Visual Studio 2013… installed
NDepend 5 … installed
Balsamiq 2 …installed
Next up ReSharper 9. However I have chosen to go for superbly priced ReSharper Ultimate which gives you oodles of tools for .NET and the promise of ReSharper for C++ in the future.
And comes with a rather nifty new installer… which hopefully is going to leave my environment working for Visual Studio 2008 for some Windows CE projects we are advancing in 2015…
ReSharper is awesome … but it also likes plenty of CPU and memory.
If you find yourself struggling on a virtual machine, then it is worth knowing that you can very easily suspend ReSharper.
There are nifty commands you can use from the Command window such as ReSharper_Suspend (or map them to keys) as well as a big button under Tools.Options.
…can be found at http://our.umbraco.org/projects/developer-tools/umbraco-v6-mvc-razor-cheatsheets
Very handy when you are living in a world of dynamic expressions and google results which span v4, v5, v6 and v7.
Currently “enjoying” a spot of tree traversal from @CurrentPage in a PartialViewMacroPage
Enjoy
I needed to populate a database I’m designing with some test data and thought to myself “LightSwitch will be ideal to knock out some screens”.
One hour later I got a LightSwitch screen to actually display! Until then all I got when running it in Desktop mode (the default) was a blank window hosting Silverlight (right click to verify)
After lots of searching and playing around I found the answer near the end of this very long thread.
Now, when this happens again I will be able to find my own post to resolve it! Enjoy!
P.S. This isn’t specific to Visual Studio 2012 … but the post title corresponds to how I was searching 🙂
Following on from nice touch #1…
I disliked the way old versions of Blend relied on something as a subtle as a few pixels of colour to tell you something relatively important.
Circa 2010
Circa 2013
although admittedly this doesn’t appear to be universal across all properties.
Thank you.
[Really I’m just testing out twitterfeed which has failed for me… but I needed something to post on :-)]
I’m just skimming through some blend tips by Mike from 2010 and spotted a nice touch in Blend for Visual Studio 2012 I hadn’t noticed before (amongst no doubt hundreds of improvements :-))
When working with grids and rows (or columns) you now get a lovely visual indicator with in place editing, rather than needing to visit properties.
circa 2010 (from this post)
circa 2013
When you create a new Windows Store project in Visual Studio 2012 it “helpfully” turns on one Capability in the manifest – “Internet Client”.
Which is great … if you use the Internet.
But… having this turned on means your application must have a privacy policy to be approved for the Windows Store else it will fail submission. There are other reasons why you might need a privacy policy – but this one has tripped up many development teams.
If you don’t need it, turn it off.
Read other Windows Store Tips
While I was at the Worldwide Partner Conference last week in Toronto I had dinner with an old friend and colleague Tim Sneath. Tim has been instrumental in a lot of the great evangelism around XAML and Windows 8 but now has a new challenge, heading up Microsoft Learning.
We got onto the subject of Microsoft Certifications and their importance (or not) when companies are hiring developers – a great little discussion which a week on has popped back into my mind as I will be interviewing candidates this month for a vacancy in my team. Plenty of the candidates who apply for technical roles in Microsoft do indeed have certifications. I on the other hand (as interviewer) do not. Hmmm. (Well, actually I do – but I seem to recall the last couple I did were on SQL Server 2000 and that is a long time back.)
However I am moving more back to development in my new role around Windows 8 and potentially could do with setting myself a “little dev challenge”.
Right now I’m thinking the “little dev challenge” should be passing MCSD: Windows Metro Style Apps.
Hmmm…. now which one to go for?
And more importantly… by when… 🙂
The team has worked to create a day that is flexible enough to help someone brand new to Windows 8 dev OR is already working on a Windows 8 application. That is very cool.
And there is even a Saturday session on the 21st.
Register today:
Just spent 30mins with the beta of Telerik RadControls for Metro. Looking very promising, certainly enough for me to register for their free Webinar on the 24th of July 6pm UK time - Why Build for Windows 8 and How RadControls for Metro can Help.
The beta includes the following controls:
And comes with a nice sample:
Although I think snapped view needs a little work 🙂
P.S. Don’t forget to unblock the downloaded chm file
