MSDN UK Team blog

//Build/2013 Conference See what's next • Learn from our engineers • Network with your peers

Lee Stott — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:37:34 GMT

The right content for your role There are hundreds of thousands of topics in the Dev Center, http://dev.windows.com and http://dev.windowsphone.com . We know in any organisation discoverability and sharing of content is critical to success. So why not...(read more)

Are you a true mobile developer? Do you develop apps for all platforms iOS, Windows Phone, Android or the web?

Lee Stott — Fri, 17 May 2013 13:31:00 GMT

This week I had a very interesting meeting with Kim Blake from UKIE . Kim is a Next Gen Skills Talent Development Coordinator, and part of her role is to simply understand and explain the skills educators and game developers need to ensure that the maximise...(read more)

Cinder C++ now supports Windows 8 Store Apps/Games

Lee Stott — Thu, 16 May 2013 10:16:00 GMT

Cinder is a cross platform framework for C++ design engineering. In order to run and Apple, Android and Windows devices prior to Windows 8, the rendering libraries leveraged OpenGL as the open source, cross platform solution. Even though DirectX has...(read more)

New look for Windows Developer Center and Design.windows.com

Lee Stott — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:28:00 GMT

So What is NEW at Design.windows.com ? A new UX Checkilist Checklist is a welcome addition to design.windows.com. It can empower designers when self-evaluating their app so they can better understand what is required and prioritize when they...(read more)

Poll of the Fortnight: Community Feedback

Sarah Lamb — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT

<a href="https://saraallison.wufoo.com/forms/q7p3r7/">Fill out my Wufoo form!</a>

Microsoft Touch Develop is looking for adventurous Windows Phone 8 mobile app creators.

Lee Stott — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:01:00 GMT

Do you have a device running the latest Windows Phone 8 operating system? Are you a fan of the TouchDevelop app that enables you to create apps directly ON your mobile device? Do you love to try out the latest apps, and give feedback about what...(read more)

Rapid2D v1.3 C++ DirectX Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Game Dev has never been better!

Lee Stott — Tue, 14 May 2013 11:29:00 GMT

Rapid2D v1.3 introduces Rapid2D Pro which allows you to deploy to Windows Phone ! Now you can release your game onto desktop, tablets and mobiles with a single click! Y ou now have greater control over your game’s objects ; adjust the finer...(read more)

The Windows 8 apps opportunity

Sarah Lamb — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:30:00 GMT

Businesses can empower employees, create new business opportunities and boost developer productivity by developing apps for Windows 8. See how leading companies including IHS, British Telecom and John Lewis are taking advantage of the latest Windows technology.

When you’re running dozens of big events in different locations around the world, you need an efficient way to register visitors and analyse attendance. So IHS, a 1.3 billion-dollar-a-year publishing and information company, decided to build a tablet application for its events team.

However, an early version for the Apple iPad couldn’t deliver the necessary functionality – it was difficult to export attendance data to Excel for analysis and it was hard to deploy the application to devices as each system needed individual configuration.

So IHS turned to LAN2LAN to build a system that would run on Microsoft’s Surface Pro Windows 8 tablet. It not only streamlined event registration and lead capture for IHS but also exemplified everything that’s cool and good about Windows 8 app development:

· Putting business data into the hands of people who need it

· Empowering people with elegant easy-to-use apps

· Delivering the best of both worlds: touch-enabled tablets and the manageability and compatibility that comes with Windows 8

· Boosting developer productivity with familiar, powerful tools

· Creating new sales opportunities for existing services via the Windows Store or sideloading directly to devices using existing management tools

Delivering data

Toyota Racing Development built a trackside app to improve the speed and accuracy of communications between the race car driver and the racing team crew chief. Instead of trying to work with a conventional laptop, drivers can use easily use a Windows 8 tablet to compare times and lap performance.

Empowering people

As Toyota has shown, giving the right information to the right people at the right time can give you a powerful competitive edge. What works for car racing can also work for salespeople, service engineers, executives and anyone else who needs information at their fingertips.

