If you act fast – i.e. between now and Friday, September 14th at midnight PDT (UTC-7:00) – you can get a free TeamCompanion license! There are three ways in which to do this:
Read this blog post for more information regarding the giveaway.
Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at this year’s Heartland Developers Conference (HDC). I gave an introductory talk on developing “Metro” applications for Windows 8. The goal of the talk was to cover some of the basic features that every developer writing Windows 8 apps would have to face when first getting started. Some of these features include:
The talk went very well and I was pleased with the turnout of my session as well as the conference overall. As always, HDC has turned out to be a great developer resource. I look forward to returning next year.
The slides for my session have been uploaded here. I have also published the corresponding demos (Windows 8, C#/XAML) on SkyDrive, here. There are some great resource links in the last few slides so be sure to check them out.
Although there are roughly one bazillion (yes, I made that number up :-) “desktop” apps currently available that will run on Windows 8, the number of Metro “Windows Store” apps still measures in the hundreds (not hundreds of thousands, just hundreds). If you’re curious about how many Windows Store apps are available in your marketplace, follow these steps:
NOTE: There may be a simpler, quicker way to determine the app count for Windows Store apps, I just haven’t come across it yet. If you know of an easier way, please share it with us in the comments below.
We are currently working on a set of mobile applications (Windows Phone, iOS, and Android) that will be used to scan QR Codes for conference attendee badges. We want the information contained within the QR code to be basic contact information that is useful to both a conference vendor as well as other conference attendees. When looking at the various standard QR Code formats, a couple of them stood out: vCard and meCard.
The vCard format contains fields for everything we wanted to store but also included fields we didn’t care about (e.g. address, city, zip, country, and URL). We could just ignore those fields however this format also produces a more tightly filled QR Code which can be a bit more challenging for some mobile devices to read (especially on conference badges that may have glossy covers, be slightly bent, etc.).
The meCard format is basically a more compact version of the vCard format. However, it doesn’t have the organization and title fields we desire and still has most of the extra fields listed above.
Another down side to the above formats is that, by default, most QR Code scanners will attempt to add information scanned in these formats as stored contacts. This isn’t always a bad thing but, in our case, we simply want to store the information within our application for later retrieval as well as have the ability for the scanned information to be displayed in an easy-to-read format – without first storing it as a contact.
Based on these discoveries and our needs, we decided to create a simple, text-based QR Code format that fits our needs. We have called this format HDC-Connect for QR Codes.
HDC-Connect is a specially formatted QR Code containing a small amount of contact information. The information provided by an HDC-Connect code typically provides just enough information to get in touch with a contact after the initial encounter.
A QR Code that utilizes the HDC-Connect format contains the following five pieces of information, each on a single line (followed by a carriage return/line feed):
If any of the above information is to be omitted, there should be an empty line with a carriage return/line feed combination in its place. In other words, there should always be five lines of data contained within the QR Code, even if some of the information is excluded.
Here is a sample QR Code encoded using the HDC-Connect format:
If you scan the above QR Code, it will be decoded as the following text:
Joe Architect
Enterprise Architect
Super Systems Design
Joe.Architect@SuperSystemDesigns.com
(800) 555-1212
Each of the five lines of data in this QR Code correspond to the five fields described above.
The HDC-Connect format was designed for badges printed for conference attendees. The HDC-Connect code would typically appear on the back of the badge. The badge can be quickly scanned to obtain a conference attendee's contact information. Typical scenarios include conference vendors scanning attendee information as they visit vendor booths. Attendees may also elect to scan another attendee's badge as a quick way to gather contact information as they network during the event. Depending upon the application being used to scan the QR Code, you may be able to quickly add the information directly as a contact on the mobile device.
Most applications that can scan a QR Code can interpret the HDC-Connect format. For example, Bing Vision on Windows Phone is capable of scanning the HDC-Connect format and displaying it in a typical contact card format. As mentioned above, we are also working on a set of mobile applications to scan QR Codes encoded using the HDC-Connect format.
The use of the HDC-Connect format is free of any license.
