1:  function WokkaWokka(size, direction, speed, posX, posY) {

   2:     this.startAngle = 0.25;

   3:     this.endAngle = 1.75;

   4:     this.gapClosing = true;

5:

   6:     this.size = size;

   7:     this.direction = direction;

   8:     this.speed = speed;

   9:     this.posX = posX;

  10:     this.posY = posY;

  11:  };

In the above code, we're creating what is in essence a class definition for our shape, which handles keeping track of all of the variables associated with that shape. To create an object from this definition, we can simply define a variable using the new keyword, passing in the desired values:

var WokkaWokkaMan = new WokkaWokka(50, right, 10, 25, 25);

This is fine so far, in that it solves the problem of managing variables related to the shape, but it still leaves open the question of how to manage multiple instances of our shape. For example, we can replicate the first example in this post with our new object template like so (click the Result tab to see the code in action):

A Better Solution - Objects Plus Arrays

This works fine for one shape, but if we add a second shape, it won't animate, since all of the functions we use to render our animated shape refer to the first instance of the shape. What we need is a container that allows us to define and manage multiple instances of our shape, and to iterate over all of the shapes so that we can render each of them. Thankfully, JavaScript provides a simple means for doing this...an array. We can define an array and start adding instances in a pretty succinct fashion:

   1:  var WokkaWokkas = new Array();

2:

   3:  WokkaWokkas.push(new WokkaWokka(50, right, 10, 25, 25));

   4:  WokkaWokkas.push(new WokkaWokka(25, up, 5, 250, 25));

All that's left is a bit of refactoring of our various calculation and rendering methods to include the current shape as an argument, and a for loop in our animation callback to iterate over the shapes in the array, and we're good to go (click the Result tab to see the code in action):

To keep things fairly simple, I've reassigned the button handling functions to only change the direction of the first shape in the array. As you can see by clicking the Result tab above, the updated code allows us to manage multiple instances of our shape with ease, and without the need for repetitive code.

Summary

When creating animated shapes for HTML5 Canvas, it's not enough to just have your code manage a single shape. By implementing your shapes using objects, and managing those shapes using arrays, you can make your code more readable and maintainable, which will come in handy as you start adding more functionality, such as input, which we'll look at in the next installment. And since all of the code related to the shape is encapsulated in the function that creates the object, any new properties or features you add will be shared among all the shapes created from that object definition.

I'd like provide a shout-out to Rob Hawkes, whose book Foundation HTML5 Canvas: For Games and Entertainment provides some great examples on this subject that helped me conceptually with this post.

If you found this useful, why not tell your friends? You can also subscribe to my RSS feed, and follow me on twitter for more frequent updates.

More parts in the series:

Part 1 – Introduction
Part 2 – Basic Shapes
Part 3 – Paths and Text
Part 4 – Transformations
Part 5 – Basic Animation
Part 6 – Managing Animated Shapes (this post)

Up next, I'll show you how to handle keyboard and mouse input for your Canvas…don't miss it!

More Windows 8 Developer Camps!

Mon, 21 May 2012 15:10:49 GMT

Via my DE peer, Chris Bowen, some good news for anyone who may have missed an opportunity to make it to your local Windows 8 Developer Camp event. Given that most of these events filled up very quickly, you might not have been able to get registered. If so, check out the list below, and you might have another chance to attend one of these full-day events. Here's what Chris shared:

I previously mentioned the series of Windows Developer Camps - free, full-day events to help you learn about building Metro-style apps for Windows 8. They feature a mix of developer sessions plus a series of hands-on labs to help reinforce what you’ve learned.

Well, it turns out they’re popular. So popular, in fact, that all of the Camps I listed earlier are full.

However, more are on the way! Coming soon to these cities:

Date Location Link

May 22 Irving, TX Register

May 23 Bellevue, WA Register

May 24 Waltham, MA Register

May 24 Chevy Chase, MD Register

May 29 Minneapolis, MN Register

June 1 New York, NY Register

June 5 Downers Grove, IL Register

Register soon, bring a PC with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Beta installed, and enjoy Camp!

More Windows 8 Opportunities

The Windows Developer Camps are a great first step toward developing for Windows 8, but whether you’re just starting or are well on your way with your own app, check out the Metro Accelerator Labs.

While the Windows Developer Camps focus on education via sessions and hands-on labs, the Metro Accelerator Labs are focused on your apps, featuring an environment to let you code with experts on hand to help you with any questions (and plenty of food, too.)

Then, as you ready your app for prime time, look toward the Application Excellence Labs. These are your chance have your app reviewed and potentially earn a token to allow you to submit it early to the Windows Store – an opportunity you really shouldn’t miss!

Happy Windows 8 coding!

Date	Location	Link
May 22	Irving, TX	Register
May 23	Bellevue, WA	Register
May 24	Waltham, MA	Register
May 24	Chevy Chase, MD	Register
May 29	Minneapolis, MN	Register
June 1	New York, NY	Register
June 5	Downers Grove, IL	Register

The two closest events for folks in Mid-Atlantic are Chevy Chase (this Thursday) and New York City (next Friday). If you're looking for a chance to learn more about building apps for the next version of Windows, you don't want to miss these.

[via Chris Bowen]

Upcoming Events for May 21st, 2012

Mon, 21 May 2012 10:32:29 GMT

Here are the events listed in Community Megaphone for the next couple of weeks for the Mid-Atlantic area, as well as webcasts of interest…this list includes events imported from the UGSS event calendar, and user group events entered in Community Megaphone are also automatically synced to the UGSS event calendar:

MD

Microsoft Public Sector 1-Day Win8 Dev Camp Event
Thursday, May 24, 2012 9:00 AM, Chevy Chase, MD
The agenda will include the following topics:
•Introduction to Windows 8 and the new Windows Store
•Designing a Metro Style App
•Building Metro Style Apps with HTML and JavaScript
•Building Metro Style Apps with XAML: What .NET Developers Need to Know
•Integrating the Windows 8 Experience with Contracts
•How and When Metro Style Apps Run
•Contoso CookBook Hands on Lab and General Hackathon

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Everything web developers must know to build Metro style apps.
Thursday, May 24, 2012 6:00 PM, Chevy Chase, MD
Learn how you can use your web skills to build Windows 8 Metro style apps. In this session you’ll discover how to harness the rich capabilities of Windows 8 through JavaScript and Windows Runtime. You will learn about navigation, user experience patterns and controls, inherent async design, and the seamless integration with the operating system that will let you create great Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Metro Friday Hackathon - Chevy Chase
Friday, May 25, 2012 10:00 AM, Chevy Chase, MD
Join us on three Fridays in May for Metro Friday Hackathons. We want to provide you with an event where you can join us and your peers and co-work on your projects with specific goals in mind. Bring a computer and ideas.

What: Hackathon for Metro style Apps on Win8 or for Windows Phone
When: 10am – 4pm, May 11, 18, 25
Where: Microsoft offices in the DC metro area, see below for specific dates/locations
Who: Anyone. We’ll be there, you should too!
Registration: Just drop a note to http://devhammer.net/contact, and let me know that you’re in

Ideas on what you could do:

- Publish your Windows Phone app during the hackathon!
- Profile your Windows 8 Metro app to qualify for early Windows Store access
- Evaluate your Windows Phone app for SDK 7.1.1 256mb emulator compatibility
- Work on a project with experienced folks to help you
- Jump start your Windows 8 or Windows Phone developer experience, cowork for a Day!

Dates and Locations:

- May 11 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
- May 18 - Microsoft Reston Office, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA (rooms 3026 & 3028)
- May 25 (this event) - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Online

Using Typemock Isolator to speed up the development of SharePoint Web Parts
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 8:00 AM, Online
Many Web Parts in SharePoint render for capturing data that is stored in a SharePoint list. This means that to test the Web Part you have to load the the Web Part within a SharePoint server. Then how do you test it?

During this webinar, Richard Fennell will show how you can use Typemock Isolator to allow the development and testing of your Web Part without the need to keep redeploying it to SharePoint to check every minor change

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Everything web developers must know to build Metro style apps
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 2:00 PM, Online
Learn how you can use your web skills to build Windows 8 Metro style apps. In this session you’ll discover how to harness the rich capabilities of Windows 8 through JavaScript and Windows Runtime. You will learn about navigation, user experience patterns and controls, inherent asynchronous design, and the seamless integration with the operating system that will let you create great Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Azure Florida Association - Getting a Handle on Azure: Diagnostic & Management by Michael Wood
Wednesday, May 30, 2012 6:30 PM, , Online
05/30/2012 - 7PM ET - Online - Please register here to attend this meeting: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/513292550

Developing for the cloud does take a slightly different mindset. While most of your current skills with .NET will simply transfer to the cloud, there are some considerations when working with Microsoft Windows Azure. In this presentation we will talk about the basics of how to manage your Azure applications in the cloud beyond using the Portal website and how to determine what’s going on when things go wrong. We’ll cover using PowerShell and other command line tools, how the diagnostics manager works and how to get your performance/logging data out of the cloud.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

PA

Windows Developer Camp
Thursday, May 24, 2012 9:00 AM, Malvern, PA
Windows 8 changes everything.

