Daily Links 23 Jul 2015

Try the new HERE Mobile SDK for free

Write Unit Test Automatically using IntelliTest in Visual Studio 2015

Crop, Blend (Watermark) Photos on Windows Phone 8.1 with the Lumia Imaging SDK

A/B Testing and Testing In Production with Azure Web Apps

Integrate your on-premises infrastructure with Azure

Application Insights Tools in Visual Studio 2015 RTM

FreshMvvm – A Mvvm Framework designed for Xamarin.Forms

UWP: New Controls (part 3 – Maps)

Application Insights Tools in Visual Studio 2015 RTM

Octopus: Automated deployment for .NET

Why I got the MCSD: Azure Solutions Architect Certification

Azure SQL or SQL Server Database?

Azure, IoT and the Future Enterprise Data Center

Pixate and Proto.io: Native Mobile Prototyping tool for Android and iOS

Comparing Four Popular, Page–Based, Interactive Prototyping Tools

Daily Links 13 May 2014

Behind the scenes of “Universal Apps”

Delight and engage your users with these new Windows Phone 8.1 capabilities

Xamarin and Microsoft launch the .NET foundation

The Next Generation of .NET

Using NuGet without committing packages to source control

Essential Tips for Async

How does TypeScript help prevent bugs in JavaScript

ASP.NET Web API/AngularJS SPA Demo App Updated

Enterprise WinRT Apps Build Roundup

Common XAML UI Framework: Notes BUILD 2014

Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Power Tools

Windows Phone 8.1 Features

Tasks and awaits and Rx! (And Drones!) Oh My!

Creating Custom AngularJS Directives Series

Visual Studio Image Library updated to over 10000 images

Easier Code Sharing Across iOS, Android and Windows

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is here!

Enabling the .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) in ASP.NET applications

Announcing ASP.NET Session State Provider for Redis Preview Release

Apache Cordova integrated in Visual Studio for Multi-Device Hybrid App development

Visual Studio Extensions worth checking out...

Productivity Power Tools
Many Features. Best: Tab and Pin your Code files. Close all but pinned.

VS Commands 2010
Many Features. Best: Xaml Bindings and resource highlights

Xaml Styler
Great for formatting xaml.

Team Foundation Server Power Tools August 2011
Obviously only if you use TFS for your source control. Now with Rollback feature only previously available from the command line.

Code Maid
Many Features. Best: Cool Build progress bar with "Cancel Build" button.

Snippet Designer
For Ninja Coders who want to be super productive - craft your code snippets with this.

Portable Library Tools
One Code Library to rule them [platforms] all

Code Metrics Viewer
View Code metrics usually only available for VS Ultimate users.

[Update 03/09/2011] ...

Default Browser Switcher
Toolbar that allows 1-click switch the browser that VS uses for Web Projects.
Handy when you're developing a silverlight app with no web project attached.

Some Isolated Storage Explorers

[Update 09/09/2011]...

Visual NUnit
Nice NUnit UI test runner from inside VS. Run or Debug unit tests. Also has filters for project, namespace and fixture.

[Update 13/10/2011]

NUnit Test Application

Mobile Ready HTML5 MVC.NET

AnkhSVN - Subversion SCC Provider

ToDoManager
Nice replacement for the VS task manager -which get wiped when the .suo file is deleted. The solution is more presistent

Windows Phone Test Project

WoVS Quick Add Reference
Add quick reference to missing assembly when class referenced in code.

I've tried to keep to those extensions that are free.
... any cool ones I've missed?

Daily Links 26/07/2011

Novell/Xamarin Partnership around Mono

Windows Phone Developers Get New App Hub Features: Mango app submission just one month away

WP7 Dev Tips - Error Reporting

QR code scanning on Windows Phone 7.5 using ZXlib

Xceed Ultimate ListBox for Silverlight

Showing the Onscreen Keyboard in Silverlight OOB Applications

Cross platform .NET mobile apps talk at NDC 2011

Smooth Streaming in Silverlight

Offline Silverlight Applications
CodePlex
Channel 9 Video
Great presentation / source code for patterns when developing offline capabilites for silverlight applications. When you consider the intrusion of tablets in the work-place, and the mobility they provide, this becomes increasingly necessary - particularly of LOB apps.

