Discussions

11 seconds ago, itsnotabug wrote

wow. native ios development in visual studio on windows? what kind of sorcery is this?

I literally read that line and exclaimed "Woah" out loud!
We've used Monotouch for our iOS apps for about a year now, so I'm going to download and play with this stuff later today.
Hopefully they've also got the .net 4.5 style AWAIT/ASYNC stuff in there as well now.

Ian,

Have you thought about setting it up as an Azure Website using either Wordpress or Orchard? It's free (as long as you don't hit a certain amount of bandwidth) and you can be up and running in no time - (I run a few sites like this, including an Orchard site).

Plus, getting more Azure time for developers like us isn't going to hurt either!

3 hours ago, androidi wrote

-snip-

Maybe the keyboard piece could contain the main battery and you could detach it and plug in from the other side, such that the keyboard+main.bat. pieces keys would face the back of the part containing the display, and the keyboards underside would be the bottom of the device when used as a tablet. To facilitate this transition, there would be a smaller battery inside the display containing piece than supplies power while you are switching the keyboard+mainbattery to the other side (laptop->tablet form). I haven't really deeply thought about this though so there could be some issues I haven't anticipated. I just noted eg. Anandtech complaining about the rigidity when used legs crossed, if the keyboard contained the main battery this would distribute the weight better and provided more rigidity.

 

If you read the Reddit AMA that the surface team did a few days ago, there were hints of new accessories for the pro coming soon. They have redesigned the magnetic keyboard clip on the surface pro compared to the surface with additional connection points so it can do more - battery power was one of the things mentioned.
I would be shocked if there's not a future accessory of a full keyboard with additional battery in it to convert it into a more laptop like device with double the battery power.

The question then becomes, if Microsoft did release this, when would it satisfy some of the biased IT press, or would they find more reasons to dismiss Microsoft and worship Apple?!

13 minutes ago, brian.​shapiro wrote

*snip*

And my hope is if that happens eventually we might get rid of the distinction between Desktop apps and Metro apps, and just have both full screen versions and windowed versions of some apps.

Yes please!

Metro apps being able to be windowed and access to less 'gated' API calls for internal apps (saving files to more locations, some direct SQL/ADO.net calls and some additional stuff etc, and we will replace some of our internal business apps for metro ones. not saying there's anything wrong with current WinRT development for consumer apps, but it would be tricky to make some of our internal apps as productive in current WinRT methodologies.

Yup - what both Death and Ketch said. We've had similar issues using some of the Telerik code refactoring tools.
Uninstalling these tools sorted out the issue, but we used them quite extensively, so we tried adding more memory and upgrading to SSD's and that also sorted it out - at least for us.

I'd like to see in Windows 9 MUCH better support for Windows Store style apps for business and internal use.

Specifically:
Keep allowing us to produce Windows Store apps like we can today, using the walled garden approach/full screen/etc.

But also allow us in Visual Studio to mark in the manifest that the app is for internal or business use, not for distribution in the Windows Store. By checking that box, it tells Visual Studio that we have extended access to the Metro API's that are currently restricted in Windows Store apps, allows you to produce apps that can run windowed/resizable etc. Oh and make enterprise loading of 'Internal Modern Apps' as easy as it is with Winform apps , forcing enterprises to pay $30 per computer for a certificate so you can use your own developed metro apps on your own computers, inside your own enterprise is beyond ridiculous. A simple Click Once type install would be perfect.

Background to this is there's a few of our internal admin and merchandising apps we would love to move from Winform/WPF and redo using Metro technologies. But there's no way our users want them running full screen. We're also staying well away from the hell that is Microsoft's implementation of side loading Metro style apps for enterprises.

After that I'd just like to see Microsoft spending much more time getting the fine details right - especially on the consumer end.
I love my Surface, and since I got it I have only turned on my iPad to test my iOS apps. I'm going to be at Best Buy first thing Saturday picking up a Surface Pro, I think they're both great devices, especially for V1, but the apps that came with it should have clean knocked the ball out of the park.

Don't get me wrong, they're not bad, but things like the mail, music, photos apps feel rushed and not thought through properly. Photos app where you can't easily view the contents of the SD card full of photos you have just inserted - clear madness! etc. etc.
I know the internal apps will get better as time goes on, but that's not the point - they need to come out of the door running every single time. They really do need to make it easy and obvious to integrate your desktop, tablet, x-box so it all works seamlessly and effectively. They always get SO close and screw up the last bits...

This is typical Microsoft -they get 80% of the way there but miss the last 20%. As we say often here at my office - "The Microsoft XYZ looks awesome, I wonder how they'll screw this one up". Sad really, but I'm hopeful that we'll see more improvements with their renewed focus, especially now that the press seem a little less willing to let Apple get away with everything just because they're Apple.

Jan 09, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Harlock123n​ew wrote

@wsdotnet:

I noted and reported a specific scenario where Intellisense just gives up the ghost. Don't know if it might be affecting you. It seems that if the namespace arrangement of your project does not necessarily mirror the folder arrangement of the files themselves, Intellisense gets a bit wonky at least in those files that are in the folders where the namespace does not match...

Of course it compiles fine and did not have that issue in VS2010...

 

I think intellisense in VS 2012 is just very flaky generally in ways that it never was in 2010.

My whole team has moved over to 2012 and on the whole are very happy with it (except the new TFS window - whoever decided that combining all the TFS stuff into one panel that you constantly have to switch context of and also change the 'pending check in files' view from using checkboxes to having to drag between 'included changes' and 'excluded changes' needs beating with a long 2 x 4!). The amount of extra work and mistakes my team have made using this is very annoying.