Combining the broad reach of Windows, best-in-class developer tools, a reimagined user experience, support for new chipsets, and a built-in Store with industry-leading business terms — Windows 8 is the largest developer opportunity, ever.

Join us for this free, full-day event designed to share all the knowledge you need to start building Metro-style applications for Windows 8 – today. We’ll begin by showing you how to use Visual Studio to code fast, fluid, immersive and beautiful Metro-style applications in HTML5/JavaScript, XAML/C# and C/C++. Your existing investments in these languages carry forward, making Windows a no-compromise platform for developers.

Whatever language you choose, your app gets deep integration with the Windows shell, including notifications, live tiles, deep links, and contracts with other apps. And now you can build once and support all Windows customers, no matter what type of PC they have – from tablets to laptops to convertibles to desktops.

We’ll cap the day off with an open, hands-on lab session. It’s the perfect opportunity to get your dream application underway, or finish that app you’ve already started – with Windows 8 experts available to guide you through every step. Bring your laptop to join in the fun and show off your killer app.

Get started now!

Prerequisites:
Please bring a notebook computer and your personal identification. Also, check out the Windows Dev Center, where you can download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

An Evening with Scott Hanselman
Thursday, May 31, 2012 5:30 PM, Dresher, PA
Scott will present all things ASP.NET, MVC, IIS, Azure, .NET, and Visual Studio

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

VA

Caparea.net - 50 HTML5/CSS3 Features in 100 Minutes
Tuesday, May 22, 2012 6:30 PM, Vienna, VA
From Application Cache to Web Workers - we will be introducing fifty (or more) new cross-browser HTML tags, attributes, JavaScript APIs, and CSS features available to web developers.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Everything web developers must know to build Metro style apps.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 6:00 PM, Reston, VA
Learn how you can use your web skills to build Windows 8 Metro style apps. In this session you’ll discover how to harness the rich capabilities of Windows 8 through JavaScript and Windows Runtime. You will learn about navigation, user experience patterns and controls, inherent async design, and the seamless integration with the operating system that will let you create great Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Want your events listed? You can add them here.

Windows 8 Dev Camp: Slides, Hands-on Labs, etc.

Fri, 18 May 2012 20:54:14 GMT

If you've attended one of the Windows Camp events that I or one of my peers have been running of late (or even if you couldn't make it, but would like some great resources for learning more about Windows 8 Metro style apps), the materials from these events have now been made available online. You can download them from:

http://bit.ly/Win8CampResources

Perfect reading material for the weekend!

Charlottesville Microsoft Developer Group Kicks Off Tonight!

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:36:17 GMT

They're tan, rested, and ready to rock some code!

That's right, the user group formerly known as Charlottesville .NET User Group is launching their rebranded and refocused group, the Charlottesville Microsoft Developer Group, tonight at 6pm, and I am honored to be speaking at the inaugural meeting, along with Stuart Leitch, who helps lead the group.

Stuart will be doing two short-take presentations...first an overview of recent developments on the Microsoft stack, and the second a look at the upcoming MVC4 release.

I will be presenting on developing Metro style apps for Windows 8 using HTML and JavaScript. I'll provide an overview of this new way of building Windows apps, including demonstrations of how you can leverage existing HTML5 and JavaScript code, use your favorite JavaScript libraries, and leverage OS integration to enable rich scenarios like search and sharing.

Here's the schedule:

6:00-6:10 - Socializing

6:10-6:40 - State of the Stack

6:40-7:00 - Dinner & Socializing

7:00-7:45 - MVC 4 - A Look Forward

7:45-9:00 - Windows 8 Metro style Apps in HTML5 and JavaScript

You may also notice, as shown above, that the group has a new home on the web, http://www.cvillemdg.com/. I'll have to double-check with Stuart, but I'm pretty sure I can see the hand of Stuart's talented wife Kristy Moon at work here...Kristy also did a very nice redesign for the web site for this year's Mid-Atlantic Developer Expo, which we were all very happy with. Either way, the new site for the group is colorful, informative, and looks great. You should check it out, and come on down and help us kick off the new group in style!

Why Developers Should Care About Design, and How Metro Helps

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:20:36 GMT

Or...I was a Teenage Design Have-not

I'm going to avoid casting aspersions on my fellow developers and instead simply own up to my own failings…I've been developing software since I was 10 years old (my first program was written in BASIC on a Commodore PET), and professionally for well over a decade, and for most of that time, I believed that design was someone else's job, and that it didn't matter whether I could design my way out of a paper bag.

WRONG!

Design is everyone's responsibility, at least to some degree. No, you don't have to start wearing black turtlenecks or engaging in other clichés, but what you should do is start cultivating a basic knowledge of design, and training your eye for what is and isn't good design, both in the world of pixels as well as in the real world. Have you ever found yourself marveling at how difficult it is to figure out how to use some basic device? Listen to that voice in your head...it's telling you that you're dealing with a bad design.

An example of this may be found in some of the newer water coolers I've encountered. In a misguided attempt to modernize this humble staple of the office, some manufacturers have added text displays, extra buttons (including in some cases having more than one button of the same color). Think of a water cooler in your mind's eye...you'll probably see two spigots, one with a blue lever, and the other with a red lever, for cold and hot water respectively. There's no need for an instruction manual, and it doesn't matter whether your native language is English, Spanish, German, or whatever, the use of color easily conveys the purpose of each spigot. If you replace these easy-to-use spigots with buttons and screens that may convey more information, but require more time to comprehend, you have not done any favors for the person who simply wants a drink of cold water.

For developers who are fortunate enough to work on a team with a full-time dedicated design professional, then that person can lead the effort in creating and executing a beautiful and functional design. But we, as developers, aren't off the hook. We have to execute on the vision and ensure that the app being developed looks great and works well.

And for those of us who sometimes (or always) have to work without the benefit of a designer on our team, it's all the more important to think about and learn more about design, including observing and noting both good and bad design examples all around us, so that we are better able to provide user interfaces that are visually compelling and intuitive to use. This is true for all applications, but it's especially true when building apps for the web, or for Windows Phone (or other mobile platforms), or for the Windows 8 Store, where your competitor is just a click away. And if your app is ugly or hard to use, that click will come quickly.

To put it bluntly, our success as developers is riding on adding design knowledge to our toolbox, and now is a great time to start building that toolset.

Microsoft Design

These are two words that, when placed together, may draw snickers in certain corners. And you could argue there was a time when that snickering had a basis in fact. Not anymore. Microsoft has spent years building its design muscles, and creating a consistent and compelling design language, called Metro.

I had the opportunity to present at the MoDevUX conference in Tyson's Corner, VA. MoDevUX focused on user experience and design, and had attendees who design and develop apps for all manner of platforms. I gave a 30-minute talk on the Metro design language, and attendees seemed pretty impressed from the buzz on twitter afterwards, including one attendee who came away with a different opinion than he started with.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to share some perspective on how design is evolving at Microsoft, particularly since it gave me additional incentive to dig deeper into the Metro design language, and its inspirations in the world at large, as well as its roots in earlier Microsoft products.

Metro Inspirations

There are several movements that have had an influence on the Metro design language, including the Bauhaus movement of art and architecture, Swiss Design, and Motion Design in Cinematography. Visually, Metro takes some of its cues from the world of wayfinding signage. As with some of the previously mentioned influences, this is a world that has a strong emphasis on typography and iconography that are stripped down to their essence, with no unnecessary ornamentation.

And there's a good reason for this…when you're rushing to catch the next subway train, or to try to make your flight before they close the doors, the last thing you need is visual noise getting in the way of the message…where is my gate? Likewise, Metro design places the focus where it rightly belongs, on the content that matters to your users, not on decoration or chrome.

You can learn more about the inspirations for Metro by watching Sam Moreau's talk from BUILD, entitled "Designing Metro style: principles and personalities," which does a great job of exploring the topic of where the Metro design language came from, among other things.

Metro Ancestry

One of the first major software releases to show an end-to-end Metro influenced design was Windows Phone 7, as I'll discuss in a bit. But Metro did not simply appear, fully developed, with the release of Windows Phone. Rather, elements of what became Metro have been a part of several Microsoft products for years, and Metro is an evolution of these products, a refinement that has taken the ideas they represented, and codified them into a consistent and elegant conceptual framework.

Windows Media Center

An early view of some of the ideas behind Metro can be seen in the "twist" interface of Windows Media Center. The interface is designed to minimize elements that might interfere with your content...the TV shows, movies, and music that are important to you. Navigational elements such as media transport controls (play, pause, ffwd, etc.) are hidden by default, since many users will be using a remote control to navigate, which will already have dedicated buttons for these actions. In fact, only if you're running Media Center with a mouse or keyboard will you ever see these elements. This emphasis on content is reflected in the Metro design principle of Content before Chrome.

Likewise, the Media Center interface has a strong emphasis on typography, using text as the primary means of navigation through the available features of the software, and relying on text size to denote hierarchies of information.

Zune and Zune HD

I still remember my first chocolate-brown Zune music player. Don't laugh, but I loved the "double-shot" translucent finish. The color choices may not have been everyone's cup of tea, but it's hard to deny that it was a bold choice to include brown as one of the colors for the first generation of Zune devices.

