TypeScript Templates for Windows 8

As soon as I saw Anders’ talk on TypeScript, I fell in love. If you’re not familiar with it, TypeScript adds a lot of necessary features to JavaScript to make it suitable for building real apps, while still “compiling down” to JavaScript to maintain JS’s single biggest advantage: ubiquity. Further, TypeScript has tooling inside Visual Studio so that it works nicely with a wide variety of Windows

Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 and Data Visualization, Oh My!

This month is a big one for Microsoft developers. Windows 8 will be generally available in stores on a variety of form factors starting on 10/26, with the BUILD conference following closely in the last week of October. This on top of the Visual Studio 2012 RTM earlier this summer and a Windows Phone 8 release coming soon, and there's a lot going on if you're a Windows developer.If you've read

Telerik’s evolving platform guidance for .NET developers

Telerik often gets questions from its customers about which of the multitude of app frameworks that Microsoft provides for .NET developers that they should pick. WinForms? WPF? Silverlight? ASP.NET? What’s the right solution for their problem? The answer is always the same: it depends.Unfortunately, that’s not very helpful, so last year a set of the best and brightest that Telerik has to offe

Telerik Loves Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 RTMs!

Yesterday’s release of Visual Studio 2012 and Blend for Visual Studio 2012 marks the beginning of a new era. In some ways, VS2012 and Blend are incremental releases, adding even better support for building enterprise and consumer apps and services for the desktop and the web. However, in one very important way, the release of VS2012 and Blend, together with the release of Windows 8 earlier this

June, 2012, Florida: Best TechEd Ever!

This month in Florida is going to be my 2nd TechEd ever and I’m sure the best by far. The number of things I get to do is staggering:*I get to work the Telerik booth for my first big show. We’ll be launching not one but two completely new Telerik products. Fun! *Since the Telerik Ultimate Collection has been nominated for the Best of TechEd, I get to give a dead-run 15-minute demo to the j

Microsoft + ASP.NET + Open Source: This Time for Sure!

_Bullwinkle: “Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat!”__Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!”__Bullwinkle: “This time for sure!”_In the last week or so, I’ve heard mixed reactions to Scott Hanselman’s eye-popping announcement that, in addition to ASP.NET MVC that is already open source, that Microsoft is releasing ASP.NET Web API and Razor as open source as well. Further, and

Building Windows 8 Apps with JavaScript

Brandon Satrom and I are writing a book on Metro/JS apps for Win8, with Don Box. All of the content on this page is subject to change.Read Online*Safari Books Online Purchase*Amazon Table of Contents*Foreword: Chris Anderson *Foreword: Rey Bango *Preface *Chapter 1. Hello, Windows 8 *Chapter 2. Binding and Controls *Chapter 3. Layout *Chapter 4. Typography *C

WinJS Promises: then and done

As of the Windows Consumer Preview (aka Win8 Beta), the WinJS promises object has a “done” method as well as a “then” method. The “done” method is just like “then” except that it turns unhandled errors into exceptions. If you read no further, know this:Always call “done” as the last promise method in your promise chain.Let’s say you have a promise implementation that makes failure a strong

What’s New in the Beta Metro/JS Templates for VS11

The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 (aka the Win8 beta) is now available for download, along with the matching Visual Studio 11 beta. You can download them both from the Developer Center for Metro style Apps and at least when I did the downloading this morning, it was smooth and worked well. In case you’re interested, I downloaded the ISO, not the setup, and I am currently writing this blog entry

Editor’s Note, Telerik Newsletter, February 2012

Hello, all, and welcome to the February, 2012 edition of the Telerik newsletter! As the newest employee at Telerik, I’m still learning all of the good stuff we’re doing just in the area of developer tools.For example, the features in JustCode that fix up my using statements (Ctrl+Shift+U) and show me a type’s shape and implementation via the JustDecompile integration (F12) are now ingrained i

The Windows Libraries for JavaScript: Part I

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.In the last post in this series, we looked at getting started building Metro style apps built using JavaScript (Metro/JS apps) with Microsoft Visual Studio 11 for the Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11) and Microsoft

Metro style JS Apps in VS11 & Blend

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.In the previous post in this series, we discussed how to build a deploy a Metro style app built with JavaScript completely from the command line. That’s a useful exercise to prove that there’s no real magic, but I don’

Your First Metro style App in JavaScript

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.A “Windows Metro style app” is an application built for the devices running the new Windows user experience of Windows 8. A Metro style app built using JavaScript is a first class Windows application built with the tec

GUI REPL for Roslyn

If you recall from REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011, I’ve been playing around building a little C# REPL app using Roslyn. That version was built as a Console application, but I’ve refactored and rebuilt it as a WPF application:You can download the source code for both the Console and the WPF versions here:RoslynRepl Sample DownloadThe benefit of a real GUI app is that output selection ma

Moving to the Cloud Part 2: Mostly Sunny

In part 1 of this now multi-part series (who knew?), I discussed my initial attempts at moving my digital life into the cloud, including files, music, photos, notes, task lists, mail, contacts, calendar and PC games.There were some issues, however, and some things that I forgot, so we have part 2.Before we get to that, however, it’s interesting (for me, at least) to think about why it’s impor

Sells Manor: Running 64-bit Win8 on My MacBook Air

With the exception of //build/, I haven’t really been a public part of the Microsoft developer community for about a year. So, to make up for some lost time, I’m giving a talk about some of the //build/ bits at the Portland Area .NET User Group first thing in the new year. This means that I need a running installation of the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my new laptop, ‘cuz THE MAN took my old

Moving My Data To The Cloud: Stormy Weather

For years, I’ve maintained a single “main” computer. It was the computer that was the central authority of all of the personal data I’d accumulated over the years and from which it made me uncomfortable to be separated. Because I needed a single computer for everything, it had to work on my couch, on a plane, on a desk and everywhere else I ever needed to go. Also, it couldn’t have a giant monit

Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Telerik!

