How To


How To Drill Into Problems with Xamarin Insights

Here's a nifty tool that can help you get to the heart of issues in your mobile apps that aren't easy to track down.

Keep Track of What Your Code Really Did

When it's important to know what path your application took when processing data, a log of that path can be helpful. And, when you need to make a decision in your code based on an earlier decision, that internal path can make your code both simpler and easier to understand.

Share Information Among Asynchronous Processes Sans Locks

If you're creating an asynchronous application (and you should be) you'll be glad to know that .NET offers ways to share data that don't require you to lock up your application.

Chi-Square Tests Using R

R is the perfect language for creating a variety of chi-square tests, which are used to perform statistical analyses of counts of data. Here's how, with some sample code.

Build Apps That Talk with the Microsoft Band

The Microsoft Band is one of the most sophisticated fitness and health trackers available today. In this article, Nick walks through building a Windows Phone app that can communicate with it.

Tips and Tools for Making Accessibility a Developer Priority

Web and application accessibility isn't just a nice thing to do. It makes your work available to a bigger world of customers ... and may be a legal requirement for some projects.

Creating Type-Safe Structures (and Dictionaries) with Tuples

When classes are more structure than you need, tuples let you specify simple type-safe aggregates of other data types. They'll also let you create a dictionary collection…but it won't be type-safe.

Slimming iOS and Android Pics for Mobility

Pictures are worth a thousand words, and some can be storage-hungry, which can be bad for mobile apps and sites. Here's a trick for slimming them down.

Create Sophisticated Asynchronous Applications with BlockingCollection

The basic functionality of the BlockingCollection makes creating asynchronous applications easy to do. But you need to use some of the BlockingCollection's other tools to create applications that handle typical real-world problems.

Functional Programming, the .NET Way, Part 2

We looked at the basic features of functional programming with Visual F#. In this second part, we take it a bit farther and look at creating anonymous functions, pattern matching, and other features of F#.

Customize Authentication with ASP.NET Identity

ASP.NET Identity is a simple but robust framework allowing you to easily inject custom authentication logic into your applications.

Functional Programming, the .NET Way

The functional programming paradigm, which has been around for decades, has never gone out of style. In this two-part series, we look at Microsoft's implementation, Visual F#.

ServiceStack and Razor Forms

ServiceStack moves to a complete Web application framework with support for Razor forms.

Create Simple, Reliable Asynchronous Apps with BlockingCollection

Dividing your application up into simple processes will make it easier to maintain and extend. Using BlockingCollection to communicate between those processes will let you make those processes run asynchronously.

Building UWP Apps Using Xamarin.Forms

One of the hardest challenges of mobile development is how to minimize the cost of building the same application for multiple platforms. Nick shows how to use Xamarin.Forms to develop a cross-platform application that also targets the Universal Windows Platform.

Fundamentals of T-Test Using R

Linear regression was easy, right? Now, let's check out t-test analysis using R.

Simplify Your Applications with Asynchronous Processes

With the right tools, creating an asynchronous application can give you not only a more responsive application that makes better use of your multi-core computer, it can also make your application simpler. Really, asynchronous applications should be your default choice.

Exploiting TypeScript Arrays

TypeScript doesn't have the rich set of native collection classes that you're used to in the .NET Framework -- instead, it has just arrays and tuples. Fortunately, you can do quite a lot with them.

Handling Lists of Selectable Items in ASP.NET MVC

You want to give the user the ability to select one (or more) items from a table. It's not as easy in ASP.NET MVC as you might like... but it's not awful, either.

Linear Regression with R

Now that you've got a good sense of how to "speak" R, let's use it with linear regression to make distinctive predictions.

8 Rich Text Editors for Interactive Web Content

Web pages aren't read-only anymore. These rich text editors let users post content of all kinds, edit content and even write collaboratively within the browser.

Supporting Multiple String Formats from Your Class

Developers (including you) benefit when you provide a string representation of your class. By implementing IFormattable, you can take control of this representation and provide some flexibility. Besides, if you don't provide one, the Microsoft .NET Framework will provide a useless one for you.

Xamarin 4 Improvements: Worth Upgrading?

Like a mobile force, Xamarin 4 awakens. So upgrade now, especially if you're a Visual Studio developer and building apps for iOS.

Building Universal Windows Apps for Universal Performance

With the Universal Windows Platform, developers can target a wide variety of devices with a single application, but it comes with performance ramifications. We look at ways to make those apps more efficient and highly performant.

What's New with .NET Framework 4.6, Part 1: API Updates

For this first in a series, Eric Vogel checks out the new IReadOnlyCollection<T> Stack<T> and Queue<T> implementations in .NET Framework 4.6.

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