March 6, 2018
We are all about GitHub on the docs.microsoft.com team. We host documentation there and just recently we launched content feedback that's storing comments in GitHub issues as well. Today, we moved all site feedback to GitHub as well.
December 28, 2017
I love looking at my Ubnt graphs - how much traffic goes where, to what clients, and many other interesting indicators. But I am also the kind of person that loves having raw access to the data, so I started digging - how can I pull those statistics locally? The setup I run is described here - I have a cloud key that manages the network, composed of a router acting as a switch, access point and the security gateway.
October 30, 2016
One of the features that I love the most about Visual Studio Team Services is the ability to build my code in the cloud. In my project I have a requirement for dynamic build provisioning, which works well. However, I recently tried to figure out how can I get the list of steps from a build definition, and was hitting a roadblock up until I got some help from Chris Patterson.
October 30, 2016
If you already checked out the Intro to Azure Notification Hubs post, there is some new material ready for you, that describes how to build a push notification service for Chrome, Xamarin.Android and native Android.
October 24, 2016
One of the key parts of my job as a Program Manager on the docs.microsoft.com team is to assess community contributions across different documentation repositories and areas. That might appear to be a very complicated task, and as we go, I will document more on the process. This post, however, is dedicated to setting up the core environment to make the task somewhat easy.
July 7, 2016
Depending on your project, you might need to run the latest version of the .NET Core SDK on your hosted build agent. Hosted agents are pulled from the VSTS hosted pool. With great flexibility comes great responsibility, so the build agent has some limitations when it comes to picking the software that needs to be deployed.
June 7, 2016
As we released the Visual F# documentation as open-source, one thing stood out as a challenge that needed to be tackled – content validation. There could be several things we could do, such as integrating extra validation rules in the build system or building a GitHub bot. I thought that as a learning experience, I will go the bot route. This post explains how I worked this problem.
June 7, 2016
A bit ago, Scott Hanselman and myself recorded a nice intro to sending push notifications with Azure Notification Hubs. Check out our session to learn more.
June 4, 2016
There might be several scenarios under which you need to make sure that certain published posts are hidden on your Ghost Blog landing page. Out-of-the-box this is not yet supported, but luckily there is an easy way to implement this restriction.
March 16, 2014
Let’s say you are developing an application that needs to integrate in the Settings Hub. For most applications, this is not at all necessary – if you are not altering the behavior of the device (e.g. through global settings that go beyond the application), you do not need to do this. However, for experimentation purposes, it is, in fact, possible to integrate your app in there.
November 3, 2013
For most applications, notifications are not exactly critical. Granted, a scientific calculator will not benefit from having an in-app notification hub. On the other hand, there are cases when you want to let the user know about what’s new and what changes before an update or including information in the changelog. That’s where a custom notification hub control can come in really handy.
July 25, 2013
I’ve added several changes to the FileExplorer control, that will be included in the Coding4Fun Toolkit.
July 2, 2013
To continue the tradition of a weekly FileExplorer build, here is the next update, bringing you a new set of capabilities and fixes.
May 13, 2013
As per the request of many Beem users, I am implementing Last.fm track scrobbling. The first part of this task is to implement an API client for the Last.fm web service, and step one is user authentication. Last.fm is not using OAuth, but rather its own implementation of an authentication engine that relies on a composite MD5 secret.
January 19, 2013
As I discussed the basic of authentication in my previous post, the most important Last.fm feature that is added to Beem in itself is track scrobbling, which will allow you to keep records of what you listened to from your favorite music aggregation service.
December 30, 2012
Serialization is a process that is prone to errors, especially with a poorly structured data layer. However, that is not always the case and a seemingly normal serialization/deserialization scenario might turn out to produce unexepected results.
November 18, 2012
Multiple applications that are already in the Windows Phone Marketplace operate with a variety of content, such as pictures, text files and music. More often than not, that content is stored locally, in the application isolated storage, and although it is a good way to preserve that content, this method is bound to create some inconveniences in case the user decides to switch phones or do a complete device reset.
November 1, 2012
With the release of the new Windows Phone 8 SDK, the developers are now able to create URI associations, where their application can be launched from the context of another application.
March 24, 2012
It’s almost 4 in the morning, and as with all great ideas, this one came to me while I was working on a completely different project. I was thinking that it is a shame that I cannot attach files to an email via EmailComposeTask – and indeed, I am not the only one thinking about this.
July 25, 2011
Windows Phone tiles are cool – everyone knows that. So far, developers can create shell tiles outside the application itself, pinning them to the user’s home screen. Today, Clint Rutkas updated his Coding4Fun Toolkit with a component called Tile, that allows the usage of tiles directly in a third-party application.
June 19, 2011
The official Kinect SDK is here, so there shouldn’t be any problems with incompatible frameworks and libraries on Windows systems. That being said, there are already a couple of interesting resources that I would say are important for developers who just start Kinect development, and for those that were already working with it (e.g. with OpenNI or OpenKinect).
September 19, 2010
While working on a Windows Phone 7 application today I noticed that some web requests are skipped by the application. In fact, the callback for the receiving method was never called, so I decided to track the outbound traffic via a local proxy tool. I actually tried two of them, and here is what I got. Fiddler Fiddler was the first choice when I decided that I need to keep track of what’s being requested by the application.
May 10, 2010
There are cases, when the functionality provided with the application is just not enough. Or maybe it is enough, but some people want to use it a bit different – either adapt it to their own needs or implement something that would add value to existing features. I actually encountered the extensibility problem in one of my projects, WeatherBar. Initially, I built it around the Google Weather API. Fair enough, it worked well for a lot of locations and it was quite simple.
May 1, 2010
I’ve asked myself this question many times. And if at the beginning, when WPF was just picking up momentum, I would say that this was a straight negative, today I can say the opposite – it really does seem that WPF will slowly replace WinForms, and there is a reason for that. When WPF came out in 2006 as a part of the .NET Framework, the overall impression was that it is a framework for media applications.
April 12, 2010
Today, at 10:00AM PST (Pacific Standard Time), Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 became available for download on MSDN, for those who have a valid MSDN subscription.
April 5, 2010
Finally got to my favorite topic – game programming. I started with XNA and I am currently working on polishing my 3D game development skills.
April 1, 2010
Facebook has a very useful API, that can give the developer access to pretty much anything Facebook-related when it comes to user profiles. The documentation provided comes in handy and it shows how to use the API from a web developer’s perspective – mostly giving examples in PHP. What if the developer wants to work with managed code in a desktop application? Since I am working with C#, I tried to implement some of the API calls in this language.
March 29, 2010
Snippet Manager is an application built by Danny Battison. Its main purpose is to help developers organize their code snippets in the cloud (those aren’t stored locally). One of the interesting features of the application is that it offers an interface for plug-ins, although with a specific code structure.
February 27, 2010
Recently I decided that I need to work more with C++ than I do now (my primary focus being C#). I picked up a Visual C++ 2008 book (I wanted to start with Visual C++ since I already have some experience with .NET and I would really like to work with managed C++, as well as with unmanaged in one environment), started a couple of sample projects and got the basic ideas.
January 24, 2010
Since the release of Windows 7, lots of .NET developers felt the need to use the new features introduced by the new OS. One of these features is the possibility to have jump lists for the application icon in the system taskbar. Natively, using the new taskbar capabilities is only possible by using the Win32 API. But there is also a managed library for .NET developers – the Windows API Code Pack for .