Imagine, for example, an app for financial services. Rather than typing into a computer behind a screen, in that intimidating way perfected by airline check-in clerks, an advisor could work together with a client to fill out a mortgage application or an insurance form on a tablet. Or a store manager could have a tablet with apps that show stock levels, staff rosters and other critical information; not in the office but on the shop floor.

Doctors are already using Windows 8 apps to simplify their paperwork, share results with patients and access patient records during their rounds. The Health Choices app is available for free on the Windows Store and gives people in England information about NHS services, medical conditions and access to their own medical records using Microsoft HealthVault.

Delivering the best of both worlds

Many businesses want to embrace new ways of working such as increasing mobility or ‘bring your own device’. Other businesses are looking to refresh their PC fleets and upgrade to the latest devices and operating systems. The challenge in both cases is to reap the benefit of increased productivity while retaining an appropriate level of security and control.

Windows 8 apps can help reconcile these requirements. Companies can deploy apps via the Windows Store or sideload them using Group Policies, like any other Windows application. In addition, IT departments can manage Windows 8 devices using the same tools they use for Windows 7.

British Telecom (BT) used Windows 8 to equip thousands of its field agents with easy-to-use apps to manage their workload. The agents use the apps, which run on Panasonic Toughbooks, to quickly close a job or find out where their next assignment is. This allowed BT to upgrade their operating system to the latest version while retaining compatibility with legacy applications running in Windows.

Boosting developer productivity

As LAN2LAN found, developing apps for Windows 8 is very efficient. They took the proprietary iOS application and rebuilt the functionality using industry standards including HTML5 and frameworks including jQuery Mobile and then wrapped it up in a Windows 8 app, optimising the interface and graphics for Microsoft Surface Pro’s Full HD display.

By offering a choice of development approaches, Microsoft makes it easier for companies to leverage their existing resources, build on the current skills of their development team and tap into open source and industry standard technology. The benefits are faster development, compatibility with other systems, including Windows and Office applications, and access to a larger base of qualified developers without retraining.

Creating new sales opportunities

As well as applications for employees, you can also make Windows 8 apps available to consumers and customers. For example, John Lewis has created a ‘Things we love’ app showcasing a weekly selection of hot products. It looks great and provides a new channel to market based on the company’s existing ecommerce platform.

Apps that build on Windows 8’s modern design look amazing and give customers an elegant and intuitive interface. Because the market is less congested, it’s easier to shine on the Windows Store and Microsoft offers up to 80% revenue sharing (compared with 70% with Apple or Google) for non-free apps.

Next steps

Whether you’re looking to modernise your application portfolio, empower your employees with touch-enabled tablets, upgrade to Windows 8 or supply apps direct to customers via the Windows Store, apps on Windows 8 represent an important opportunity for your business.

More information

· See apps case studies, examples, design tips and more: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/apps

· Download Windows 8 developer information and tools: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/apps/br229516.aspx

· See how the public sector is using Windows 8 in our free ebook: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukgovernment/archive/2013/03/28/public-sector-windows-8-apps-ebook.aspx

Free One Day Scrum with Team Foundation Server Training 2012 Course

Sarah Lamb — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:35:05 GMT

Our friends at our partner RippleRock are running a free one day hands-on training course on running scrum with Team Foundation Server 2012. The course will be held 24th May 2013 at the Microsoft Campus in Reading. Sign up can be found here: https://msevents...(read more)

Guest Post: The Visual Studio and TFS 2012 DevOps Story

Sarah Lamb — Mon, 13 May 2013 09:00:00 GMT

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 a trend in software development expressed by the term Development Operations (DevOps).

Companies recognize that they need to provide continuous quality and eliminate waste in their software development process. This is especially important as the focus shifts from long QA/user acceptance testing cycles to rapid identification and resolution of issues in production, and deployment of the fixed application back into production. This rapid identify-fix-deploy loop requires adoption of new tools and processes to be successful.