But even more so was the UX, which took the "twist" interface of Windows Media Center to the next level, making the entire interface all about beautiful and clean typography. And several design choices appeared that have carried on to subsequent implementations of Metro, including text that bleeds off the right side of the screen, indicating the ability to scroll for more, and social sharing (the ancestor of the Share contracts in Windows 8).

The Zune HD stepped up the design, adding a bold, beautiful hardware design that was widely lauded, a capacitive touch OLED display, and a nice touch of whimsy, including a subtly animated home screen that responded to movement of the device by moving the foreground text and background tiles (or vice-versa) relative to one another. It's not something that you would necessarily notice immediately, but when you did, it was one of those "wow, that's cool" moments that delight with the attention to detail (delighting your users by attending to even the smallest details is a great habit to get into).

The addition of touch made for an interaction model that relied much more on direct manipulation, such as swiping left or right to change tracks on an album or playlist, that made the device a pleasure to use (and easy to use without needing to look at the screen).

Zune for Windows

The Zune devices weren't the only ones playing in the early Metro world. The Zune software for Windows is another great example of the ancestry of Metro, with a major focus on typography defining the UX and hierarchy of information.

Note, also the use of tiles with bold photography overlaid with crisp text. While the UX for the Zune client for Windows is busier than a typical Metro style application should be, in comparison with most Windows apps, there is a dramatic reduction in the use of chrome for hierarchy and navigation. Instead, navigation is achieved by clicking on the applicable content.

And when playing songs, the Zune client shows off some more attention to detail and early Metro stylings. Again, you see big, bold photographs and color choices, an emphasis on typography, including subtle translucent scrolling text with information about the artist, song, and album currently playing. And you can see the use of the simple and bold icons that continues in the more recent implementations of the Metro design language.

Implementations of Metro

What you should take from these examples are some good practices to follow. When designing Metro style apps, spend some time thinking about the content of those apps. What is the essence of the content? How can I most effectively present the content to the user? More examples can be seen in the following examples of the more recent evolution and implementations of Metro.

Windows Phone

Metro made its first big splash with the introduction of Windows Phone. With a Start screen made up of bright, bold Live Tiles, and an almost entirely chrome-free UX, Windows Phone was a huge change from Microsoft's previous efforts in the mobile space. And with it, developers can create apps that are not only beautiful in their own right, but also have their own Live Tiles that expose constant, up-to-date information, giving the user a great "glance and go" experience.

Along with a new design language, Windows Phone introduced new controls, including Panorama and Pivot, optimized for the touch-first environment of a smartphone, and designed to make navigating through content simple and intuitive. And the Windows Phone SDK and tools included project templates that provided named resources for all of the variety of font sizes and such, making it easier for developers to follow suggested practices.

XBOX 360

Another recent example of Metro design is the newly-updated XBOX 360 dashboard.

Notice that the implementation of Metro on the XBOX 360 is not identical to that of the phone. This is natural, because there are critical differences in how users interact with a game console and TV compared to how they interact with a phone. The XBOX 360 dashboard is optimized for use with a game controller, Kinect, or voice, while the phone is optimized for touch.

The XBOX 360 also includes a music and video player based on the playback experience in the Zune client for Windows, and if you have not used it, I highly recommend it, both as a beautiful player for music (particularly if you have a Zune Pass), and as an example of a bold and effective UX design.

Despite the differences between the Windows Phone and XBOX implementations, the essence of the Metro design language is there. Unnecessary decorative chrome has been stripped away, leaving the important information and content to take precedence. While most of us won't be developing for the XBOX 360, the use of the Metro design language here helps familiarize users with Metro, discover content more easily, and prepares them for using Metro on other platforms.

Windows 8

Of course, I can't talk about the Metro design language without discussing it's most mature and sophisticated implementation, Windows 8.

Right from the moment you turn on a Windows 8 device, the emphasis on design shines through. Beautiful photography, and important information at your fingertips, without even needing to log in (of course, the user is in control of which apps can display information on the lock screen). The use of typography and of visual white space allows both the beauty of the lock screen background and the user's information to co-exist in harmony, neither detracting from the other.

And upon logging in, the user is greeted by the new Windows 8 Start screen, with Live Tiles providing access to the apps that matter most to them. These Live Tiles are alive with activity, updating the user with relevant information on upcoming appointments, recent emails, and more, giving them easy access to the information that is most important to them, without needing to open the apps. Of course, Live Tiles can also be used by developers to entice users to return to their apps for more information on the tile updates, so a great tile design is an important step towards a successful Windows 8 Metro style app.

As developers and designers, we should think of Live Tiles as the front door to our application, and put some effort into making that door as enticing as possible, to bring our users in again and again. The MSDN Library provides guidance on the use of tiles that you should review when designing the tile for your app.

How Metro Helps

So far, I've mostly talked about Microsoft's implementations of the Metro design language. But how does Metro help you, as a developer, become better at design?

The Grid

No, I'm not going to start noodling on Tron: Legacy...I'm talking about the grid as a guide for laying out the UI of your Metro style application. The grid allows us to create Metro style apps that are consistent, both visually and functionally, with other similar Metro style apps. Note that this doesn't mean that you cannot differentiate your app visually. All of the apps (keeping in mind that these are from the Consumer Preview release, so they are previews, and should not necessarily be considered reference applications) shown at left leverage the grid to consistently lay out their content with a header and consistent white space that not only gives the content room to breathe, but also automatically leads the users' eye to the right location to find the important content. And each app is visually distinct, with variations in the balance between images and text, sizes of UI elements, use of color, etc.

Now if you're developing a Metro style game for Windows 8, of course you probably will not use the grid to lay out your content, but for most Metro style apps, the grid will provide a very useful way to easily make your app "fit in" with the Windows 8 environment.

My co-worker Chris Bernard, who is a UX Evangelist (yes, that's his actual title) puts it this way:

A grid helps you remove random and arbitrary choices around placement that can harm user experience—but it also provides flexibility and you should ‘respect’ the grid versus ‘obey’ it. Pushing boundaries on purpose versus by accident.

That focus on seeing the grid as a tool and a starting point, rather than a rigid requirement, is exactly right in my view. The grid isn't there to limit you, but to free you.

Templates

Templates will not turn a developer into a designer. But what templates can do is to give you a solid head start towards following best practices in the design of your application. The templates included in the Visual Studio 11 beta release include a Grid application template and a Split application template (there's also a Blank application template for folks who want to start essentially from scratch), as well as Fixed Layout and Navigation applications. The Grid, Split, and Navigation application templates all include styles (CSS3 or XAML resources) that help align your content to the grid.

The Grid and Split application templates both also include sample data that demonstrates the databinding features of both HTML/JavaScript and XAML-based Metro style apps. And these templates also dovetail with the templates for the Search and Share contracts, leveraging the sample data to demonstrate how to implement these important features.

Whether you choose to leverage one of these templates for your final application or not, I highly recommend that you go through the exercise of building at least a simple application based on the templates as a learning exercise. It will help you to see and understand how the various parts of a Metro style application work, both visually and functionally.

And with a little bit of work to retrieve some custom data in place of the sample data, perhaps a bit of added background interest via colors, an image, or even SVG elements, a few calls out to REST services, and you can end up with something a little more interesting, such as my in-progress Community Megaphone Metro style app shown at left. Note that, thanks to the the use of CSS Grid for layout in the Grid application template, my title, headers, and content all align to the recommended positions, with little or no additional work needed on my part, so I can focus on the aspects of my application that are differentiated, such as the SVG logo I've used for the background, and the Bing maps I've used for the individual tiles representing each event.

It's important, too, to note that the templates provided in Visual Studio 11 beta are but a couple of examples of how you can implement applications that embrace Metro style principles. You should explore using variations of size and proportion in your apps, and see how that impacts the visual hierarchy, or whether such variations may help highlight featured and/or relevant content.

Guidance

Last, but certainly not least, developers wanting to learn more about Metro style app design, and the Metro design language can find guidance at http://dev.windows.com (focused on developing apps for Windows, and includes a section on Metro style apps for developers) and http://design.windows.com, the latter of which is focused primarily on designing UX for Metro style apps in Windows 8, and (at the time of this writing) contains the following resources:

UX Design Patterns
Design Principles
Downloadable Design Assets, including .psd wireframes
Case Studies
End-to-end App Guidance
and more...

Conclusion

It's a great time to be a developer, and whether you're developing Metro style applications on Windows 8, Windows Phone apps, or even web sites, design is becoming an ever more important part of the job. Taking the time to add design skills to your toolset will help you (and your apps) stand out in a more and more crowded marketplace.

My thanks to my Microsoft colleagues Chris Bernard and Sara Summers, both of whom have far more design expertise than I can lay claim to, for reviewing this post prior to publication. Their input helped me refine some of the ideas above. Any remaining typos, strange ideas, or odd statements are purely my own.

[Note: subsequent to publishing, I decided to update one of the photos to reflect the most current release of Windows 8 at the time of this writing.]

Getting an App in the Windows Store: What, Why, and How

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:07:33 GMT

Most of my readers are probably aware that Windows 8 is on the horizon. If you're a software developer, whether an experienced Windows dev, or one who works on other platform, chances are good that you've at least heard of it. What I propose to do in this post is argue for a simple proposition...every developer who would like to put some additional money in their pocket owes it to themselves to learn the What, Why, and How of the Windows Store.

