Microsoft has fixed a bug on its Kanban board that was introduced with its last Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 revision, which came out March 4.
According to this Team Foundation Server (TFS) blog posting, the bug accidentally re-ordered the first Kanban board column by closed date instead of stack rank. Since closed date is empty in that column, it randomized the items in the column. Ouch.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/15/20130 comments
Microsoft has made its Unified Communications Web API (UCWA) public, allowing Web developers to add capabilities to its Lync-based services. Toward that end, Microsoft has created a specific Lync Web Developer site, to educate devs about the API.
"UCWA is a REST API that exposes Lync Server 2013 Instant Messaging and Presence capabilities," says documentation on the developer site. UCWA is free, but to use it, you must have Lync on-premises.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/14/20130 comments
Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to get apps into its Windows Store and Windows Phone Store -- to the point of paying you to do it.
This blog by Jennifer Marsman spells out the details. Basically, you create an app and publish it to either app store, and Microsoft will pay you $100. The cash cutoff per dev is $2,000, so when you've written 20 apps, the money stops. Note that you can't create 20 apps for one store or the other -- you'd have to create 10 for each to get the full amount (it's limited to 10 apps per publisher ID; if you publish to both stores, you have two IDs, hence the $2,000).
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/12/20136 comments
The Spark never caught fire, and now, it's been crushed out of existence.
That may be a little overly dramatic, but it's essentially what happened to Microsoft's WebsiteSpark program. As Mary Jo Foley reported earlier, Redmond notified developers that the Spark is being quenched, as of today.
"The WebsiteSpark program will no longer be accepting new membership applications," is how the company put it on the Spark site. The good news is that membership benefits, like the Expression design tool and Visual Studio Professional, aren't being immediately phased out. They'll be available for another year, through March 2014.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/12/20130 comments
Microsoft released a new version of Visual Studio Tools for Git yesterday, that adds some welcome functionality.
The update is version 0.8.0.0 (so it's still in the preview stage). The two key additions are a "Resolve Conflicts" page and a new scheduled builds page that allows nightly builds.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/07/20131 comments
Three weeks ago, Microsoft released the third Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Visual Studio 2012 Update 2. It was called the "February Edition." So now that we're in March, that must mean it's time for the "March Edition."
That version -- the fourth CTP of Update 2 -- dropped yesterday. One big difference between this version and the previous is that it's a "go live" iteration, so you can put it on production servers. But, as Charles Sterling of the Visual Studio ALM team mentioned, there may still be fixes, changes or additions coming, so proceed accordingly. Since it's go-live, it will be supported by Microsoft.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/05/20130 comments
Windows Phone Developers continue to crank out apps, enriching the ecosystem that's so critical to the success of any mobile device. As of a few days ago, there were more than 130,000 Windows Phone apps available, according to this MSDN blog. About 15,000 of those were written specifically for Windows Phone 8, according to the author, Tareq Ateik.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/01/20130 comments
Hortonworks has partnered with Microsoft to provide the first Hadoop implementation geared specifically toward Windows Server.
Called the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), it "enables organizations to capture, process and share data in any format and at scale," according to a Hortonworks press release.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/28/20130 comments
Microsoft is making some changes to its .NET Framework documentation in the MSDN Library, and they look like changes for the better.
The changes were discussed by Brandon Bray on an entry on the .NET Framework blog. In response to developer feedback, Bray said that Microsoft has added a lot of data about the performance of .NET apps. "As a result, we've reworked the existing performance and reliability topic to include more performance guidance as well as links to performance analysis tools and technology-specific performance content," Bray wrote.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/21/20130 comments
It seems like a little thing, but could be something important for many developers: Microsoft has provided an update to its Git tooling for Visual Studio.
Microsoft Technical Fellow (if it's a woman, is she a Technical Lady, by the way?) Brian Harry blogged about the small update, which is mostly about three bug fixes. It doesn't sound like much, but they're likely to be important for many devs. From the blog:
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/12/20130 comments
Microsoft is really practicing what it preaches when it comes to Agile development. Fewer than two weeks after it released Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP 2, it's already finished the next sprint -- Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 CTP 3.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/12/201312 comments
Welcome to the new Visual Studio Magazine. If you've been here before, you know that things are radically different. If not, well, you picked the right time to visit.
As you can see, the site is much more graphical than it used to be, and much more colorful. In terms of navigation, we've moved it to the top of the site, rather than the old-style nav bar on the left.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 02/07/201319 comments