WinRT
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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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This week has so far had an AU theme to it, just as last week we talked exclusively about Leap Motion and AutoCAD. Perhaps I'm sub-consciously shifting this blog to a weekly-themed format? Hmm. Like many of you, I'm sure, I received an email over the weekend to let me know that the recorded sessions from Autodesk University 2012 are now available online (for anyone with a valid AU online account). I wasn't sure which of my sessions had made it up there from this last year's event (thank goodness I rarely have to write cheques anymore), and so was…
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After introducing the topic – as well as creating our basic, local web-service – in the last post, today we're going to publish our MVC 4 Web API application to the cloud and see it working from a number of different client environments. Preparing to publish to Azure Now that we're ready to publish to Azure, we need to add a deployment project to our solution. Right-click "ApollonianPackingWebApi" in the Solution Explorer and select "Add Windows Azure Cloud Service Project". This will add a new project into our solution. We can now double-click the entry under the "Roles" folder in…
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This post contains the second part of the handout for my Windows 8-related session at AU 2012 (here's the first part). Here's the accompanying source project for the MetroCAD application, which has now been upgraded to work on the shipping version of Windows 8. What can be done with AutoCAD? Something that's being promoted by Microsoft to developers of "heavyweight" desktop apps is the idea of a companion app. These are essentially Windows Store apps that complement desktop apps such as AutoCAD. We're going to see one such companion app in this session: an app called MetroCAD that is basically…
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I finally managed to wrap-up my AU material over the weekend. Here's the first part of the handout for my Windows 8-related session (if you log in with your AU account, you'll be able to access the accompanying presentation and sample project). This is an "intermediate" class (rather than "advanced"), so at times it may seem fairly high-level. That said, if anyone sees issues with the material – especially important topics that have been glossed over – please do let me know: I'd be happy to make corrections (especially in advance of the class being delivered :-). Introduction Windows 8…
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As part of my preparation for AU 2012, I've been working on updating the various Windows 8 samples I'll be showing to work with the RTM version of the OS. The first to be migrated was the Apollonian Viewer for WinRT, which is part of the cloud & mobile series from earlier in the year. The project was easy enough to get working: I mostly had to update to version 2.3.0 (or 2.3.1, as this was the latest available) of SharpDX and made a few minor code changes (there was previously a SafeDispose() function that seems to have disappeared and…
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Over the weekend, from Friday to Sunday, I spent far more hours than I'd have liked finishing off my AU Virtual class for this year, "Secure Your AutoCAD Environment" (I'm increasingly involved in security-related activities for the AutoCAD development organisation). Preparing material for AU Virtual is often pretty tough, whether it's being recorded in person (I've done a couple of those) or being in advance and needing extensively editing. This year's format was a bit different, in that it required multiple modules to be recorded separately as opposed to a single, monolithic recording. Better from a consumption perspective, apparently, and…
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Last week, I received confirmation that I'll be presenting a few different classes at AU 2012, which will be held at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas from November 27-28. My main sessions, this year, are in some way focused on cloud & mobile technologies. The subject matter of the first lecture is the recently completed cloud & mobile series, where we'll look at moving desktop functionality to the cloud and using it from a variety of mobile environments: CP1914 – Moving code to the cloud – it's easier than you think! It has a companion roundtable session –…
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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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As we reach the end of this long series of posts on moving code to the cloud – and a look at ways to use the functionality from a wide variety of applications, many of them on mobile devices – I felt it was worth putting together a quick summary post to reinforce the overall message (which may have been a bit lost in the sheer volume of information). Firstly, here are the posts in this series, including those looking at the original creation of the "desktop" application functionality: Creating the core desktop functionality Circle packing in AutoCAD: creating an…