What

The "What" portion of this post is pretty straightforward, namely the Windows Store. New to Windows 8, the Windows Store is the single place for consumers to find and acquire Metro style apps in Windows 8. If your app isn't there, users won't be able to find and install it, simple as that. You probably won't be surprised to find that we think the Windows Store is kind of a big deal. In fact, there's an entire official blog devoted to the store, which you just might want to bookmark.

Why

All developers, whether experienced Windows hands, HTML/CSS slingers, iOS/Android app developers, have a tremendous opportunity in Windows 8. The Windows Store will represent a huge market when Windows 8 launches, and if history is any measure it will grow rapidly. Windows 7 sold more than a half a billion licenses in its first 2 years after release. By some estimates there are more than 1.5 billion PCs running Windows today.

Simply put, those who are first in the door to the Windows Store stand to profit handsomely by the visibility and prestige of being one of the first apps in the store when Windows 8 is released.

What's more, Windows 8 Metro style applications allow developers to use familiar languages and UI paradigms, so it's easier than ever to leverage your existing skills. If you have experience with WPF or Silverlight, then building a Metro style application with XAML and C# (or VB) will be straightforward for you. If you're more of a web whiz, the support for building HTML5/CSS/JavaScript Metro style applications will help you to quickly leverage those skills to build awesome apps and games. And C++ developers are now also able to join the party, with C++ and XAML a fully-supported pairing for building Metro style apps.

And if you're a website developer or iOS developer, we've even started providing resources to help you port your applications to the new platform:

Website to Metro style app

iPad to Metro style app

How

Hopefully, by this time you understand why you'd want to write a Metro style app and get it in the store. Next is the question of how. To start with, you'll need a copy of Windows 8 (the current release as of this writing is the Consumer Preview, which you can get here), and a copy of Visual Studio 11 (the current release as of this writing is the Visual Studio 11 beta, which you can get here).

Next step is to head over to http://dev.windows.com/, where you'll find tutorials, downloads, and samples you can use to get started (not to mention performance best practices and store certification requirements). And if you're looking for information on making your app look great (and work well, from a UX standpoint), we've got you covered at http://design.windows.com/, including UX design patterns, downloadable design assets, and end-to-end guidance.

If you learn better via webcasts or in-person events, you should check out our Windows 8 Developer Camps and see if there's one near you. If you're in the DC area, the local Public Sector folks are holding a series of Windows 8 events, including evening lectures, webcasts, and 1-day dev camps.

Need some focused time to get started on your app? Join us for a local Metro Accelerator Lab, or Metro Friday Hackathon (currently running here in Mid-Atlantic and in Tampa, FL, but more are coming to other locations in the US east coast). There are Metro Accelerator Labs coming up in the following cities (for the east coast...if you're outside of the US east coast, check availability with your local Developer Evangelist):

Tampa, FL (http://aka.ms/MetroLabTA)
Atlanta, GA (http://aka.ms/MetroLabAT - I'll be there!)
Boston, MA (http://aka.ms/MetroLabBos)

Whichever you attend, lab or hackathon, you'll have focused time for coding, with access to Microsoft evangelists with hands-on experience building Metro style apps, who can help you with your ideas, questions, or roadblocks.

Once you have your app idea prototyped and have a fairly clear idea of what's needed to finish it, you'll probably start thinking about submitting it to the Windows Store for review. As with the Windows Marketplace for Windows Phone 7, all apps in the Windows Store will have to undergo review to ensure that they meet the required performance and quality guidelines.

At the time of this writing, access to the Windows Store is by invitation only, and you will need a token in order to be able to register for a developer account with the store. So the last part of how is "how do I get a token?" The best way is to attend an Application Excellence Lab, which is a 1:1 engagement with a trained Premier Field Engineer to review your application for performance, quality, and adherence to Metro design principles. If your application meets the review criteria, you will receive a token to register for the store. If your app still needs some work, you'll receive detailed feedback on what needs improvement, which means you'll have a better (and hopefully more profitable) app in the end.

Finally, here are the suggested steps to get invited to an App Excellence lab:

Create a really great Windows 8 Metro style app (or game) immediately. Get it as ready as if you were submitting to the store.
If you know your local DPE evangelists (maybe because you attended a Windows camp training), get in touch with them (that would be me, for folks in DC, MD, VA, and WV...you can contact me here) and ask them to nominate your app for a lab.
If you don’t know your local evangelist, then email the following information to win8aefb@microsoft.com:
1. Your name
2. City & country where you are located
3. Brief description for your app (no binary, screenshot is optional, but only send if the screenshot is public, non-confidential stuff )
4. Wait for our response letting you know where the closest app excellence lab will be and how to get in touch with the right evangelist to nominate you.

I can't wait to see the many fantastic apps developed by the very talented folks I know here in Mid-Atlantic. If you have questions about any of the above, feel free to drop me a line.

Accelerate Your Windows 8 App Development

Tue, 15 May 2012 14:28:17 GMT

Yesterday, I posted about the What, Why, and How of getting your Metro style app in the Windows Store for Windows 8.

Today, I want to follow up on that post by expanding on the Metro Accelerator Lab events that I mentioned in the post as a great resource to spend some highly focused time with experienced Microsoft folks on hand to answer questions and discuss your app ideas. You can either bring an app in progress, or just bring an idea, and you may walk away with an app that's ready for review in an App Excellence Lab. In fact, one of the folks who attended our first Metro Accelerator Lab in Chevy Chase last month started with nothing more than an idea, and finished with an appointment for an App Excellence lab, at which his app passed review and he received a token for access to the Windows Store.

I'm borrowing a post from my fellow DE, Chris Bowen:

Metro Accelerator Labs – Speeding Your App Development

Do you have a Windows 8 or Windows Phone app idea? Maybe you’re already working on an app and would like some guidance for getting it across the finish line? Then come to one of the upcoming Metro Accelerator Labs!

These are three-day opportunities to develop your app with experts on hand to help you with any questions:

Please join us for a special event that you simply don't want to miss – the Metro Accelerator Lab. This is your chance to dig deeper into Windows 8 and Windows Phone and gain all the knowledge you need to immediately start (or finish) building beautiful, fluid and immersive Metro style Windows and Windows Phone applications.

In this FREE, three-day developer event, you’ll get expert help building, testing and deploying your Metro style apps. Experience step-by-step advice from Microsoft and community experts and one-on-one technical assistance. Come for an hour, or all three days. Bring that app you've been tinkering with, or a new idea that you're eager to build and we’ll help you get well on your way to releasing that killer app to the world.

We'll also help you understand the steps needed to get your Windows 8 Metro style app into the Windows Store.

We’ll have Windows Slate and Windows Phone devices available on site so you can see exactly how your app will run. And of course, there’s always a chance we’ll have a few to give away during the course of the event.

Agenda (subject to change)

Day 1

8:30 – Arrival & Breakfast
9:00 – Kickoff & Logistics
9:15 – Session: “Designing Metro style: principles and personality”
10:00 – Hackathon, expert one-on-one guidance, lightning talks on demand, and plenty of sustenance, snacks & caffeine
5:00 – Wrap Up

Day 2

8:30 – Arrival & Breakfast
9:00 – Kickoff & Logistics
9:15 – Session: “Effective Metro Style Applications: User Experience (UX)” – To help you focus on making your Metro style apps great, we’ll review the essential features, design, and behavior of effective Metro style apps
10:00 – Hackathon, expert one-on-one guidance, lightning talks on demand, and plenty of sustenance, snacks & caffeine
5:00 – Wrap Up

Day 3

8:30 – Arrival & Breakfast
9:00 – Kickoff & Logistics
9:15 – Session: “Effective Metro Style Applications: UX (continued), Store, Performance” – Part two of our dive into the essential features, design, and behavior of effective Metro style apps
10:00 – Hackathon, expert one-on-one guidance, lightning talks on demand, and plenty of sustenance, snacks & caffeine
3:00 – “appX” – Your chance to show off your app and win prizes!
4:30 – Wrap Up & Giveaways

Seating is limited and registration is not guaranteed. Secure your spot today!

Prerequisites

You must bring a laptop/notebook computer. To develop Windows 8 Metro style apps, please install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows 8. To develop for Windows Phone, install the Windows Phone SDK.

The focus is on your app, and while this isn’t a day of training (like our Windows Developer Camps), we will have a brief session every morning to give you ideas that you can turn into reality as you code.

Here in the eastern US, there are four Metro Accelerator Labs on the way:

Date	Location
May 30 – June 1	Tampa, FL	Register
June 5-7	Alpharetta, GA	Register
June 6-8	Waltham, MA	Register
June 11 & 12	Orlando, FL (at TechEd)	Open to all TechEd Attendees – just drop in!

So register today, bring your PCs and apps/ideas, and get ready to accelerate!

[via Chris Bowen]

Upcoming Events for May 14th, 2012

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:12:28 GMT

DC

Security Development Conference
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 8:00 AM, Washington, DC
Industry and government decision makers are increasingly aware that operational security protections and regulatory compliance are insufficient in protecting global applications and infrastructures. Organizations are realizing the value of secure development practices and seek to accelerate adoption and articulate this value to management.

