Cloud, mobile and distributed software services have made “simulating production” impossible while production and release cycles are becoming more frequent. At the same time, communication and collaboration between development and operations has become a focal point for process improvement, spawning...

Shhhhhh.... we've heard that lots of .NET enterprise devs are dabbling in app development in their spare time. We caught up with Julius Agweny to find out about the Windows apps he's been building... What's your background? What did you do before building Windows Phone apps? I'm currently working...

We’re running some introductory style developer camps for Windows Phone 8 in the UK at the moment targeted at folks who have perhaps done some .NET in the past but haven’t built apps for the Phone yet and as part of those I work through some parts of a demo...( read more )

There’s a Windows 8 app that I have a minor involvement with that needs to be able to display PDF documents and also capture annotations (ideally ink) on those documents. I haven’t looked in great detail at how to display PDF documents (other than to ...read more

One of the ‘interesting’ things about a Windows Store application and the application lifecycle is that it forces architectural changes onto the way that you’d build an app. You can read the full details on the developer centre if you’ve not looked at ...read more

In a Windows 8 Store app, it’s pretty easy to put a dialog on the screen that allows the user of your app to save or open a file from/to somewhere. For example, here’s a simple piece of code which attempts to ask the user for a zip file and then will ...read more

I think I may have written something similar to this before but I got asked about loading images from the web and so I thought I’d write something down. It’s a pretty common scenario that you have an image control and you want that image control to display ...read more

If you’ve been along to one of my talks on Azure Mobile Services you’d have noticed that I’d been fairly careful in talking about Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 support in terms of the .NET class libraries for development on the client side which make ...read more

Mobile devices like phones, slates need operating systems that try and get the best out of the battery power that the device has while providing a fast, responsive experience for the user. The operating system itself can do a tonne of work in this area ...read more

A quick post to answer a question that I received from someone around adding a privacy page to a Windows Store app. Why would you need a privacy policy? If you take a look at the page; “Avoiding common certification failures (Windows)” You’ll find the ...read more

Hamish tweeted at me about a bug published on the Connect system; Now, naturally I’m sure that nothing is being ‘brushed off’ here but I thought that I recognised the scenario and the last time I looked at it I wasn’t at all sure that I’d figured out ...read more

I was toying around with some code to sum up file and folder sizes on the disk from a Windows Store app and I hit what was, for me, a little bit of a snag. My first attempt (extracted into a smaller snippet) looked something like this; FolderPicker picker ...read more

Ah JavaScript. If it isn't the most popular language in the world, it is certainly the most prevalent. It is the scripting language of choice for Web applications, a server-side scripting language for frameworks such as node.js, and more recently an alternative to C# and Visual Basic for developing Windows...

As Russell has blogged about, I was down at the London Windows Store App Developer Group this week (Tuesday) talking about Windows Azure Mobile Services as a backend as a service for your mobile apps regardless of platform ( but with specific support ...read more

Back in September, 2011 I went out to the BUILD conference where Microsoft first talked about Windows 8. At that conference (as I’m sure you know) the attendees got a Samsung Slate prototype device which is close to the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro . Being ...read more

There’s a number of photo viewing applications for Windows 8, including the built-in ‘Photos’ app and other apps on the Windows 8 Store like ‘Gallery HD’ and a few others. These are all good apps but, for my own use, none of them quite do what I want ...read more

In my ‘spare’ time I’ve been building a new Windows 8 Store App to go alongside my existing kwiQR app. Like kwiQR, this app is built in .NET and XAML but I think it took me a little more time than kwiQR. Also, like kwiQR it is to an extent based around ...read more

I know we’re all living here in the 21st century and we’re supposed to be paperless and everything but I still print quite a lot of stuff out. I’ve got one of those all-in-one printers on my desk here and I still probably send a few sheets to it every ...read more

One of the really powerful features of Windows Store apps is the system-provided ability to share data from one app to the other while keeping those 2 apps loosely coupled. Basics You can read up on it on the dev center ( under “Sharing and exchanging ...read more

I managed to get myself into a bit of a pickle with some code that I was writing and so I thought I’d share – there’s nothing here that’s particularly complex or earth-shattering but it is something that I spent a good 10 minutes trying to fix before ...read more

This one arose today and it’s something that I’d thought about a little before and I’d had a good read of this blog post in the past about working with async at the WinRT level rather than at the .NET level. Taking a simple example – let’s say that I ...read more

In a lot of the Windows 8 sessions that I’ve given around the UK I’ve been building out a simple demo app that searches on flickR for some photos. Over time I’ve come to build that app usually with some combination of the following; Build out the basics ...read more

I have a simple application in the Windows 8 Store – it’s called kwiQR and it’s a QR scanning application. There’s a whole bunch of services that the Store provides to my application but one that I haven’t seen a whole lot written about is the idea that ...read more

If you're a .NET developer (or just interested in finding out more about developing Microsoft applications), come along to the Visual Studio 2012 launch event in Reading! This event includes a presentation by Shanku Niyogi from Microsoft. Shanku leads the team responsible for testing Microsoft’s developer...

One of the things that I was looking at in my post on Azure Mobile Services the other day was the idea of creating a ‘virtual table’ or a view which represented a join across two tables. For example, imagine I have a new service mtaultyTest.azure-mobile ...read more