Sascha Corti aka. TechPreacher

Testing Your Windows Phone 8 Apps Series.

TechPreacher — Thu, 23 May 2013 07:25:56 +0000

The second part of the series on “Testing Your Windows Phone 8 Apps” has now been published on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. Testing your apps before releasing them to the store can make a huge difference. A small investment in the key areas described in this post can give your app better results in your market and help bypass common coding errors early in the development process.

Testing your Windows Phone app – Part 1 – Released May 1, 2013

Beta testing
Installation and launch
Fast Application Switching (FAS) and tombstoning
App navigation
Launchers and choosers
UI and layout

Testing your Windows Phone app – Part 2 – Released May 22, 2013

Push notification
Live Tiles
Agents
Media, audio, and video
Geolocation
Resource usage and performance

Impressive video showing Leap Motion used to control Windows 8.

TechPreacher — Tue, 21 May 2013 07:59:48 +0000

Via: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/21/leap-motion-shows-off-how-its-touch-free-gesture-capture-hardware-will-interact-with-windows-8

Surface Pro in Switzerland – Availability Date and Price announced.

TechPreacher — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:51:32 +0000

Via: http://www.microsoft.com/switzerland/mediacorner/de/PressRelease.aspx?title=Surface_Pro_kommt_in_die_Schweiz___&id=8ea440d0-c945-446e-b359-062882c09fe7

Surface Pro will be available in Switzerland on May 30th, priced as follows:

64 GB Surface Pro: CHF 959.-
128 GB Surface Pro: CHF 1‘059.-

The following accessories will be available at launch:

• Touch Cover at CHF 130.- (recommended retail price)

• Type Cover at CHF 140.- (recommended retail price)

• Wedge Touch Mouse Surface Edition at CHF 79.90 (recommended retail price)

WebMatrix 3 released, ready for free download.

TechPreacher — Thu, 02 May 2013 07:17:29 +0000

WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010, and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.

Today’s release includes a ton of great new features. You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video:

Get more in-depth information on http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/05/01/announcing-the-release-of-webmatrix-3.aspx

OneNote Windows 8 app updated with finger drawing support – Neowin

TechPreacher — Wed, 01 May 2013 08:02:32 +0000

It’s only been a few weeks since Microsoft has released an update for the free OneNote app for Windows 8. Today, the company released yet another update that adds a feature that will please many users who access OneNote on touchscreen devices like the Surface.

As described on the official Office blog, the new version now allows anyone to draw on the app just with their finger on a touchscreen, instead of using a pen or stylus. To access the feature, users simply tap on the app’s radial menu and select the Draw option.

via OneNote Windows 8 app updated with finger drawing support – Neowin.

Surface Pro coming to Switzerland before the end of May

TechPreacher — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:36:37 +0000

Surface Pro will launch before the end of May in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Surface Pro will launch in Korea, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, and Thailand before the end of June.Surface Pro is currently available in the U.S., Canada, and China.

via Expanding Surface Pro and Surface RT Availability.

This is great news!

Mañana Mail from Microsoft Research.

TechPreacher — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 11:46:03 +0000

Microsoft Research has released a plug-in for Outlook called Mañana Mail.

This little helper adds a “Send at 9:00” (or any predefined time) button to your mail that allows you to schedule your mail to be sent at the specified time the next day.

There is also an undo-feature that pops up for 10 secs when you send any message, allowing you to abort sending of the message or reschedule it to be sent “mañana”. How ofthen have I pressed “send” only to freak out about what I just did… Wrong To:, missing attachment or premature sending.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is ready for download.

TechPreacher — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 06:41:47 +0000

Via Soma Somasegar’s Blog

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) has been released and is now available for download.

Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market. The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.

Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 offers enhancements in the following areas.

Agile planning. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a wide range of capabilities focused on enabling agile teams, not only for development but also for planning. With VS2012.2, Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been augmented with an additional variety of features to help make it even easier for agile teams to do their planning, in particular around adapting to a team’s preferences and work styles.

Quality Enablement. This update introduces web-based access to the Test Case Management tools in TFS such that users can now author, edit, and execute test cases through the web portal. It also includes the ability to profile unit tests (with results across both the unit tests and the code under test surfaced through a single report), improved unit testing support for both asynchronous code and for interactions with the UI, unit testing support for Windows Phone 8 apps, unit test playlists that enable a subset of tests to be managed together, significant improvements around testing for SharePoint 2013 (web and load testing, unit testing with emulators, coded UI support, and IntelliTrace support), and more.