The inaugural Security Development Conference 2012 (SDC 2012) will bring together industry professionals to network and learn from security experts about secure development practices. SDC 2012 will include information for leaders in software engineering, process and business management who are responsible for implementing or accelerating the adoption and effectiveness of secure development practices in their organizations.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

MD

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Metro Friday Hackathon - Chevy Chase
Friday, May 25, 2012 10:00 AM, Chevy Chase, MD
Join us on three Fridays in May for Metro Friday Hackathons. We want to provide you with an event where you can join us and your peers and co-work on your projects with specific goals in mind. Bring a computer and ideas.

What: Hackathon for Metro style Apps on Win8 or for Windows Phone
When: 10am – 4pm, May 11, 18, 25
Where: Microsoft offices in the DC metro area, see below for specific dates/locations
Who: Anyone. We’ll be there, you should too!
Registration: Just drop a note to http://devhammer.net/contact, and let me know that you’re in

Ideas on what you could do:

- Publish your Windows Phone app during the hackathon!
- Profile your Windows 8 Metro app to qualify for early Windows Store access
- Evaluate your Windows Phone app for SDK 7.1.1 256mb emulator compatibility
- Work on a project with experienced folks to help you
- Jump start your Windows 8 or Windows Phone developer experience, cowork for a Day!

Dates and Locations:
- May 11 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
- May 18 - Microsoft Reston Office, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA (rooms 3026 & 3028)
- May 25 (this event) - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Online

MoDev Developer TechCast: Porting your Government Apps from iPhone to Windows Phone
Tuesday, May 15, 2012 2:00 PM, n/a, Online
You have successfully built your government app for iPhone and now you would like to further expand your customer base. The Windows Phone team has developed techniques, technology and best practices to make the process of porting your app much easier. This webcast will walk you through the process of taking your government iPhone app and successfully migrating it to Windows Phone. We will discuss existing open data sources, user experience, navigation, services, application life cycle, language considerations, tools and much more!

Join us for this webcast and you'll have a chance to win a brand new developer device to get you started in migrating your current iPhone solution.

[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Webinar – Introduction to Unit Testing
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 10:00 AM, Online
Software testing isn’t just a task for QA. In order to prevent bugs and release quality code to market, you also need developer testing, including unit testing. Discover why you should start unit testing, and how you can get started with automated tests quickly.

Learn:

• Benefits of unit testing
• xUnit Frameworks
• The difference between unit testing and test driven development (TDD).

Join this webinar to learn what you need to know in order to start testing today.

Examples will be in C++.
When: Wednesday May 16, 2012 at 10:00 AM Eastern US, 15:00 United Kingdom, 16:00 Central Europe
To sign up, click here: http://www.typemock.com/introduction-to-unit-testing-may

This will be a vendor-neutral webinar. Typemock will also be raffling off copies of Typemock Isolator++, the most professional mocking framework for C/C++.
[ Event Details | Add To Calendar ]

Microsoft Developer Tools Webcast Series: Legacy App Maintenance with Visual Studio & TFS
Wednesday, May 16, 2012 2:00 PM, n/a, Online
This webcast is intended for any individual involved in software development & related processes, who would like to know more about leveraging Visual Studio & MSDN Subscriptions to more effectively maintain & advance legacy application projects. In this session, we will cover topics such as migrating legacy code (Best Practices & partners that have great tooling), maintaining projects until they are retired, upgrading from Visual SourceSafe & other SCCM products to Team Foundation Server and other related technologies. In the end, we hope this webcast will give you the information you need to make the best decisions in when to advance your development projects & technologies, as well as how to move forward when the time is right.

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SQL Server Table Partitioning by Mike Fal
Thursday, May 17, 2012 12:00 PM, Online
Eating The Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning

Is your table fat? Do you need to manage a table that has billions of rows within it and are overwhelmed by index rebuilds that take more than 12 hours? SQL Server's table partitioning gives the DBA the tools to manage this beast and support very large tables in a way where index management and data retrieval does not become unwieldy. This presentation will take you step by step through choosing an appropriate partitioning key, setting up the partitioning on the table, and finally maintaining the partitions.

Mike Fal

Mike Fal is a musician turned SQL Server DBA, with 10+ years of experience along with some brief excursions into Oracle and Netezza. He has worked in several different industries, including healthcare, software development, marketing, and manufacturing and has experience supporting databases from 1 GB to 4 TB in size. Mike received his Bachelor's Degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1996 and has been caught playing trombone in public on more than one occasion.

Contact URL: http://www.mikefal.net/
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PA

TechNet Events Presents - IT Camp: The Future of IT
Thursday, May 17, 2012 9:00 AM, Pittsburgh, PA
Mark your calendar, set up a reminder, and join us at our IT Camp as we further “The Future of IT” event series. We will begin with the essentials of Microsoft Hyper-V and advance to real-world topics on Hyper-V manager, virtual networks, processes and operations on virtual machines, etc. This is an exciting opportunity to learn Hyper-V with hands-on* experience and gain technical insights of the technology in a relative short period of time. For many It professionals, a TechNet event is also a gathering to connect with those with similar professional interests and grow the community. Come and take this important step to get started on becoming the next private cloud expert in your organization. Seating is limited so reserve your place now!

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VA

Charlottesville Microsoft Developer Group Meeting
Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:00 PM, Charlottesville , VA
This month we have 2 presentations lined up:

MVC 4 - A Look Forward
ASP.NET MVC 4 is a significant release shipping later this year that brings with it some exciting new capabilities. Learn about the new Web API, mobile features, Razor enhancements, Single Page Application support with Knockout.js and Upshot.js, async language integration, and more.

Windows 8 Metro Apps in HTML5 and JavaScript
In this talk, Microsoft Developer Evangelist G. Andrew Duthie will walk you through his experiences in developing Metro style apps for Windows 8 using HTML5 and JavaScript. As part of the discussion, you’ll learn about the importance of solid JavaScript coding practices, how and when Metro style apps run, and why you should build at least one application using the Grid or Split application templates included with the Visual Studio 11 beta. Code reuse and the importance of Contracts in Metro style apps will also be covered.

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VMware's vision, strategy and direction for the Cloud
Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:30 PM, Arlington, VA
Curtis Brazier will present VMware's vision, strategy and direction for Cloud Computing as they move into 2012 and beyond. The session will include exposure to VMware's strategy for IaaS, PaaS, DaaS (Data as a Service) and end user consumption. VMware will discuss the technology that makes this vision and strategy come to life and how they see the market adoption from private, hybrid and service provider cloud computing.

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Cap Area - Client/Dev (formerly Silverlight) SIG - Intro to Windows 8 using XAML - Van Van Lowe
Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:00 PM, Arlington, VA
Abstract:

In this session you will see how to create a Metro App using Xaml and C#. You will learn how to use the new templates in Visual Studio to create a metro app. You will also learn to make changes to these basic templates so that you can customize your metro app. We will also go over new features of metro app such as the charms and the app bar.

Bio:

Van, a Senior Web Developer for Innervisions Software, Inc. since 1996, started programming Mainframes using COBOL, JCL for a fortune 100 company. Van has been a line of business application developer for over 30 years. In 2003 Van started developing application professionally with .Net specializing ASP.Net.

Van is currently the leader of the Cap Area .Net Client/Dev (formerly Silverlight) Special Interest Group. He spends his spare time creating Lightswitch applications for Prince William Special Olympics. He has recently deployed a couple of Lightswitch applications.
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Metro Friday Hackathon - Reston
Friday, May 18, 2012 10:00 AM, Reston, VA
Join us on three Fridays in May for Metro Friday Hackathons. We want to provide you with an event where you can join us and your peers and co-work on your projects with specific goals in mind. Bring a computer and ideas.

What: Hackathon for Metro style Apps on Win8 or for Windows Phone
When: 10am – 4pm, May 11, 18, 25
Where: Microsoft offices in the DC metro area, see below for specific dates/locations
Who: Anyone. We’ll be there, you should too!
Registration: Just drop a note to http://devhammer.net/contact, and let me know that you’re in

Ideas on what you could do:

- Publish your Windows Phone app during the hackathon!
- Profile your Windows 8 Metro app to qualify for early Windows Store access
- Evaluate your Windows Phone app for SDK 7.1.1 256mb emulator compatibility
- Work on a project with experienced folks to help you
- Jump start your Windows 8 or Windows Phone developer experience, cowork for a Day!

Dates and Locations:

- May 11 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
- May 18 (this event) - Microsoft Reston Office, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA (rooms 3026 & 3028)
- May 25 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
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Want your events listed? You can add them here.

Windows 8 at Night

Fri, 11 May 2012 23:25:22 GMT

My peers who work with public sector customers have scheduled a series of evening events covering many aspects of Windows 8 development, and this is a great opportunity for those of you who weren't able to make it to one of our full-day Windows 8 Developer Camp events to gain an early edge in developing for the new Metro style app platform in Windows 8. Here are the details:

Microsoft Public Sector - Win8 Event Series
The broad reach of Windows, best-in-class developer tools, a reimagined user experience, support for new chipsets, and a built-in store with industry-leading business terms make Windows 8 the largest developer opportunity ever.

