Visual Studio

At Xamarin Evolve 2013, I caught up with Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza after his keynote. It's been a while since I last chatted with Miguel, so it was great to catch up. Clearly, he and team have been very busy pushing Mono forward and building Xamarin—a new technology that enables developers to…

Code Digger is a lightweight version of Pex that allows you to explore public .NET methods in Portable Libraries directly from the Visual Studio 2012 code editor. It's a highly simplified and nifty way to leverage the power of Pex and Z3, one of the…

NuGet support for C++ projects in Visual Studio has arrived in NuGet version 2.5! This has been an elusive feature for VC++ developers so we are thrilled it's here. It's been around for about a month now so we figured we'd go talk to one of the developers who helped make it happen,…

This week on Channel 9, Mark and Dan discuss the week's top developer news, including; [01:07] Introducing a new Windows Dev Center experience, Windows Dev Center [02:25] Windows 8.1 at //build (Windows Keeps Getting Better) (Brandon LeBlanc) [03:25] Channel 9 Highlight: Programming Windows with…

Async involves some new concepts. They're not difficult; just unfamiliar. Over the past year Lucian Wischik has been watching how people use async/await in C# and VB. This series distils out the three top async patterns and anti-patterns. Tips: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and…

Today's "I don't know what to call it" Wednesday project is one that's just a little different, not a game or anything, but something I've not seen mentioned too much recently. Visual Studio has these cool things to help you in your debugging, called Visualizers. They help you see beyond…

Async Tip #1: Async void is for top-level event-handlers only, and event-like things. Don't use it elsewhere in your code. Slides are available on Lucian's blog. Async void is a "fire-and-forget" mechanism: the caller is unable to know when an async void has finished, and the…

Async Tip #2: It's crucial to distinguish CPU-bound work (should be done on threadpool) from IO-bound work (which needn't). You can download slides for this talk from Lucian's blog. I remember reading an old Android dev blog post. It said: "1. A good practice in creating responsive…

Async Tip #3: You can wrap events up in Task-returning APIs and await them. This can dramatically simplify code. Slides and source code are available on Lucian's blog. This video introduces a new pattern for dealing with events: you can await them! Now why would you want to do that? Well,…

Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac is a hypervisor-based virtualization solution that makes it easy to run any number of operating systems inside separate windows on your Mac desktop. For developers, this means you can simultaneously run Xcode on Mac and Visual Studio on Windows 8. The Parallels window…