Imagine platform-neutral, language-agnostic tools for writing code. Awesome, yes, but using tools like Visual Studio Code to compose your programmatic masterpiece will require a bit of rethinking.
Writing Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps that rely on inter-process communication is actually easy. Debugging and making them fault-tolerant is the tricky part, but it can be done with the AppServiceConnection for UWP and IoT Apps.
- By Lee Richardson
- 02/27/2017
Some questions can only be answered by organizing your data into groups and then finding groups that contain particular members or have particular properties.
Complex queries can be solved with a combination of simpler LINQ queries, anonymous objects and the Group/By/Into clauses. Using Group/By/Into will also give you the best possible performance for those complex queries.
Here's a trick to have Marten automatically deserialize JSON data only when you want it to.
- By Jason Roberts
- 02/16/2017
Version 1.9 of the online code editor sports a new look and some new tools to get developers up to speed quickly, including an Interactive Playground to test-drive some of the news features.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/15/2017
When you want to find all the objects that are missing a corresponding object, then you need the LINQ equivalent of an outer join. Here, step by painful step, is how to build that query.
Visual Studio 2017 is coming March 7. Microsoft Dev Evangelist Robert Green talks about the top new features, best improvements for mobile/Xamarin developers and more in this Q&A preview of his Visual Studio Live! session on the same topic.
With a pack of updates that amount to minor fixes following the release of Visual Studio 2017 RC3 a week ago, the Visual Studio team is now set to launch a feature-complete version within a month's time.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/09/2017
Microsoft offers a laundry list of developer-oriented features to get devs up to speed with the newest, feature-complete Windows 10 Creators Update slated for early 2017 release.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/08/2017
Your Xamarin Forms App needs one more little tweak, and that's to make it device-specific, so users don't freak out. Unlike the Apple tweak, the Android tweak takes a bit of work.
- By Wallace McClure
- 02/08/2017
If you decide on using an Enum with enumerated values in your Entity Framework class, here are the tools you'll need to make it work. But an enumerated value shouldn't be your first choice.
Here are two ways to save some typing when defining anonymous objects. One only works in Visual Basic, though.
Tizen is an open source app platform targeting mainly Samsung devices, from televisions, to phones, to wearables. Yep, there's a Visual Studio Tool for that, and it's on its second preview.
- By Michael Domingo
- 02/03/2017
Welcome to the 21st century, C#, now that case blocks support a variety of pattern-matching formats.
Find the patterns in your data sets using these Clustering.R script tricks.
- By James McCaffrey
- 02/01/2017
A roundup of a few more features: deprecated any type, literal datatypes, read-only properties, more!
The third release candidate of the venerable, all-encompassing and integrated Microsoft developer platform has been re-released after being pulled for a short time due to reports of developer machines crashing due to an odd installation issue.
- By Michael Domingo
- 01/27/2017
You want to keep an object around only as long as you have memory available, do ya? Then you need the WeakReference class.
Marten is PostgreSQL-based, so take advantage of relational features where it makes sense. Here's an example.
- By Jason Roberts
- 01/24/2017