Take your pick of live, 2-hour evening events; live, full-day dev camps; or online 1-hour sessions - each designed to share the knowledge you need to start building Metro style applications for Windows 8, all free.

Live - Win8 at Night
6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M., Reston, VA
- May 23
Everything Web Developers Must Know to Build Metro Style Apps
- May 31
Bring Your Apps to Life with Tiles and Notifications
- June 5
VS11 for Windows 8: Beyond Code: App Development for the Modern World
- June 13
The Windows 8 Platform for Metro Style Apps
- June 20
Everything Web Developers Must Know To Build Metro Style Apps
- June 26
Bring Your Apps to Life with Tiles and Notifications

Live - Win8 at Night
6:00 P.M. to 8:00 P.M., Chevy Chase, MD
- May 24
Everything Web Developers Must Know to Build Metro Style Apps
- May 29
Bring Your Apps to Life with Tiles and Notifications
- June 7
VS11 for Windows 8: Beyond Code: App Development for the Modern World
- June 14
The Windows 8 platform for Metro style apps
- June 21
Everything Web Developers Must Know to Build Metro Style Apps
- June 28
Bring Your Apps to Life With Tiles and Notifications

Live, Full-Day Win8 Dev Camps
May 24, 9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Chevy Chase, MD
June 5, 9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M., Reston, VA

The events (including the webcasts) are all listed over at Community Megaphone, so you can learn more about them by clicking through the links above, or via Community Megaphone. And in case you're wondering, no, you don't have to be a public sector developer to participate.

May 15th: Webcast on Porting iOS apps to Windows Phone

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:58:10 GMT

Next Tuesday, May 15th, join Pete Erickson, organizer of MoDevDC, my fellow developer evangelist Joel Reyes, and Ken Fang, President of Mobomo, for a one-hour webcast on porting iOS apps to Windows Phone. This webcast is part 2 in an ongoing series, and will include a detailed process for porting your apps, discussion with developers who have been through this process, and resources for open data sources to use in your apps.

REGISTER TODAY!

Event Date: May 15, 2012

Event Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm Eastern Time

Abstract:
Developers, designers, architects and managers must be prepared to answer the porting challenge on behalf of customers who require Windows Phone compatibility. This webcast will provide the detailed process for porting from an iOS application to Windows Phone and you'll hear from developers who've recently completed the process on behalf of federal government agencies. For those of you interested in just building for Windows Phone we will include information on readily available open data sources that you can use to build your new WP Apps. In the meantime, feel free to download the Windows Phone specific resources below. Look carefully, there are really good resources here!

Phone: Tools (http://bit.ly/WP75SDK), Devices (http://aka.ms/freedevices - public sector apps only)
Cloud: Tools (http://bit.ly/DLAzureSDK), Account (http://bit.ly/z5MLcT)
Resources: Infokit (http://aka.ms/infokit)
Apps Ideas: Ideas (http://bit.ly/WP7AppIdeas)

Full details at: http://www.meetup.com/modevdc/events/63397902/

Exploring HTML5 Canvas: Part 1 - Introduction

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:23:41 GMT

In this post, I'm going to begin an examination of one of the hottest new features of HTML5, namely the Canvas element.

What is Canvas, anyway?

The best place to start is at the beginning, and that's with an explanation of what Canvas actually is. Canvas is a new element that is part of the HTML5 specification, and can be added to your markup as simply as this:

   1: <canvas id="myCanvas" width="500" height="500"></canvas>

OK, we're done. Let's go home.

Of course, it's not that easy. By adding the canvas element to the markup, if we browse the page containing the element in a modern browser that supports canvas (you can find out which browsers support canvas using caniuse.com), you'll see a great big nothing. Why? Because all that the <canvas> tag gives you is a blank slate, and unless you've changed the background color of your page, both the page background and the canvas will be white. Not terribly interesting to look at, so I'll spare you the screen shot of the blank canvas. Just take my word that the above markup gives you a drawing surface that is 500 pixels wide by 500 pixels tall, and (assuming it's the only element in the body of your page) will appear at the top left of your page.

Building a Template

To make life easier as we explore the HTML5 Canvas, I'm going to start with a basic set of markup and script, and in future posts in this series, I'll add to that basic template. Since this will consist solely of HTML markup, CSS, and Javascript, you can use any text editor you like to follow along. I'll be working with the Microsoft WebMatrix 2 beta, which you can download here (you can choose either the current v1 release, or the v2 beta, using the big green buttons in the upper right).

Here's the basic template I'm going to use:

   1:  <!DOCTYPE html>

2:

   3:  <html lang="en">

   4:      <head>

   5:          <meta charset="utf-8" />

   6:          <title>HTML5 Canvas Template</title>

   7:          <style>

   8:              /* styles here */

   9:          </style>

  10:      </head>

  11:      <body>

  12:          <canvas id="myCanvas" width="500" height="500">

  13:              <p>Canvas not supported.</p>

  14:          </canvas>

15:

  16:          <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.7.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

  17:          <script type="text/javascript">

  18:              $(document).ready(function() {

  19:                  var canvas = $("#myCanvas").get(0);

  20:                  var context = canvas.getContext("2d");

21:

  22:                  function renderContent()

  23:                  {

  24:                      // we'll do our drawing here...

  25:                  }

26:

  27:                  renderContent();

  28:              });

  29:          </script>

  30:      </body>

  31:  </html>

Some things to note:

On line 7, I'm setting up a <style> block where we'll put CSS rules.
On line 13, I've added some content in between the <canvas> and </canvas> tags. Any browser that does not support Canvas will ignore the canvas tags, and will instead render the content within them. In this case, I'm simply displaying a message, but I could also provide a fallback solution using Silverlight or Flash, if I chose.
On line 16, I'm importing the jQuery script library, which can help simplify and speed my Javascript development. I am placing my script references at the end of the page, just prior to the closing </body> ~~element~~ tag, to ensure that my page content loads without being blocked by script loading.
On line 18, I am telling jQuery to execute an anonymous function when the page is ready for scripting, using jQuery's built-in ready event. This is where I kick off processing, first getting a reference to the canvas element and its 2d drawing context (more on this in a bit), and calling the renderContent function, which is currently empty.
A final note…in a production site, I would separate out the CSS and JavaScript into separate files, to keep my markup nice and clean. For the sake of this blog series, I will largely keep the CSS and JavaScript in the same file, so you'll be able to see it all at once.

All of the parts of this template will be useful moving forward, so you may want to copy the above code and save it to a file. I'm calling mine CanvasTemplate.html:

A Brief Digression – JsFiddle

Another useful tool I want to introduce, since I'll probably use it from time to time to post example code, is JsFiddle. JsFiddle is, as the JsFiddle docs state,"a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways." It supports multiple JavaScript libraries, such as jQuery, MooTools, Prototype, and many more, and makes it easy to experiment with, and share, your web code. You can see an example in the code snippet I posted for making a grid in canvas as an aid to visualizing layout:

It's important to note that JsFiddle is an alpha release as of this writing, and I've found a few issues when editing scripts, particularly when using tabs. But overall, it's very functional, and quite convenient for brief forays into web monkeying. For deeper development, I definitely prefer an environment like WebMatrix or Visual Studio that provide a more robust editing experience.

A Blank Slate

Back to the code…as noted above, even with the addition of our JavaScript in the template, our canvas still isn't doing anything useful. In order to start drawing, we need the canvas equivalent of a pencil (or pen, or paintbrush, depending on which metaphor you prefer). And that's where the Context comes in. The HTML5 Canvas element exposes a function called getContext, which you can call like so:

var context = myCanvasElement.getContext("2d");

Note that in the snippet above, I've already gotten a reference to the canvas element (you'll see how momentarily), and I'm passing in the string argument "2d" to the function. This is required, although in the current specification, there is only one drawing context, which is 2d (there may be a 3d context in future versions of the specification, which is why you have to specify 2d, even though it's the only context). It is this context that exposes all of the functions you'll call to draw on your canvas.

Getting the drawing context takes just 2 lines, one to get a reference to the canvas element you want to draw on, and another to get the context itself. We'll use jQuery to grab the element, using its ID selector syntax:

var canvas = $("#myCanvas").get(0);
var context = canvas.getContext("2d");

In the first line, I ask jQuery for the element with the id of "myCanvas" and call .get(0) to get the underlying element (by default, jQuery returns a set of elements wrapped with some of its useful functionality…but we just need the element itself), then in the second line I grab the canvas drawing context and stick it into a variable called, appropriately enough, "context". In our template above, I define and populate these variables at the beginning of the anonymous function called by jQuery's ready event handler. Since the renderContent function is also defined within the anonymous function, it will have access to the canvas and context variables, while keeping both the variables and function from polluting the global namespace (that is, unintentionally exposing variables and/or functions as global to the page).

We'll get into the ins and outs of the canvas drawing API in the next installment, but I'll leave you with a simple example of what you can do with Canvas, by adding the following code to the renderContent function:

   1:  function renderContent()

   2:  {

   3:      context.fillRect(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);

4:

   5:      var text = "Hello, Canvas!";

   6:      context.fillStyle = "#FF0000";

   7:      context.strokeStyle = "#0000FF";

   8:      context.font = "36px sans-serif";

   9:      context.strokeText(text, 10, 50);

  10:      context.fillText(text, 10, 50);

  11:  }

Which results in the following being rendered:

Hope you enjoyed the first installment of Exploring HTML5 Canvas.