I have gotten to do a ton of really great things at Microsoft:*I got to write a column on WPF and turn that column into not one, but two books. *I got the excitement for every blog post in the first two years wondering if this was the one that was going to get me fired. (It was close a few times.) *I got to throw several Developer Conferences (DevCons). *I got to spin up a completely

Roslyn Syntax Visualizer Tools

As I do more with Roslyn, I find I want more information about what I’m parsing and how it’s represented in the Roslyn object model. I could, of course, have built myself a little OM dumper for Roslyn, but instead I dug through the samples and found two cool ones built right in, both provided in the Documents\Microsoft Codename Roslyn CTP - October 2011\Shared folder.Both Roslyn visualizer sa

REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve long been fascinated with using the C# syntax as a command line execution environment. It could be that PowerShell doesn’t do it for me (I’ve seriously tried half a dozen times or more). It could be that while LINQPad comes really close, I still don’t have enough control over the parsing to really make it work for my day-to-day command line activities. Or it may

Telerik: Best tech support response ever

I was playing around with the Telerik WPF controls the other day and I ran into an “issue.” It wasn’t a bug, just a bet peeve of mine, so knowing that two friends of mine, Stephen Forte and Doug Seven, both work at Telerik, I thought I’d report it. I created an account on their support web site and dropped in the following message:_From: Chris Date: 11/17/2011 10:59:38 AM__when I'm choosi

Mary Sells, 1921-2011, Rest In Peace

Mary Hohnke Sells died on a Monday afternoon on the last day of February, 2010 in her home in Fargo, ND. She had just turned 89 years old on the 18th of February. She passed away peacefully in her sleep during an afternoon nap, having been tucked in by her daughter-in-law earlier that day. She’s survived by her son J. Michael Sells, her daughter-in-law Charlene Schreiber, her grandson Chris Sell

The Basics of EF Validation: IDataErrorInfo

When you’re adding or updating data in your database, you really want to make sure that the data being sent to the database is good and true. Often, that’s something that can be checked in the database itself. The first thing you’ll want to do is make sure that the database has validation constraints set on the columns, like nullability or max data sizes. If you’re going EF model-first, you can

EF Concurrency Mode Fixed + MVC

Imagine a very simple EDM to describes web advertisements: Now imagine that I’d like to build a web application to manage instances of the Ad type. If multiple people are editing ads at once, especially the same set of ads, I’m likely to run into concurrency errors. By default, EF lets the last change win. For example, if Chris and Bill are both editing Ad.Id == 1, if Chris pushes his chan

Using SQL Server Profiler with EF

I’m a big fan of the SQL Server profiler for figuring out what the Entity Framework (EF) is really doing on the wire. If you’re unfamiliar with how to use the profiler, the easiest thing to do once you’ve got it started is File | New Trace. It will ask to which database you’d like to connection and then pop-up the Trace Properties window. If you click on the Events Selection tab, you can filter

Be Careful with Data Services Authentication + Batch Mode

I was doing something quite innocent the other day: I was trying to provide authentication on top of the .NET 4.0 WCF Data Services (DS) on a per method basis, e.g. let folks read all they want but stop them from writing unless they’re an authorized user. In the absence of an authorized user, I threw a DataServicesException with a 401 and the right header set to stop execution of my server-side

Enabling the Tip Calculator in Your Brain

I can’t imagine anyone reading this blog needs to read this, but I can’t help myself.When I was just a wee lad, probably the most valuable thing I learned was how to perform mathematical estimation, the importance of which and several techniques you can get by reading Jon Bentley’s The Back of the Envelope (this essay along with several others, are collected in his most excellent books Progra

Windows Phone 7: Beating Expectations

Years ago, when I was on my T-Mobile Dash, I would purchase a new phone every quarter or so, just to see if something better had come along. Always, within a week or so, I returned it and went happily back to my T-Mobile Dash. Then came the iPhone, which I instantly fell in love with. I didn’t think I’d ever give it up. Then came the Samsung Focus, one of the first Windows Phone 7 phones and I h

If you want something from eBay, don’t bid on it!

I’m fond of quoting my father to my sons. I have a terrible memory for these kinds of things in general, but what he says sticks with me:*“Anything worth doing is worth doing right.” –Mike Sells *“Don’t start a fight, but be ready to finish one.” –Mike Sells *“Who got the goddamn jelly in the goddamn peanut butter?!” –Mike Sells I’ve learned a ton of things from my father and continue

Fluent-Style Programming in JavaScript

I’ve been playing around with JavaScript a great deal lately and trying to find my way. I last programmed JS seriously about 10 years ago and it’s amazing to me how much the world has changed since then. For example, the fifth edition of ECMAScript (ES5) has recently been approved for standardization and it’s already widely implemented in modern browsers, including my favorite browser, IE9.Flu