I am joined this week by Francis Cheung and Blaine Wastell of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team. They show us Prism for Windows Store Apps . This project provides guidance to developers who want to create a Windows Store business app using C#...

In this show, I am joined by Boris Scholl and Merwan Hade, Program Managers on the Visual Studio Azure Tools team. They provide a high level overview of the just announced new tools in Visual Studio for working with Azure Storage and performing diagnostics...

Starting with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has moved to providing updates to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals. The second such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 , is now available. In addition to bug fixes, Update 2 contains...

There's always new stuff to play with, whether a preview version of Windows, a CTP of Visual Studio, or a prerelease of an upcoming version of ASP.NET or Entity Framework. Getting ahead of the curve and learning early sounds great, but how do you do it...

In this show, John Papa and Pete Brown join me for a freewheeling discussion about building great apps. We cover a range of topics including your icon and tile, how you app looks in the Windows Store, how you display information in an app layout, gestures...

In this show, I am joined by Julie Lerman , the author of several highly acclaimed Entity Framework books. Julie shares a number of Entity Framework tips and tricks including: Overriding the DBContext SaveChanges method EntityFramework Power...

This post and episode 59 of my Visual Studio Toolbox show cover the same topic. Although I published this and the show on the same day, I wrote this first. When you switch from one Windows 8 app to another, Windows suspends the first app. The app stays...

In this episode, Karsten Januszewski joins me to talk about the latest version of the Visual Studio Achievements extension. Once you install this extension, you can unlock achievements based on things you do in Visual Studio. The latest version adds nineteen...

In this episode, I revisit the Windows 8 line of business app I wrote. This app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports—and for managers to view and approve or reject them. I first review the app as you last saw it...

In this episode , learn how to use Azure Mobile Services in a Windows 8 app. Robert shows how to create a new mobile service and an accompanying database as well as how to connect a Windows Store app to the mobile service. He then demonstrates how to...

Starting with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has moved to providing update to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals. The first such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 , is now available. In addition to bug fixes, Update 1 contains new...

The Productivity Power Tools is an extension pack that delivers powerful tools for improved productivity. With 1.5 million downloads, the Visual Studio 2010 version is the second most downloaded extension in the Visual Studio Gallery. The Visual Studio...

Mei Liang returns to the show this week to demonstrate the latest version of the Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio. This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 3500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including...

In episode 52 of my Visual Studio Toolbox show, I showed a sample Windows 8 app that uses SQLite. The app manages customers and their projects. In this post, I will show you how to build that app. [11/28/2012]: I uploaded the sample to the MSDN Code Samples...

In this episode, Matthew Johnson shows us the Visual Studio 2012 Color Theme Editor extension. With this extension, you can customize the Visual Studio 2012 color palette, choosing from several available themes or creating your own in order to customize...

IntelliTrace is a great tool. It records and traces your app's code execution and stores this information in a trace file. You can open up that trace file later on and figure out why your app isn't behaving as expected. This can save you huge amounts...

There have been a lot of recent developments in the Windows Azure world and those developments are what we've lately been covering on this show. In this episode, however, Dennis Angeline joins me as we take a step back and focus on how Visual Studio developers...

In this episode, Josh Twist and Nick Harris introduce us to Windows Azure Mobile Services . This makes it incredibly easy to connect a scalable cloud backend to your client and mobile applications. It enables you to easily store structured data in the...

In this episode, my colleague Pete Brown (Windows Developer Evangelist and XAML and Gadget Guy) shows us how to write Windows Store apps that use the .NET Micro Framework and advanced socket networking to talk to devices like robots. Very cool!

In this episode, Jim Nakashima and Saurabh Bhatia show us how to build Office and SharePoint apps using "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools and Visual Studio. If you have an Office 365 account, a browser, and "Napa" you can build apps for Office documents...

In this episode, Rocky Lhotka joins me to talk about CSLA.NET. CSLA is a software development framework that helps you build a powerful, maintainable business logic layer for Windows, Web, service-oriented, and workflow applications. Its primary goal...

In this episode, Beth Massi joins me to demonstrate some cool new features in LightSwitch. First, she shows how LightSwtich now has built-in support for OData. Then, she shows how to use the LightSwitch HTML Client Preview to build a cross-browser, mobile...

In this episode, I review a Windows 8 app I built. This line of business app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports, and for managers to view and approve or reject them. I am joined by Nadine Fox of Macadamian , the design...

In this episode—taped at TechEd North America—I chats with Billy Hollis, a consultant and trainer who is a widely recognized expert on XAML and design. We have a freewheeling discussion that focuses mostly on the design of Windows 8 apps....

In this episode, taped at TechEd North America, I chat with Jay Schmelzer, a Principal Director of Program Management at Microsoft, and John Papa, an independent consultant, speaker, and trainer for Pluralsight. Jay's team owns the business application...