If you found this useful, why not tell your friends? You can also subscribe to my RSS feed, and follow me on twitter for more frequent updates.

More parts in the series:

Windows Azure Camps - To the Cloud!

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:20:31 GMT

Have you been putting off getting to know the cloud? Well, don't put it off any longer. Whether you're developing enterprise apps, or cooking up an idea for the next million-selling app for Windows 8, or somewhere in between, Windows Azure has plenty to offer you.

And the Azure gurus who are my teammates, Brian Hitney, Peter Laudati, and Jim O'Neil are running a series of Windows Azure Camp events that offer you the opportunity to get up to speed on Windows Azure quickly, including hands-on development time with experts on hand to answer your questions.

Here's the agenda for the events:

1.      The Azure Platform – An Overview (60 minutes)
Let’s start off the day with a dive into Windows Azure.   We’ll talk about what Windows Azure offers, from hosting applications to durable storage.   We’ll look at Windows Azure roles types, hosting web applications and worker processes. We’ll also cover durable storage options, both traditional relational database that is offered as SQL Azure, or more cloud-centric offerings in Windows Azure Storage for files, semi-structured data, and queues.

2.       Hands on @home with Azure (120 minutes)
For this hands-on portion of the day, we’ll work on the @home with Windows Azure project. The @home project will give you a solid understanding of using Windows Azure in a project that contributes back to Stanford’s Folding@home distributed computing project.   We’ll walk through the code, provisioning an account, and getting the application deployed and running.

3.      Caching – A Scalable Middle Tier (45 minutes)
Creating a stateless application is a difficult but fundamental aspect of building a scalable application in the cloud. In this session, we’ll talk about the Windows Azure Cache service and using it as a middle tier to maintain state and cache objects that can be shared by multiple instances.

4.      SQL Azure, Data Sync, and Reporting (45 minutes)
SQL Azure offers a scalable database as a service without having to configure and maintain hardware. We’ll look at the subtle differences between on premises SQL Server databases and SQL Azure, and how Data Sync can be used to synchronize data between multiple databases both in the cloud and on premises. We’ll also look at SQL Azure Reporting.

5.      Windows 8 and Azure – Better Together (60 minutes)
The consumer preview of Windows 8 is out, and it’s the perfect time to ramp up on developing native Metro-style applications.   In this session, we’ll give an overview of Windows 8, and delivering a richer user experience by leveraging a cloud backend.

There are 3 Windows Azure Camps scheduled, and you can register for the one nearest you via the links below:

Date	Location
May 24th, 2012	Alpharetta, GA	Register
May 30th, 2012	Reston, VA	Register
May 31st, 2012	Iselin, NJ	Register

Don't miss out on this great opportunity to learn about how Windows Azure can help make your apps shine, both in the cloud, and elsewhere!

Announcing Metro Friday Hackathons!

Wed, 09 May 2012 13:31:01 GMT

Join us on three Fridays in May for Metro Friday Hackathons. We want to provide you with an event where you can join us and your peers and co-work on your projects with specific goals in mind. Bring a computer and ideas.

What: Hackathon for Metro style Apps on Windows 8 or for Windows Phone
When: 10am – 4pm, May 11, 18, 25
Where: Microsoft offices in the DC metro area, see below for specific dates/locations
Who: Anyone. We’ll be there, you should too!
Registration: Just drop me a note, and let me know that you’re in

Ideas on what you could do:

Publish your Windows Phone app during the hackathon!
Profile your Windows 8 Metro app to qualify for early Windows Store access
Evaluate your Windows Phone app for SDK 7.1.1 256mb emulator compatibility
Work on a project with experienced folks to help you
Jump start your Windows 8 or Windows Phone developer experience, cowork for a Day!

Install the dev tools before you show up (you can grab them all, or just install what you need for your particular app):

Dates and Locations:

May 11 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
May 18 - Microsoft Reston Office, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA (rooms 3026 & 3028)
May 25 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)

See you there!

Upcoming Events for May 7th, 2012

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:35:17 GMT

DC

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MD

RockNUG Release 5.11
Wednesday, May 09, 2012 6:30 PM, Rockville, MD
Technical Center - Room 232
Montgomery College (Rockville Campus)
Getting Async with C# 5
- Kevin Jones
Asynchronous applications are becoming more relevant, and the need and justification of them is hard to ignore. Users are demanding better experiences with applications, and applications need to make the most out of the resources they are given. Once time consuming and difficult to write, the new C# 5 async functionality built on top of the Task Parallel Library finally makes asynchronous development a full class citizen in the language. We'll explore what it is, how it is doing it, and why we will all benefit from it.
Kevin Jones is an Team Lead and Senior Consultant for LogicBoost, a leading software development company based in Washington DC.

6:30 - 7:00 n00b Presentation: TBD
7:00 - 7:30 Pizza/Announcements
7:30 - 9:00 Featured Presentation: Getting Async with C# 5 - Kevin Jones
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Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Building Metro style apps with XAML: What .NET developers need to know
Thursday, May 10, 2012 6:00 PM, Chevy Chase, MD
If you are experienced with .NET or Silverlight and are already familiar with XAML, this session will teach you everything you need to know to create a Metro style app for Windows 8. This session will cover updates to familiar features and explore concepts that are new for Windows 8. This session will show you how to turn your XAML skills into money-making Metro style apps.

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Metro Friday Hackathon - Chevy Chase
Friday, May 11, 2012 10:00 AM, Chevy Chase, MD
Join us on three Fridays in May for Metro Friday Hackathons. We want to provide you with an event where you can join us and your peers and co-work on your projects with specific goals in mind. Bring a computer and ideas.

What: Hackathon for Metro style Apps on Win8 or for Windows Phone
When: 10am – 4pm, May 11, 18, 25
Where: Microsoft offices in the DC metro area, see below for specific dates/locations
Who: Anyone. We’ll be there, you should too!
Registration: Just drop a note to http://devhammer.net/contact, and let me know that you’re in

Ideas on what you could do:

- Publish your Windows Phone app during the hackathon!
- Profile your Windows 8 Metro app to qualify for early Windows Store access
- Evaluate your Windows Phone app for SDK 7.1.1 256mb emulator compatibility
- Work on a project with experienced folks to help you
- Jump start your Windows 8 or Windows Phone developer experience, cowork for a Day!

Dates and Locations:

- May 11 (this event) - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)
- May 18 - Microsoft Reston Office, 12012 Sunset Hills Road, Reston, VA (rooms 3026 & 3028)
- May 25 - Microsoft Chevy Chase Office, 5404 Wisconsin Ave, Chevy Chase, MD (room 7027)

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Online

Software Architecture in an Agile Environment
Wednesday, May 09, 2012 9:00 AM, Online
How do architects build software in an agile environment.

Learn
• What is Software Architecture
• What is Agile development
• How they can live together?

Discover principles of Agile architecture

• Lifecycle and process
• Modeling and development
• The right solution for the right problem
• How to deliver quality with (TDD)
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Designing apps with Metro principles and Windows personality
Wednesday, May 09, 2012 2:00 PM, Online
Windows 8 marks the next step in the evolution of the Metro design language. Through the bold use of color, typography and motion, Metro brings a fresh new approach to the user experience. In this talk, you'll learn the design principles behind Metro and get insights into how to apply these principles in your own apps.

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Microsoft Web Camp
Thursday, May 10, 2012 9:00 AM, Online
What’s a Web Camp?
Web Camps are free, fun, no-fluff events for developers, by developers. You learn from experts in a low-key, interactive way and then you’ll get to apply what you’ve learned.

What am I going to learn?
At this Web Camp, you’ll learn how to develop beautiful, interactive and fast web sites using Microsoft’s web tools and platform. You will also learn how to deploy and scale your web sites with the cloud.

Here’s a snapshot of the topics that will be covered in the sessions and demonstrated with extensive hands-on resources.
– HTML5
– jQuery
– ASP.NET 4.5, MVC, and Web APIs
– Visual Studio 2011 Beta & WebMatrix 2.0 Beta
– Internet Explorer Site Pinning, Notifications, Jump Lists, Media
– Internet Explorer 10 Concepts and Developer Preparation
– Cloud deployment and scaling with Windows Azure
– And more….

What does it cost?
Web Camps are free. We appreciate your time, so we take care of the rest.

How do I register?
Registration is easy! It’s quick and painless. Seriously. Registration is free, but it’s also limited to keep things interactive and fun. We recommend you register right away to make sure you get a seat.
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TechNet Webcast: SQL Server 2012 - What's New in the Tabular Model (Part 2)
Friday, May 11, 2012 9:00 AM, Online
This webcast picks up where the previous part left off: we look at the different specific features in the tabular model, such as key performance indicators (KPIs), roles, partitions, and calculations. We also look at scenarios in which the tabular model works well compared to the traditional OLAP model, scenarios in which the models differ, and ways that we can scale the tabular model (which by default is an in-memory data model) for more enterprise-level applications (by using DirectQuery mode). After this webcast, you should have a better understanding of the tabular model and how it differs from the traditional OLAP, multidimensional model.

