The 2014 Build conference has been surprising. If you'd told me before the show started that the major product announcements would be updates to Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 -- in other words, no new products at all -- I would've yawned and said that the only thing developers had to look forward to was the amazing swag Microsoft gives out at this show.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 04/04/20140 comments
Mary Jo Foley's reporting that Microsoft may be either buying tool-maker Xamarin outright, or making a big investment in the company. It's all speculative at this point, but this is an idea that just makes too much sense.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 03/18/20140 comments
In the spirit of "shameless Top-10 year-end articles that you know you'll click on because it has a number in it and you can't help yourself," I herewith present the 10 most popular Visual Studio Magazine articles from 2013. These are the ones you liked best.
10: Modeling Neuron Behavior in C#. This was the debut of Dr. James McCaffrey's "Neural Network Lab" column, a high-level yet accessible tour of complex software design.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 12/24/20130 comments
Looks like the idea of making CodeLens, by all accounts a killer feature in Visual Studio 2013, available below the Ultimate level is picking up steam.
I wrote about this recently, pleading with Microsoft to make the feature available at the Professional level, since that's the version the vast majority of most developers use. It would appear that the idea of downstreaming CodeLens is gaining a lot steam in the dev community. Visual Studio UserVoice is a feedback site for Microsoft's army of software devs. What happens is that a developer makes a public suggestion on something he or she would like to see. Then the community votes on it. The more votes, the more the community throws its cyber-weight behind a proposal.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 12/10/20130 comments
So, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Android has more than 80 percent of the smartphone market for the first time ever -- 81 percent, to be exact.
Yawn.
I'm not surprised by that, as Android has been a runaway locomotive for years now in this space. And Apple has -- for now -- maintained its hold on second place, with iOS at 12.9 percent market share for the third quarter of 2013. Apple might be a bit uneasy; although it sold more phones than ever, its slice of the market is shrinking. That's not news, either.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 11/12/20130 comments
CodeLens is perhaps the best new feature of Visual Studio 2013.
Too bad you'll never get to use it.
That is, unless you have Visual Studio Ultimate. Those of you with Visual Studio Professional -- in other words, most of you -- or even Visual Studio Premium aren't eligible for the awesomeness that is CodeLens.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 10/29/20130 comments
I'm excited to announce the refresh of a previous column, which is under new management and a new name. Those of you who still work in the native code world will be delighted to know that today marks the debut of a new C++ column: Modern C++.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 08/06/20130 comments
Microsoft has updated its Power Tools, a suite of enhancements for Team Foundation Server (TFS) projects, to work with Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/08/20130 comments
The third update of Visual Studio 2012 has progressed to Release Candidate (RC) stage, and is now available as a "go-live" version, meaning you can put it on a production server.
The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of VS 2012, Update 3 was released last month. That iteration wasn't for production. This RC version of Update 3 is for both Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server (TFS), Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry wrote on his blog.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/08/20130 comments
Microsoft has updated the HTML client runtime in LightSwitch, its lightweight Web development tool. "Runtime Update 1", as it's called, is a bug and compatibility fix for the latest versions of jQuery, jQueryMobile and datajs.
The update adds support for jQueryMobile 1.3 and jQuery 1.9, according to this blog posting from the LightSwitch team. "Embracing the mobile-first, instead of mobile-only, approach was the main focus of this release," the team states.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/07/20130 comments
Microsoft's released a new .NET Framework managed library to help with debugging and crash dump analysis.
It's a beta release, and is called Microsoft.Diagnostics.Runtime (abbreviated to ClrMD -- MD for "Memory Diagnostics"). It's available through the NuGet package manager. It works similarly to the SOS Debugging Extensions. With it, you can write automated crash analysis and automate common debugger tasks.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/03/20130 comments
Microsoft has released WebMatrix 3, its lightweight development tool for quickly building Web sites. The key features of the new version are Windows Azure integration, source control with Git and Team Foundation Services (TFS), and remote editing.
Microsoft's Scott Guthrie made the announcement on his blog. There was apparently some confusion on the official release date of WebMatrix 3; a speaker at the VSLive! conference in March said it would debut on April 4, and ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported that it was available on April 3 (she had updated that post, listing the release date as April 4 as well). But whatever the cause of the delay, it's available now.
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Posted by Keith Ward on 05/02/20130 comments