Branch by Abstraction (BBA)
An alternate "best practice" feature-based branching strategy

Speed up Visual Studio Builds

GPU.NET, a developer platform with it's own Compiler and Runtime to easily hardware-accelerate .NET solutions.

Daily Links 13/03/2011

A WP7 App: The Numbers
An app developers shares some sales numbers and lessons learnt.

WP7 Application Bar Icons

Creating a Custom Markup Extension in WPF (and soon, Silverlight)

Phoney Tools Updated (WP7 Open Source Library)

Native Extensions 2.0 For Microsoft Silverlight Released

A Numeric Input Control for Windows Phone 7

12 WP7 Coding4Fun Toolkit in Depth articles covering all controls

Mindscape Phone Elements released!

MEA countries - submit apps to marketplace via Yalla Apps

Using DockPanel in WP7

Testing Network Availability

SharpComments
Displays color comments in Visual Studio 2010, C#.

Using NuGet with Windows Phone Applications

Daily Links 25/08/2010

WP7: Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Final - 16 Sep

Windows Phone and the Cloud--an Introduction

XNA WP7 getting started

Using self tracking entities with Silverlight 4 and Entity Framework 4

The ThreadPool is dead
Commentary on the parallel framework on codeplex.

Removing Event Handlers using Reflection

Introducing Microsoft Visual Studio LightSwitch
Rapid Application Developement framework for Visual Studio

An effective testing strategy
"If an application is critical to business, it’s going to require change. If it’s going to require change, we better be able to safely change it without affecting our client’s business."

Speeding up Visual Studio Build Times and Performance

Backing up and Restoring your TFS Server
PowerTool to make things just a tad easier :P

WikiPlex 1.4 Released
"WikiPlex is a regular expression based wiki engine that allows developers to integrate a wiki experience into an existing .NET application seamlessly and with little effort"

Visual Studio Editor - Ctrl+Arrow navigation not working

Thought I might post the solution here, since this was infuriating me for a number of days, and I couldn't find anything related on the web.

Visual Studio Menu:
Tools | Options
On the left menu:
Environment | Keyboard
Click the reset button on the top right.

... so simple I should have thought of it sooner :|

Daily Links 28/04/2010

Using the ChangePropertyAction Behaviour

Learning MEF in Silverlight 4 and .NET 4

Silverlight Tip of the Day #6 - Toast Notifications

Silverlight 4 enables Authorization header modification

Spec Explorer 2010 Released - model-based testing tool from VS

VS 2010 Dark Theme
My personal dark fonts

Windows Phone 7 in 7 (Tutorials)

Get a Silverlight XAP signing certificate for cheap thanks to GoDaddy

Microsoft Has Released Enterprise Library 5.0
Now packaged with Unity 2.0 - Microsoft's Dependency Injection Tool

My top 5 free VS 2010 extension picks

Microsoft Surface: Announcing Online Design and Development Training

Daily Links 12/12/2009

She Sells PowerShell on The Sea Shore

Plug into MEF in 10 minutes or less

Building extensible Silverlight applications with MEF

Play sounds in Silverlight using MediaElement

Working with the WebCam in Silverlight 4

Bing Maps Silverlight Control SDK

One bug, two developers: Collaborative debugging is now a reality in Visual Studio 2010

Creating extensions for VS 2010

Crafting Smartphone User Interfaces Using .NET Compact Framework
Some basics of developing UI for smartphone devices

Handango
Develop mobile applications and sell them online

Daily Links 25/06/2009

Silverlight: Product Maintenance Application ( Part 1 - Authentication, Roles and Logging In )

