Visual Studio
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After blinking LEDs with an Arduino Uno R3 and its younger step-sibling the Digispark, I decided to give the same treatment to their beef-cake second cousin, the Netduino Plus 2. James Maeding had been telling me to take a look at the Netduino for ages, so when I ordered some parts for my (optimistically speaking) forthcoming Kinect for ZX Spectrum integration, I decided to throw in a Netduino Plus 2. Now the Netduino Plus 2 retails for $60 in the US (and 80CHF here in Switzerland, as the device is assembled in the US), which means it's at least twice…
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I headed cross to the Zurich area on Tuesday afternoon – which is quite a trek from where I live, around ~2.5 hours by train – to attend the first Zurich .NET Developer meet-up. The event was held in the Microsoft office in Wallisellen: they kindly provided beer and the meeting room, while the session itself was organised by members of the local .NET community. Considering the weather – a pretty serious snowstorm hit the country that day – the event was surprisingly well attended. The main topic of the session was MVVM Light, a lightweight framework developed by Laurent…
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A few things have happened over the last week or so that have got me looking, once again, at Windows Azure: Firstly, there was an exciting release announced last week (I attended the webcast online from San Francisco, where the event happened to be taking place), prior to this week's TechEd. Among the key features were: Support for Linux instances These will presumably be cheaper, given the lack of OS licensing costs Virtual Machine capability IaaS for those that prefer it over PaaS (something no doubt learned from the popularity of AWS) Select from the online Image Gallery or upload…
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I'm sure several of you have formed opinions on the new look & feel of the Visual Studio 11 Beta, whether you've installed it on your existing OS or have tried it on one of the preview versions of Windows 8 (or perhaps you've just seen screenshots on the web). I've been using it now for a couple of weeks – on and off, admittedly – and have mixed feelings about the new monochrome styling. A lot of people have stronger views (which is basically a polite way of saying it's fairly universally hated, judging from the feedback). I do…
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As promised in my last post, I spent some time hacking together a basic application to get a feel for what it's like to develop inside the WinRT sandbox for Windows 8. If you're interested in the source code, here it is. Be warned: the code is really just to prove a concept – there's a lot therein I'd consider sub-optimal for a production application. If you're more interested in seeing the application in action, but haven't yet installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, then here's a quick screencast I recorded: A few comments on the experience of developing with…
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I've just arrived home from a long day (mainly because of the 4-hour round-trip rail travel) at the Windows TechConference in Baden, Switzerland, focused on Windows 8. It was a pretty interesting day – thankfully, as I'm still a bit jetlagged from my trip to California, and I didn't want to doze off in the lecture theatre. And yes, I've certainly dozed during a few lectures in my time, but not since leaving University. The main developer-oriented session I attended – which covered writing a WinRT application to pull down Teletext into a XAML + C# application, which was just…
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I've been meaning to post on this topic for some time, and a recent comment reminded me to do so. As many of you will have noticed, when you do a straight copy & paste of code from this blog into Visual Studio, it comes with unwanted line feeds. For instance, taking some recently posted code using Internet Explorer 9: And pasting it into VS2010 results in unwanted linefeeds in the code: Less than ideal, to say the least. The reason this happens is probably the way the HTML gets formatted by the CopySourceAsHtml tool I use to get the…
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Given the fact AU 2011 is quickly approaching, I decided it was time to dust off my Kinect-related code and getting it working with the Beta SDK from Microsoft Research. Part of the reason I haven't been able to do this sooner is that my primary work machine is currently a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 via Parallels, and the Microsoft Kinect driver currently does not support working inside a Virtual Machine. I did start to try to get my previous implementation using OpenNI + NITE to work on this system, but as it uses the nKinect component that is…
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Visual C# Express and Visual Basic Express can be used successfully to build .NET applications for AutoCAD: in fact many developers use these tools to do so. One long-standing issue with using these tools with AutoCAD relates to debugging: the ability to debug using an external application is not directly exposed via the user interface Visual C#/Basic Express, which – as AutoCAD implements a plug-in hosting framework for .NET Class Libraries (or DLLs) – makes life complicated. The workaround for addressing this issue has been documented in this previous post and also on the ADN web-site, but thankfully this manual…
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After creating our basic LightSwitch project in the last post, today we're going to add some real functionality. To get warmed up, let's take a look at some contents of the project we created last time. At the top level, we see there's a new project type, along with some intriguing files: Drilling down a level further, we see a number of sub-projects (Client, Server, Common) contain C# files: None of this should need to be edited manually, of course. Before adding some real capability to our app, let's take a quick look at the data-type imported when we connected…