There are complimentary “devops” tools shipping in Visual Studio and TFS 2012 that help reduce cycle times and continuously improve quality. Let’s look at them:

SCOM Application Performance Monitoring

Use SCOM Application Performance Monitoring if you own Microsoft’s System Center Operations Manager 2012 and you have internal applications you wish to monitor such as Internet Information Services (IIS)-hosted .NET applications. The .NET Application Performance Monitoring (APM) template in System Center Operations Manager 2012 allows you to get details about application performance and reliability that can help you pinpoint root causes of incidents. You specify settings, the types of events to collect, the performance goals to measure, and servers to monitor and .NET Application Performance Monitoring reveals how applications are running. You can see how frequently a problem is occurring, how a server was performing when a problem occurred, and the chain of events related to the slow request or method that is raising exceptions. SCOM is a great solution when you want to decrease the mean time to repair an issue in production measured in minutes or hours.

PreEmptive Analytics

Use PreEmptive Analytics for Team Foundation Server (PA/TFS) if you have a broader set of applications you wish to monitor that are:

· Enterprise, B2B, or B2C: In and across enterprise, partner, & client domains.

· Heterogeneous: .NET, Java, JavaScript, Windows Native including WP, Android, and WinRT.

· Distributed: Client/Server, Mobile, Azure, hosted inside and across firewalls and domains.

PreEmptive Analytics allows you to see, as they happen, the errors your users are experiencing. By aggregating and analyzing exceptions reported by your production applications and automatically creating TFS work items, PA/TFS gives you access to incident data right where you need it – in Visual Studio, TFS Web, and Reporting Services. The work items include the exception type, message, full stack trace, the contents of any inner exceptions, and the list of all assemblies loaded at the time of the exception, as well as the number of such exceptions received. With a small amount of additional configuration, you will also be able to see unique instance identifiers (such as the serial number of each application instance that experienced the exception) as well as comments about the error and contact information, if provided by the end user. PreEmptive Analytics is always on (like Radar) and supports a broad set of “real world” scenarios efficiently, securely and reliably. PreEmptive Analytics is a great solution if you want to decrease the mean time to fix an issue in production measured in days or weeks.

Below is a screenshot of PreEmptive Analytics inside Visual Studio. Three issues are shown. In this specific example, when a problem occurs for a user with a higher Service Level Agreement or Priority the work item severity is marked as critical.

Intellitrace

Intellitrace is more like a CAT scan. It is able to provide “deep dives” into complex systems and is well suited when a problem is already known but not fully understood. As an example, if you are alerted to an issue in production with PreEmptive Analytics and you don’t have enough information yet to fully solve the problem, you could use Intellitrace to further dig in. To do this, start IntelliTrace data collection, reproduce the problem, and then stop collection. You can take the resulting log that IntelliTrace creates, open it in Visual Studio 2012 Ultimate, and analyze it. Intellitrace is great for debugging errors that are hard to reproduce or that happen outside Visual Studio, for example, in production or other environments.

DevOps tools and services improve software quality and reduce time to resolution by generating actionable bugs from deployed software. Visual Studio and TFS 2012 include three complimentary tools that help you dramatically reduce time for solving production errors. Take advantage of these and start building better software, faster.

Want to find out more about how to do this? Why not sign up to the Webinar happening later this month?

Gabriel Torok, CEO PreEmptive Solutions

Gabriel Torok is the CEO of PreEmptive Solutions. A lite version of PreEmptive’s Dotfuscator tool has been bundled with Microsoft’s Visual Studio since 2003. And a light version of PreEmptive Analytics is also bundled in Microsoft’s Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server 2012. As a result, he has an outsiders “insider” view of Microsoft’s developer division. He has authored two technical books and has been a speaker on various topics related to software at many national and international conferences including Software Developer’s Conference, SD Best Practices Conference, TechEd, VSLive and others. Gabriel has a passion for software development and is the current chairman of the Northeast Ohio Software Association.