Silverlight - Resizing Childwindow

Synchronous Web Service Calls with Silverlight 2: Dispelling the async-only myth

Distribute Mobile Applications On Windows Marketplace

Visual Studio's Database Publishing Wizard and the new 1-Click Web Deployment

Visual Studio 2010: Web application packaging and publishing

Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework Feature Community Technology Preview 1

Feature CTP Walkthrough: Self Tracking Entities for Entity Framework

Feature CTP Walkthrough: Code Only for Entity Framework

Daily Links 29/07/2008

Visual Studio Item Templates
create custom file templates to give you a head start in implementing derived classes / patterns

Create PDF Files on the fly with C# and PDFSharp

Agilo for Scrum
Demo movie
"Agilo for Scrum is a simple, web-based and straightforward tool to support the Scrum"
"Agilo is distributed as Open Source Software"

Default Architecture: Layers
Interesting article by Ayende touching on most common architecture layering implementations.

Patterns I Hate #1: Singleton
I'm one of the guilty - singletons seem to spread like a virus in my code :|. One of the most convincing arguments not to use them is testability, so if you're going TDD, singletons are going to give you some roadblocks.

In-State Animation with Silverlight
One of the best things about silverlight is how it makes control animation so easy, even non-designers can use it :)

Daily Links 30/04/2008

Deferred execution with LinQ
LinQ queries don't necessarily get executed on the line they are declared...

Subversion so easy, even your wife can use it
yeah, this guy slept on the couch a few nights I'm sure :)

Using the Grid control in Silverlight 2 Beta 1
The Grid Control is pretty central (at least for the meantime) to layout of Silverlight UI

Share files on-line

TFS Client download
Free Team Foundation Client install for Visual Studio.

LinQ to XML in 3 easy steps

Going Open Source Series & Working With Open Source Companies - 3 RedMonk White Papers

TestDriven .NET now has support for Silverlight 2.0 Beta 1
Only ad-hoc tests supported thus far though

Hacking Visual Studio to Use More Than 2Gigabytes of Memory

Defining Silverlight DataGrid Columns at Runtime

Silverlight - the song

Implementing Generic Caching

Daily Links 28/02/2008

Downgrade a VS 2008 .sln or .csproj to VS 2005

Hosting options in WCF
Host your web service in IIS, a windows service, a managed application, or WAS (Windows Process Activation Service)

an old article I found helpful on how it initialise hosted WCF Services
... I was quite surprised at the lack of documentation out there for this kind of behaviour, since twice now I've developed services, and both times required initialisation mechanisms.

.NET 3.5 Brings Major (Undocumented) Changes to ThreadPool
plus a follow up post

(Links) - Silverlight 2/WPF Tutorials
The silverlight tutorials are the same ones that I mentioned previously (from ScottGu's blog)

MSDN Reader application
"The MSDN Reader allows you to browse through MSDN Magazine articles like never before. Read through articles, view figures and code snippets in an intuitive and easy-to-use experience." Source code is also available

LINQ to SQL In Disconnected/N-Tier scenarios: Saving an Object
There is a link to other LinQ to SQL tutorials in the comments

Daily Links 25/02/2008

ScottGu has just posted some handy tutorials on the soon-to-be-released silverlight 2.0


NSpecify
an interesting look at evolving NUnit testing

Code performance analysis in VS 2008

Data-Driven testing with VS 2008

How to follow DotKicks.com efficiently
plus handy DNK widgets

Digitally signing an XML Document and verifying the signature

Microsoft Makes Strategic Changes in Technology and Business Practices to Expand Interoperability

another blog post on the subject

C# .NET Gmail Tools

Do try...catch blocks hurt runtime performance?
short answer.. no, it doesn't.

Top-10 Application-Design Mistakes
mostly to do with UI design

Daily Links 11/02/2008

TDD for Beginners Series
for those of us who keep meaning to get into TDD and would like a simple place to start

C# Sorting evolution
Illustrates the improvements of C# from 1.0 - 3.0 using sorting as an example.

