Posts

Robert is joined this week by Francis Cheung and Blaine Wastell of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team. They show us Prism for Windows Store Apps. This project provides guidance to developers who want to create a Windows Store business app using C#, XAML, the Windows Runtime, and modern development...

In this show, Robert is joined by Boris Scholl and Merwan Hade, Program Managers on the Visual Studio Azure Tools team. They provide a high level overview of the just announced new tools in Visual Studio for working with Azure Storage and performing diagnostics. These tools are available as part of the...

Starting with Visual Studio 2012, Microsoft has moved to providing updates to Visual Studio on a regular cadence of shorter intervals. The second such update, Visual Studio 2012 Update 2, is now available. In addition to bug fixes, Update 2 contains new features in four areas: agile planning,...

There's always new stuff to play with, whether a preview version of Windows, a CTP of Visual Studio, or a prerelease of an upcoming version of ASP.NET or Entity Framework. Getting ahead of the curve and learning early sounds great, but how do you do it? You don't want to install these early bits on your...

In this show, John Papa and Pete Brown join Robert for a freewheeling discussion about building great apps. They cover a range of topics including your icon and tile, how you app looks in the Windows Store, how you display information in an app layout, gestures, design, and more.

In this show, Robert is joined by Julie Lerman, the author of several highly acclaimed Entity Framework books. Julie shares a number of Entity Framework tips and tricks including:

• Overriding the DBContext SaveChanges method [02:00]
• EntityFramework Power Tools [19:00]
• Configuring 1:1 Relationships...

In this show Robert discusses managing state in Windows Store apps. When a user switches away from an app in Windows 8, Windows suspends the app. When the user switches back to the app, it looks like it was running all along. Windows can terminate a suspended app if it needs to free up memory for other...

In this episode, Karsten Januszewski joins us to talk about the latest version of the Visual Studio Achievements extension. Once you install this extension, you can unlock achievements based on things you do in Visual Studio. The latest version adds nineteen new achievements oriented toward Windows Store...

In this episode, Robert revisits the Windows 8 line of business app he wrote. This app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports—and for managers to view and approve or reject them. Robert first reviews the app as you last saw it and then discusses what changes he made to...

In this episode, learn how to use Azure Mobile Services in a Windows 8 app. Robert shows how to create a new mobile service and an accompanying database as well as how to connect a Windows Store app to the mobile service. He then demonstrates how to query, add, update, and delete items in the database....