The HDC-Connect format as described above was really built for our own needs. However, it is easy to see that the format may be useful to other applications and uses outside of what we intend to use it for (e.g. conference badges). If you end up using the QR-Code format in your applications, please let us know. We’d love to hear about it.
Today Microsoft announced that the final build of Visual Studio 2012 has been completed. The final bits will be available for download from MSDN and “elsewhere” on August 15th. The official launch will be on September 12th via an on-line event. You can find out more about the launch event here: http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com/
Also from Microsoft, today they announced the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 8. Windows 8 will be generally available on new machines as well as on-line on October 26th. For more information about Windows 8 visit the Building Windows 8 blog.
Today, Microsoft held their first ever Windows Phone Summit. Although the event lasted only two hours, there was quite a bit of information provided, lots of questions answered, and several questions still left to be answered. Below are some of highlights of the event (in no particular order):
I have no doubt left out a few details covered during the summit but you can get all the details yourself by watching the recorded presentation currently available here (I’ll update this link if the video is moved).
I look forward to seeing what else has yet to be announced for Windows Phone 8.
If you’ve been following the progress of Visual Studio 2012 closely chances are you’ve already downloaded the recently released Release Candidate. If not, then I’ve provided a handy list of links below to get you started. I’ve also included some handy reference and guidance links as well.
This is not a download but I’m including it anyway since it’s another offering in the works by Microsoft related to TFS. If you are not familiar with the Team Foundation Service it is essentially “TFS in the Cloud” (in simplistic terms – you can read more about it here). To sign up for a free preview account, visit the TFS Preview site.
Getting Help - To help with any questions you might have, please refer to the following:
- MSDN Forums - get answers to your questions from the community
Providing Feedback - To provide feedback (bugs, suggestions, etc.) for any of the Visual Studio 2012 RC products, utilize the corresponding Microsoft Connect site:
If you’ve been wanting a chance to try out Microsoft’s Team Foundation Service (formerly known as TFS on Azure) but haven’t been able to obtain one of the coveted invitation codes then wait no longer! Microsoft has officially removed the invitation requirement and has opened up their TFS Preview site to the masses. You can now create your very own TFS projects in the cloud!
If you’re not familiar with Microsoft’s TFS Service, it is essentially a subset of the “TFS on Premises” features (in some cases, a superset) made available in the cloud. Some of the features provided within the Team Foundation Service include:
With all these features, it’s important to note that there are some features (available in the “on premises” version) that are currently not included with the Team Foundation Service:
Although pricing for the Team Foundation Service (once it officially leaves the “preview” stage) has not yet been announced. However, Microsoft has announced that they will continue to provide a free version of the Team Foundation Service at some level (not yet announced):
There is a lot of information available on the TFS Preview site under the “LEARN” tab (notice the “ALL UPPER CASING” ;-)). It is the perfect place to familiarize yourself with the extensive features of this service.
It has been fun to see this service grow over the past months and I look forward to seeing what comes next.
Check out this post from Brian Harry for a quick run down on some of the details.
Here are some other useful links from the above post:
I’ll cover more of the details once I’ve had a chance to install the bits.
When Visual Studio 11 Beta was released a few months back there were some drastic changes to the overall user interface (UI) within Visual Studio. Namely, the UI was pretty much devoid of all color (short of various shades of gray). Needless to say there was a tremendous amount of feedback provided to Microsoft pleading for a little color in their beloved IDE (as well as fewer ALL CAPS VERBIAGE).
Well, as it turns out, Microsoft has listened to the feedback and have posted some screenshots of the upcoming Visual Studio Release Candidate (RC) release which shows that some color has been added back into the UI.
Here are a few of the screenshots:
There is now less text with ALL CAPS VERBIAGE (although the main menu items are still in ALL CAPS):
The Visual Studio status bar now utilizes color to indicate various states (e.g. Ready, Development, Building, and Debug modes):
You can get all the details on the Visual Studio Blog, here. I am personally looking forward to the RC release as I have liked what I’ve seen so far.