Calculate the distance between 2 geoCodes (lat / long) in C# / Javascript

Visual Studio 2005 Addins for NAnt and NUnit

ShortGuid - a shorter and URL friendly Guid class in C#

Latest Link List from Scott Gu

Secured Subversion on Windows
using SSH withouth having to install Apache

I recently got locked out of my SQL 2005 using the sa account: to fix this, login using windows authentication, and run this query: "ALTER LOGIN sa WITH PASSWORD = 'yourPassword' UNLOCK"

Daily Links 01/02/2008

The "Boo" Open-source langauge
"Boo is an object oriented, statically typed language for the common language runtime with a Python inspired syntax and focused on language and compiler extensibility."

ASP.NET MVC Links Collection
Links to help get you started in understanding ASP.NET MVC

VS 2008 Web Deployment Project Support Released

ADO.NET Data Service (Astoria) in plain English

LinQPad (free)
The "SQL Query Tool" for LinQ - support SQL / Objects / XML etc
Great way to get to learn the qurey language. Also ships with over 200 examples from the "C# in a Nutshell" book from Albahari

10 ASP.NET Performance and Scalability Secrets

Daily Links 23/01/2008

Free Professional Diff Tool from SourceGear

Attach to Asp.NET process with keyboard shortcut (custom VS macro)

ASP.NET web service tips - documentation
How to add custom help pages to your web services

.NET Framework Library Source Code now available

Debug into .NET framework source code :)

Visual Studio 2008 Multi-threaded debugging feature
Keep track of which thread is running what code in the IDE - neat

Rhino Mocks Hello World
very simple quick-start for using Rhino Mocks (framework for loading mock business objects into your unit tests)

Subsonic and MVC: Introducing Makai

Best C# web sites

WCF Communication Options in the .NET Framework 3.5

I recently struggled a bit with getting my silverlight application to resize with the
browser using the following hook in C# code:
BrowserHost.Resize += new EventHandler(BrowserHost_Resize);
(placed in the Page_Loaded event handler of the main page.xaml)
The event just wouldn't fire when the browser resized :|
...until I discovered that you need to change the auto-generated
TestPage.html properties to the following: (specify percentages instead of pixel size)

.silverlightHost { width: 100%; height: 100%; }

Daily Links 04/12/2007

.NET Framework detection sample code

Top 10 reasons why NOT to buy Visual Studio 2008

Tricks to increase SQL Server query performance

Golden Rule of Web Caching

SQL Server 2008 will have IntelliSense

AjaxDataControls GridView Part One

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit and Web Deployment Project Releases for VS 2008

Daily Links - 23/11/2007

What is the MVC noise all about, anyway?
Pt 1
Pt 2
Pt 3

New Compression Features in SQL Server 2008

Snippet Editor for Visual Studio 2005/2008

Linux install for newbies
"Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 7.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions"

Optimise SQL Server queries with these advanced tuning techniques

DLinq (Linq to SQL) Performance

Cruise Control.NET and VS 2008 web projects

SVN Server
"everything you need to install, configure and manage Subversion server for your team on Windows platform."

Reducing Server Load and Network Traffic in REST/Ajax Architectures

Exploring one of M$ AJAX's often overlooked features

Daily Links - 21/11/2007

InterSystem's Cache
"high-performance object database that runs SQL five times faster than relational databases"
It's got free (single user) download, so check it out.
Anyone have experience in using Cache? Leave a comment.

15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton.

Yet (E)Another Tab Interface Implementation (YETII)
"simple, yet functional tab interface implementation"
Javascript tab interface

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions
Visual Studio 2008 Express All-In-One DVD image file

AJAX Control Toolkit
AJAX Control Toolkit Samples

SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition (for Mobile Devices)
"1.7MB free redistributable runtime engine for SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition"
Downlaods

JavaScript TimePicker
Nifty clock interface with drag functionality on hour and minute hands