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PA

Philadelphia VFP User Group
Tuesday, May 08, 2012 7:00 PM, Fort Washington, PA
This month, we’ll have a short presentation by member Dan Baker, followed by open mike night. Please bring any questions or tips.

Dan says he’s been “using the Web Browser to create controls for my VFP applications. It's a work in progress but I have a calendar date picker and a two-level hierarchy table with various HTML input controls inside to show.”

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Code Camp 2012.1
Saturday, May 12, 2012 8:30 AM, Abington, PA
Our first 2012 Code Camp will be held at the Penn State campus in Abington, PA on Saturday, May 12 from 8:30-5:00. Detailed directions are on the Penn State web site.

- Lots of code, just say no to slides!
- 8 hours of learning and networking
- 70 sessions by 60+ speakers (8:30, 10:00, 11:30/12:00, 1:40, 3:10)
- 13 tracks + Open Spaces Forum
- 600 seats with tables (laptops welcome)
- Breakfast, lunch (two groups), and afternoon snack
- Raffles and prizes after second lunch and closing
- Booster registration option for charity donations, parties, and prizes
- Easy parking
- Convenient hotels (TBD)
- After hours party at the Brick House (network with speakers and attendees)
- The official Twitter hash tag will be #phillycc. Use it when you tweet and search it to stay in the know.

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VA

Hampton Roads .NET User Group
Tuesday, May 08, 2012 6:00 PM, Virginia Beach, VA
Join us as Derik Whittaker talks about making lemonade out of lemons - tips and techniques for working with bad code and making it better.

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Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: Building Metro style apps with XAML: What .NET developers need to know
Wednesday, May 09, 2012 6:00 PM, Reston, VA
If you are experienced with .NET or Silverlight and are already familiar with XAML, this session will teach you everything you need to know to create a Metro style app for Windows 8. This session will cover updates to familiar features and explore concepts that are new for Windows 8. This session will show you how to turn your XAML skills into money-making Metro style apps.

[ Event Details | Map & Directions | Add To Calendar ]

Cap Area - Client/Dev (formerly Silverlight) SIG - Intro to Windows 8 using XAML - Van Van Lowe
Thursday, May 17, 2012 7:00 PM, Arlington, VA
Abstract:

In this session you will see how to create a Metro App using Xaml and C#. You will learn how to use the new templates in Visual Studio to create a metro app. You will also learn to make changes to these basic templates so that you can customize your metro app. We will also go over new features of metro app such as the charms and the app bar.

Bio:

Van, a Senior Web Developer for Innervisions Software, Inc. since 1996, started programming Mainframes using COBOL, JCL for a fortune 100 company. Van has been a line of business application developer for over 30 years. In 2003 Van started developing application professionally with .Net specializing ASP.Net.

Van is currently the leader of the Cap Area .Net Client/Dev (formerly Silverlight) Special Interest Group. He spends his spare time creating Lightswitch applications for Prince William Special Olympics. He has recently deploy a couple of Lightswitch applications.
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Upcoming Events for May 1st, 2012

Tue, 01 May 2012 15:02:01 GMT

DC

Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: The Windows 8 platform for Metro style apps
Tuesday, May 01, 2012 6:00 PM, Washington, DC
Windows 8 is Windows re-imagined. Join this session to learn about the new platform for building Metro style applications. Get an understanding of the platform design tenets, the programming language choices, and the integration points with the operating system and across Metro style apps.

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MD

CMAP Main Meeting - Automated Unit and Integration Testing with NDbUnit - Stephen Ritchie
Tuesday, May 01, 2012 6:30 PM, Columbia, MD
Topic: Automated Unit and Integration Testing with NDbUnit

When coding and running automated integration tests, have you bumped into "database in an unexpected state" failures? The database is often in the wrong initial state when test code runs. NDbUnit is a .NET library for managing database state for unit and integration testing. As a database testing framework, it provides the capability to arrange the data in the database before and after a test method runs. This helps ensure that the database’s state is consistent for the execution of each test. In this presentation, you will learn:

How to unit test a stored procedure with NDbUnit
How to automate the integration testing of the data access layer
How to enable refactoring through automated integration testing
How to improve automated UI testing with NDbUnit

NDbUnit clears away some very significant automated testing obstacles, which can help you avoid common pitfalls of automated testing.

Presenter: Stephen Ritchie

Stephen Ritchie is the author of Pro .NET Best Practices (Apress, 2011). He has been writing software professionally for over 20 years. He is the .NET best practices steward at Excella, working together with .NET project teams to facilitate and to implement new and better development practices. He is often called upon to setup the continuous integration server, perform code analysis, and automate the testing, packaging and deployment of software.
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Microsoft PubSec Live - Win8 At Night: The Windows 8 platform for Metro style apps
Thursday, May 03, 2012 6:00 PM, Chevy Chase, MD
Windows 8 is Windows re-imagined. Join this session to learn about the new platform for building Metro style applications. Get an understanding of the platform design tenets, the programming language choices, and the integration points with the operating system and across Metro style apps.

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Online

TechNet Webcast: How to use Windows Azure and Windows Phone to Enable a Real-Time Financial Close Process
Tuesday, May 01, 2012 9:30 AM, Online
The Journal Entry Management (JEM) team architected a document management application for Windows Azure. The resulting solution delivers improved performance, capabilities, and services using Windows Phone while delivering operations savings. Join this webcast to learn more.

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Driving application development through Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
Wednesday, May 02, 2012 11:30 AM, Online
Looking to start unit testing or test driven development but not sure what to test and how to start? Behavior Driven Development, an agile software development technique, can help spread unit testing and TDD in your team.

This webinar will walk through how you can be driving your application development through behavior driven, one specification at a time in a test-driven manner. You will see how BDD could fit with an agile process.

Learn:

- What is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD)
- The relationship between BDD & Test-Driven Development (TDD)
- Basic specifications, Cucumber-language
- How BDD makes a good fit with agile processes
- Driving out your units in a test-first approach
- Mocking / Fakes / Stubs - what are they and how to use them
- Decoupling in software

This will be a vendor-neutral webinar, we will also be raffling Typemock Isolator licenses and t-shirts to winning webinar attendees. Sign up for a chance to win.
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Introduction to Twilio
Wednesday, May 02, 2012 7:00 PM, Online
http://justin.tv/jonmarkgo

Twilio is the leading telephony platform for developers to extend and expand their applications with Voice and SMS communications. Our focus for this workshop will be to get an overview of the basic features and functionality of the Twilio platform; send, receive, and respond to SMS messages; place, receive, and respond to phone calls; and use Twilio Client to use your browser to place and receive phone calls.

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Intro to Mashery: What are APIs
Thursday, May 03, 2012 7:00 PM, Online
Register at: http://bitly.com/IyABVz

What are APIs? Why you should be interested and why they should be every developer's best friend. Developers will also get a taste of API Explorer - an interactive documentation system designed to learn and explore RESTful APIs like Klout, USA TODAY, Rovi, Whit.li, New York Times and many more.

Mashery is the world leader in API technology and services helping over 150 companies manage their APIs.

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TechNet Webcast: SQL Server 2012 -What's New in the Tabular Model
Friday, May 04, 2012 9:00 AM, Online
Although Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services has tremendous capabilities for building analytic (OLAP) databases, the learning curve can intimidate developers. The new tabular model in Analysis Services provides developers with some of the same general features as the regular multidimensional capabilities of OLAP, but in a somewhat simplified user interface. In this webcast, we create an analytic database by using the tabular model in Microsoft Visual Studio (SQL Server Data Tools), pointing to a relational database as the source. Because there's still a learning curve with the tabular model, we split this up into two parts. This webcast focuses on the basics of the tabular model (because it's new to many people), and in the second part, we look at some of the more detailed features. If you need a "first look" at what the tabular model offers, this webcast is for you.

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Software Architecture in an Agile Environment
Wednesday, May 09, 2012 9:00 AM, Online
How do architects build software in an agile environment.

Learn

• What is Software Architecture
• What is Agile development
• How they can live together?

Discover principles of Agile architecture

• Lifecycle and process
• Modeling and development
• The right solution for the right problem
• How to deliver quality with (TDD)
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PA

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VA

RVNUG May Meeting: Continuous Delivery in Practice with Roberto Hernandez
Thursday, May 03, 2012 6:00 PM, Roanoke, VA
Learn the basic concepts behind continuous delivery, a software development strategy that optimizes your delivery process to get high-quality, valuable software delivered as quickly as possible. In addition, learn how to leverage current build and continuous integration technology to support the continuous delivery process.

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Pete Brown Geeks out on .NET Gadgeteer and Netduino

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 03:00:29 GMT

This past week, my friend and fellow Microsoftie, Pete Brown, ran a neat online symposium for the Microsoft Patterns & Practices group. As part of the event, Pete did an hour-long session introducing the .NET Micro Framework, and many of the cool things you can do with the various devices in the NETMF ecosystem, including Netduino, Netduino Go, and .NET Gadgeteer boards like the FEZ Spider. He was even kind enough to do a demo of the Meeblipiator project I put together using his Gadgeteer MIDI module (the demo is at around 45 minutes in). Here's the video…enjoy!