Windows Store development. VS2012.2 includes additional new features for Windows Store development, beyond the quality enablement capabilities already mentioned. For example, VS2012.1 included a new memory profiling tool for apps implemented with JavaScript, enabling developers to better understand the memory usage of their apps, to find and fix leaks, and so forth; for VS2012.2, we continued to invest in improved diagnostics for JavaScript apps with a new profiling tool that helps diagnose UI responsiveness issues and latency in visual updates. This release also incorporates the latest version of the Windows App Certification Kit.

Line-of-business development. Beyond improved support for building Windows Store apps, VS2012.2 also brings with it a wealth of new and improved capabilities for developing and modernizing line-of-business (LOB) apps. This includes the ability to use LightSwitch to easily build cross-browser and mobile web clients with HTML and JavaScript, with support to target SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. It includes support in Blend for SketchFlow, WPF 4.5, and Silverlight 5. And more.

Development experience. As developers spend so much of their time using the IDE, it’s important that Visual Studio provide as streamlined an experience as possible. Towards that end, we continually invest in new features and productivity enhancements to make the IDE the best and most productive environment possible, a trend we continue with VS2012.2. Code map has been updated with improved responsiveness as well as with debugger integration, providing a visual perspective on the relationships and dependencies in code being debugged. Symbol loading has been improved across both the profiling and IntelliTrace experiences. The Workflow designer now has an improved debugging experience. The XAML design surface in both Blend and the Visual Studio editor includes multiple performance and reliability improvements, in particular when loading large projects and when using third-party controls. The IDE’s light and dark themes are now joined by a third, blue theme. And more, such as including all of the improvements made available through ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2.

A more expansive list of what’s new in VS2012.2, including new features and bug fixes, is also available.

WebMatrix 3 Preview now available for download.

TechPreacher — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:48:11 +0000

Download page: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/next/

Key features include:

Your Companion for the Cloud

When you create local projects, you’ll be able to instantly get a companion website in Windows Azure without ever leaving WebMatrix. Using the Publish button, you can easily keep these sites in sync and save your changes to the cloud.

Remote Site Editing

Simply open your remote sites, make changes, and hit Save. The lightweight performance and full editing capability (including intellisense) make it feels like you are editing a local site!

Source Control with TFS

Team Foundation Service is Microsoft’s hot new source control service in the cloud. WebMatrix 3 makes it simple and fun to work with your code using TFS for any project in the cloud, or on site.

Source Control with Git

Plug into GitHub, CodePlex, and Team Foundation Service to start sharing your code with the world. Whether you’re a newcomer to git, or a seasoned pro, you’ll find all of the features you would expect in a powerful but easy to use tool.

Zombies!!! Or my journey into the next generation of the social board game.

TechPreacher — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 09:38:05 +0000

I have been a long time fan of the board game Zombies!!! where players have to escape a Zombie infested town. it’s an interesting mix of competing to reach a heli-pad first and co-operating to handle the crazy amounts of Zombies.

The downside of this game is the huge amount of material you need to play it and the time it takes to set up / tear down.

Now this game has been ported to a Windows 8 Store App that has all the aspects of the full board game and adds very atmospheric sound and graphics of the town, that can be viewed and zoomed in real time. It also adds very cool animations to the Zombie fight sequences which adds a lot to the overall atmosphere.

It still doesn’t alter the gameplay experience of the board game and we recently played it with 5 people on one tablet and had a great time in a epic battle that lasted for over three hours.

Computer opponents can of course take the place of missing players.

The downside is that the game is meant to be passed from player to player as the current player’s card hand is shown over the entire screen when activated, so it has to be concealed from the other players.

The player’s card hand.

Also, this would play real nice on a large tablet, seeing the action was sometimes a bit hard for all five of us as my 11-inch tablet was a bit small in the center of the table.

Adding new parts to the ever growing town.

A fully laid out town, Helicopter waiting on the far left in this case

A player plotting his move.

Fighting a Zombie with the fire axe from the fire station. Our winner was using this tool for this victory….