My company, AgiliTrain, has created its spring schedule and we are happy to announce that we’re going to be expanding with new courses and new cities. Let’s take the courses first.
I wasted an evening last night on a simple bug of mine. I was writing a simple HTML data entry page. I was using JSON + $.ajax to POST data to a ASP.NET MVC controller and it used to work. But for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Let’s start with some background.
A long labor of love of mine has finally been birthed. My Essential Windows Phone 7.5 book is now available for Kindle. You can also pre-order the physical book from Amazon or directly from Pearson. While I’ve been assured that the book is printed, sometimes it can take some time to make it into the retail chain for different outlets. To clear up some of this confusion I thought it would be helpful to tell you how you can get the book depending on which retailer you go with:
It’s been a long nine-months and I am excited to be able to talk about what I’ve been working on for the first time. I am working with a small team of people to build a new set of products. But unlike what I’ve been doing in the past, this new set of products is not for developers...
I buy a lot of music. I am not a hoarder like some, but I have 100GB’ish of MP3s. I don’t go around and ‘borrow’ friends collections just to up my count. What I do is buy music…just not at brick and mortar stores.
While I could go on about how iTunes on Windows is a bad piece of software, that’s not what I care about. It’s the DRM. I pave my machines constantly and I have my music on a lot of devices at once. Music Match sounds like a good idea, but Apple has burned that bridge with me a long time ago so I won’t harp on it. But as a consumer of music (and someone who wants to support the artists), what do I do?
As most of you know, I have been in the Silverlight space for quite a while. (And to be clear to the chicken-little amongst you, no I am not leaving the Silverlight community.) I’ve been building a web application for consumers so that HTML + JavaScript represents the right solution to building a project like we’re building (more on what I am building in the near future).
One of the things I wanted to be able to do is to build longer-lived pages where it made sense without having to resort to post-backs or hacked together JavaScript. In fact, what I really wanted was a client-side ViewModel (e.g. MVVM) for my web page. After looking at several of the existing frameworks for the job, I settled on KnockoutJS as a great solution. The currently released version (1.21) is a good solution, but the developers of the framework have released a Beta (1.3Beta) version that greatly simplifies what I needed. If you want to follow along, make sure you download that version here.
So the Windows Phone Marketplace hit 40K apps. What does it mean to the platform? There are a number of articles out there that talk about the 40,000 apps and compares them to other platforms but I think they are missing a key differentiator.
Articles like the PC Magazine article point to the fact that Apple got to 50K in one year (faster than Microsoft) and that it took Android in 18 months (a tad slower than Microsoft). But to me the real remarkable news of this milestone isn’t the speed…it’s the size of the marketplace for that is astounding in my opinion.
As many of my readers know, I’ve been neck deep in the Windows Phone. More recently, I’ve been digging into Windows 8 development as well. On my most recent trip, I spent quite a bit of time with the BUILD tablet. Good news is that it’s a pretty good piece of hardware. Even though it’s not ARM, I am still getting a good four hours of battery life. This version of Windows 8 is early but I do think there are some things that Windows 8 should learn from what they’ve done with the Windows Phone. Here is a short list of what I think the team should look at on the phone:
In-App Back Button
If you're a XAML developer and have proudly stated that you hand-code all your markup, it’s time to learn how to be more productive. I’ve authored a new course for PluralSight. If you have a subscription, you can view it my new “Blend for Developers” course now:
Hope you enjoy the course!
My new article disruptive technologies is now available on Software Quality Connection. If you’re an organization or developer who are worried about what is coming next, my “Which Platform is Next: All of Them” may be a good read for you.
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| Application Name | WilderBlog | Environment Name | Production |
| Application Ver | v4.0.30319 | Runtime Framework | x86 |
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| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 10.0.14393 | Runtime Arch | X86 |