Adding more memory to our PC's definitely helped with some early perf issues and we've moved to SSD's now to really make it fly.

But, intellisense is one area that needs work. It constantly just stops working - 2 or 3 times a day for most of us. Sometimes closing the source code file and reloading it helps, but most times it's a full restart of Visual Studio. We have noticed various scenarios that can induce this, most of which involve having syntax errors in your code - my guess is that there's some unhandled errors going on in the Intellisense functionality for certain scenarios that just crashes or disables intellisense, but that's just a guess. It may be a coincidence, but things seem to have become better since update 1, but it does still happen daily.

I'm sure Microsoft will get it fixed, but it's annoying nonetheless.

@Dr Herbie:

Hi Herbie,

I think the type of projects you work on can have a more than small influence on how reusable your code is.

For example, at my company, I run the development teams and we're a large e-commerce operation. So we have our main e-commerce sites, additional micro-ecommerce sites, internal merchandising/reporting apps etc, our main back end order processing apps as well as web api's for additional vendor apps and other things all of which talk to each other to a greater or lesser extent.

So, we have built layers of reusability across a lot of our software. Essentially we've thrown the most common things we do into a set of internal API's that are fully documented.
At the basic level we have things like simple helper classes that wrap up the most commonly used areas of ADO.net, caching of data, putting things into Azure blob storage, etc. The idea there is our developers can connect to one of our databases, call a stored procedure and get back a dataset with a single line of code and as long as that particular API is used, vs. doing it all manually through ado.net then we have consistency. We know that there's going to be try... catch... finally around the actual ADO.net work, that the correct data connection is used etc.

On top of that we have an additional layer for getting/putting data - so if the developer needs to get XX products in a group or do a keyword search for YYY items, then he/she calls the data request layer. This layer worries about if the data is already cached or not, if not then it knows where to get the data (database/blob storage/table storage/etc), put it into the cache for the correct amount of time and return it to the developer as the correct collection type expected and not just a dataset.

All of this allows us to make sure that we have standard consistent ways of doing our most common things - so the end developer doesn't have to worry as much about the runtime performance of getting their data - if there's a method in our API for getting what they need, then we've already done the performance work on it. It's more work up front, but it covers around 75% of what our developers need to do - so it's been worth it and allows them to focus on the other 25% and give more attention to Win UI/web design work.

As for my own personal projects - I have a fair bit of reusable classes I dip into as well for very common things I do a lot. Once again, data access, caching are covered there along with things like editing images, putting things into Azure blob storage and so on. I have a few websites, mobile apps and other things I work on in my free time, so code reuse makes sense for me. If I were just working on one large project only though, I probably wouldn't have so much reuse in there.

Richard.

14 hours ago, kettch wrote

I can't believe people actually buy grocery items from Amazon. Most of what's there ranges from 2-10x the brick-and-mortar price. Sometimes it's even more than that!

Even taking into account the meta-costs of shopping, I can't even begin to make it pencil out.

It's amazing what you'll spend to get treats that are no longer available to yourself locally!
As an ex-pat Brit living in the USA, I am used to spending 3-6 times the price for real Cadbury's chocolate (not the fake stuff made by Hershey under license here), Branston pickle, Heinz baked beans and yes, even Marmite.

Plus whenever I take a trip home, I always take an extra suitcase to haul back a load of loot.

Outside of geekdom people like us, I'm not sure there actually is confusion about Surface not running regular Windows programs, at least that has been my experience so far.

Plenty of people at my office (we have over 500 non technical employees at my place of work) have seen me using my surface in the breakroom and had a play. So far every single person who has looked at it gets that it's essentially a Microsoft iPad and doesn't run regular Windows apps. When I point out that it also runs full office then they regard that as a bonus.

Not one employee so far has expressed disappointment that the surface can't run regular apps. In fact, I know of at least 4 people who have played with my surface who then went out and bought one. I've even had employees I don't really know too well track me down because they've heard about surface and the fact that I have one and they want to have a play. In all my time here I don't think that has ever happened for a Microsoft product before. There genuinely does seem to be excitement among at least some of the general populous for surface that I haven't seen in a long time.

Of course, this is a very small sample size of people, but it makes me think that mostly the issue of not running regular programs is one that gets tech bloggers and technical people worked up way more than it does regular users.

11 minutes ago, wastingtime​withforums wrote

*snip*

Ah, come on. With a bit creative thinking (instead of political thinking, what MS did) you still could get the best of both worlds. How about a "professional mode" on WinRT devices: They can't run Win32 except for Office, but, you could unlock the ability - with huge scary "at your own risk" banners if needed.

Bang. You would have a kick-a$$ device for the absolute beginners, and for the pros. Problem solved.

Win8 could be great, yet MS took the most anal way with it possible, with every decision.

But we already pretty much have that (or will have). It's a surface pro or any other i386 tablet/touchscreen laptop.

A further issue standing in the way of having a desktop app unlock feature for regular surface is that it wouldn't be that easy - the regular windows apps would have to be compiled specifically for Arm. (We've had this mess before with Pocket PC and old style Windows phone - and believe me, as a former developer on those platforms I definitely don't want to have to go back to that again - building and testing one app for three different architectures was a giant pile of poo.

I think users would be more confused as to why their Windows copy of Photoshop won't run on their newly unlocked regular surface, rather than why their surface doesn't allow regular programs to work on it, at least based on my experience above...