Today’s a huge day for Microsoft, for the massive number of users of Windows worldwide and for software developers of every flavour as the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 was announced and shown at Barcelona Mobile World Congress and made available...

Visual Studio 11 Beta is now available for download . Take a look at what's new in Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 Beta on MSDN and for a more in-depth discussion, see Jason Zander’s discussion of the Beta release . The focus on streamlining...

Do you think building business applications requires hours of effort and big development teams? This course introduces Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch, the simplified, self-service development tool that enables you to build those business applications...

Did you know that Visual Studio 2010 introduced new test tools, in addition to the existing web and load tests, in order to drive closer integration between testers and developers? Microsoft Test Manager is a new environment specifically for testers,...

Today we also announced the availability of a beta of the much anticipated Skype app for Windows Phone. It looks absolutely awesome. I’m installing it now. Get the beta from Marketplace here .    

Today we also announced the availability of a beta of the much anticipated Skype app for Windows Phone. It looks absolutely awesome. I’m installing it now. Get the beta from Marketplace here      ...( read more ) ...read more

Some significant announcements today at Mobile World Congress . Windows Phone will soon be available to almost 60% more potential customers through a combination of entering 23 additional markets and optimising the OS to run on lower-cost hardware (reducing...

Hot off the press from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the news that Windows Phone will be rolling out across another 23 markets and the engineering team have done the work to optimise Windows Phone OS to run on lower-cost hardware. This means devices...

This video provides an overview of how the full software development lifecycle is supported by Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server 2010. It covers requirements, planning, architecture, development, code quality, version control, automated build...

by Gemma Darracott We recently embarked on a proof of concept project to create a business web application using some of the latest technologies such as Windows Azure and HTML5 and see if we could combine these technologies with great design to...

by Steph Cook Addison Lee is London’s largest minicab company with more than 3,000 cars across the capital. Traditionally, booking a minicab meant a slightly frustrating phone call and then waiting a random period of time before a driver honked...

When you think about the monetization (awful word!) of apps for the phone, you can narrow it down to either: The app is free – it was fun building it, I don’t want to be rich. The app is paid for and entirely standalone. It doesn’t rely on any service...

I’ve just spotted that the Patterns and Practices guidance for Windows Phone on MSDN has been updated this month. This includes the use of the MVVM pattern as well as designing for testability (see Sara’s post from earlier today for more details ) and...

by David Britch Introduction The purpose of this technical article is to demonstrate how to build a testable Windows Phone application that consumes accelerometer data. The approach adopted here for building a testable Windows Phone application...

Over the past few weeks we have run 2 free Windows Azure Bootcamps in the UK: one in London, one in Bristol. London etc.venues at Drummond Gate were our hosts in London and the Mercure Holland Hotel in Bristol. 55 delegates turned up to each event...

Is it me or is the rhythm (or “cadence” if you want to be trendy ) of the “Building Windows 8” blog posts starting to increase as we head towards the Windows 8 Consumer Preview being made available next week? I use a number...

Join us on an express tour of Windows Azure from newcomer, experienced developer to an architect’s perspective in March. In this series of the UK Tech.Days Online Conference, we will take you through a guided journey to understanding Windows...

Over the weekend a video of Scott Guthrie talking about ASP.NET MVC 4 went online , there are many new features but In particular I'm interested in the Web API. Over the past few months I have been doing a lot of HTML5 work and for my backend services...

With the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 to be available for download by the end of February, it’s good to keep a close eye on the posts on the “ Building Windows 8 ” official blog and it’s companion - “ Windows Store for developers...

With the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 to be available for download by the end of February, it’s good to keep a close eye on the posts on the “ Building Windows 8 ” official blog and it’s companion - “ Windows Store for developers...

With the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 to be available for download by the end of February, it’s good to keep a close eye on the posts on the “ Building Windows 8 ” official blog and it’s companion - “ Windows Store for developers...

The W3C co-chair got up on his soap box last week and declared that WebKits power is causing an Open Web crisis: W3C co-chair: Apple, Google power causing Open Web crisis Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) enables you to do AJAX requests across different...

With the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 to be available for download by the end of February, it’s good to keep a close eye on the posts on the “Building Windows 8” official blog. A lot of people I’ve spoken to about Windows 8...

With the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 to be available for download by the end of February, it’s good to keep a close eye on the posts on the “Building Windows 8” official blog. This recent post on improving power efficiency for applications...

by Mike Ormond Excellent write up from ScottH that details how he built his first Windows Phone app and includes links to lots of great libraries / tools / frameworks to accelerate the development process (and even create a website for your app). “...