Technology Post Roundup–6th Edition

In Canada, we’re fortunate to have many community experts and MVPs. Throughout the month, they write about and talk about some really cool things. Many of you have told us that you’d like it to be easier to discover them and what they’re writing about. The team and I will be curating top picks and sharing them with you in frequent technology post round ups.

Windows 8

• Windows 8 and the WebSocket Protocol by Kenny Kerr
  The WebSocket protocol aims to provide bidirectional communication in a Web-saturated world dominated by clients solely responsible for establishing connections and initiating request/response pairs. In this article, you’ll see how the WebSocket protocol works and explain its relationship to the larger TCP/IP suite. You’ll then explore the various ways in which Windows 8 enables programmers to easily adopt this new technology from within their applications.

• State of the Windows Store on December 2012: number of apps, average price, popular categories by Andrei Marukovich
  A look into some Windows 8 app numbers.

• Handling binding between WinRT Image control and ViewModel for local file system images by Andrei Marukovich
  For some reason file:// URIs are not supported and it is not possible to use Uri to display, for example, image located in the Pictures Library. In this case, the application needs to load image files manually.

• Adapting UI of Windows 8 app for available pointer devices by Andrei Marukovich
  WinRT includes several classes that allow to identify attached input devices: TouchCapabilities, MouseCapabilities and KeyboardCapabilities.

Windows Azure

• Table Storage 2.0 by Tyler Doerksen
  This post has been a long time coming. In late October the Windows Azure Storage Team released a new version of the storage services API libraries. At first these libraries were shipped with the Azure SDK, then later provided by NuGet but used the same version number as the Azure SDK. Now even the version numbers are different, where the latest Azure SDK is 1.8 the storage API is on version 2.0.
• Demo Code for my “Windows Azure As the Backbone” talk at DevTeach by Erez Harari
  See how easy it is to create a web-api based app using the Visual Studio 2012 wizard, deploy it to Azure and then create Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 apps that uses the service from within Azure.
• Windows Azure Active Directory Federation In Depth (Part 2) by Steve Syfuhs
  In my last post I talked a little bit about the provisioning and federation processes for Office 365 and Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD). This time around I want to talk a little bit about how the various pieces fit together when federating an on premise Active Directory environment with WAAD and Office 365. You can find lots of articles online that talk about how to configure everything, but I wanted to dig a little deeper and show you why everything is configured the way it is.
• EF5 Code-First Migrations on SQL Azure - Reference Not Supported by James Chambers
  What you should be doing when migrating to SQL Azure.
• Know Your Network - The Azure Service Dashboard by James Chambers
  Having trouble viewing your Windows Azure Website? In spite of all the inner voices' assurances, it might not be you.
• Upgrading to Azure SDK 1.8 by Tyler Doerksen
  Recently I had to work with an older Azure solution which was originally written on Visual Studio 2010 and Windows Azure SDK 1.6. When I opened the solution in VS 2012 it prompted me to upgrade the SDK version which caused a few problems.

Windows Phone

• How to avoid application settings corruption when a background agent is used by Sébastien Lachance
  Using IsolatedStorageHelper to assist in exchanging settings between the background agent and the application.
• XAML coding convention by Sébastien Lachance
  With time, conventions form. Here are a few.

Visual Studio and ALM

• My collection of favourite TFS utilities by Aaron Kowall
  So, you’re in charge of your company or team’s Team Foundation Server.  Wish it was easier to manage, administer, extend?  Well, here are a few utilities that I highly recommend looking at.
• Scale out Team Foundation Service Build Server by Ahmed Al-Asaad
  In this article, Ahmed setups up an on premise Build Server to build Windows Store applications that are hosted in tfs.VisualStudio.com.
• Deploying Test Data for MSTest by David Alpert
  MSTest, the unit testing framework from Microsoft that ships out of the box with the last few versions of Visual Studio, has a great feature whereby tests run through Visual Studio are not run in the output path of the project (like other common testing frameworks in the .NET space) but are rather copied after build to a TestResults folder with a unique name and run there.

.NET Programming

• Entity Framework Code First aka Magic Unicorn by David Paquette
  Slides and demo code from the December 11th Calgary .NET User Group session.

SQL Server

• Microsoft SQL Server 2012 File Tableby Eric Moreau
  Introduction to the FileTable feature which is a great enhancement over the FileStream. In short, the FileTable feature let users store files within a special table in a SQL Server database straight from Windows (not having to do anything special). Most users won’t even know the file is in fact stored in a database.

Of Interest

• SOLID as an Anti-Pattern by David Alpert
  An article about how applying some of the SOLID principles can become an anti-pattern, when using them makes your software more brittle and resistant to change rather than less.
• Calls to GetManifestResourceStream Always Return NULL by James Chambers
  If you are trying to load resources that are compiled into your assembly as Embedded Resources, it appears you can't use extra "dotting" in your naming convention or the compilers won't properly add your file to the manifest, at which point all calls to GetManifestResourceStream will return null.
• Kinect SDK and Windows 8 by Erez Harari
  Microsoft Kinect SDK is claimed to work under Windows 8. Well, before you run-off starting to develop your next Kinect multi-touch experience for the Windows 8 UI, it is important that you know that there are limitations to that.

If you’ve come across a great technology post and think we should share it, please let us know by sharing the post in the Canadian Developer Connection LinkedIn group. Make sure to share how the post helped you get something done. I’m sure your fellow developers would appreciate the insights.

Until next edition!