Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 12/12/2010

Friday, December 17, 2010

What do Babel, icons and Intellisense have in common?

DevCurry - Intellisense Icons in Visual Studio

“When you are using Visual Studio Intellisense completion list, you must have observed a collection of icons as shown below

There are 179 such icons and have you ever wondered what do all these icons mean? These are called Babel Icons and you can have different icons for a method depending on whether it is public, protected or private. Here’s a snapshot of these icons …” [GD: Post Leach Level 90%]

MSDN Library - Babel Icons

“The Babel Package comes with a collection of icons that are used in the IntelliSense completion lists and in the drop-down bar used for quick navigation. Most of these icons are arranged in sets of six variations, where each variation corresponds to the access concepts of public, internal, friend, protected, private, and shortcut. For example, you can have different icons for a method depending on whether it is public, protected or private.

These icons are defined in babelservice.idl in the ScopeIconGroup and ScopeIconMisc enumerations. For example, to specify a protected method, you can use (IconGroupMethod * IconGroupSize) + IconItemProtected.

The Icons

The following icons are available for use in Babel:

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Doubt I’ll ever need this, but I thought it was pretty cool that not only was the rhythm and reason behind these icons, but that it was public and published information too…

10 ways to reduce technical/code related tutorial, video, whitepaper, presentation and training… um… suckage…

Jesse Liberty - Ten Requirements For Tutorials, Videos, Demos and White Papers That Don’t Suck

“I read a lot of tutorials, and most of them suck.

Sorry, but they do; they almost tell you what you need to know and then you are left hanging; with your code not quite working and you can’t figure out why.

It is time to write down some best practices for writing tutorials; then once the list is complete, you can email a link to the list to the author of the next tutorial you read that sucks.

This is a first attempt; finalizing it will be up to you helping me get it right.

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Jesse provides some great advice and suggestions in this post. If you’re writing training materials, demos, tutorials, etc PLEASE read it…

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

“Windows Phone Programming in C#,” the Curriculum (think “Stuff to help teach Windows Phone Dev… Code, Demo’s, Pptx’s, Labs, 152 page eBook, etc”)

Required Verbage - my garbage collector > New Windows Phone 7 Curriculum available!

“One of my final jobs in the Academic Team was to commission / review / edit a complete Windows Phone curriculum for Computer Science. It’s differentiated from the MS materials in that it (mostly) takes a code-first approach to WP7 (rather than a feature-first approach) – therefore it’s particularly useful for complete novices to programming.

That said, Rob’s got a wonderful writing style, and the handbook is probably a great introduction to WP7 development for *anyone*. Also included are hands-on-labs and PowerPoint decks.

…”

Microsoft Faculty Connection - Windows Phone Programming in C#

“This material, created by Rob Miles, is an introduction to Windows Phone development for anyone learning to program. It contains 8 sections with labs, PowerPoint presentations, demos and detailed notes.

…

File Name: Windows_Phone_Programming.zip

Resource ID: 8729

Publication Date: 11/01/2010

Language: English

Download Size and Type: 79.00 MB Zip file

…

This material is an introduction to Windows Phone development for anyone learning to program. It assumes some knowledge of programming fundamentals, but will teach you programming concepts in the framework of Windows Phone development. This information does not teach basic programming principles. The assumption is that you already know how to write and run simple C# programs on a Windows PC.

The following sections are included in this material:

Windows Phone 7
In this chapter you are going to find out about the Windows Phone platform as a device for running programs. You will learn the key features of the platform itself, how programs are written and how you can sell your programs via the Windows Marketplace.

Introduction to Silverlight
This section looks at Silverlight and how to use it to create a user interface for your programs.

Introduction to Visual Studio 2010
When you write programs for Windows Phone you will be using Visual Studio. This section will take a look at the process of creating and managing Windows Phone projects. It will also show you how to run and debug Windows Phone programs using the Windows Phone emulator program. This allows you to test your programs without needing to have a device. However, this is not just a look at how to use Visual Studio. You will also find out how Visual Studio manages the content that makes up the solutions.

User Interface Design with Silverlight
Section 2 looks at some of the elements provided with Silverlight. In this section you are going to build on your skills and delve a bit more deeply into what Silverlight can do. By the end of this section you should be able to create useable, multi-page Silverlight applications that will work on a Windows Phone.

Consuming Data Services
One of the things that make a Windows Phone very useful is the “connectedness” that it has. It allows the user to consume network services wherever they are (as long as they can get a signal). This makes it possible for some genuinely new kinds of applications, particularly if you add in the way that the device is also location aware. In this section you explore the ways in which C# programs on the device can connect to and use data services provided by the network.

XNA Overview
After all the hard work in the previous sections now would seem a good place to have some fun and play some games. You can write games in Silverlight, but that is not really what it was designed for. XNA on the other hand was built from the ground up to be an efficient and powerful tool for game creation. In this section you are going to take a look at XNA and how to use it to create games for the Windows Phone device.

Creating Windows Phone Applications
You now know enough to make programs run on the Windows Phone device. In this section you will take a look at what it takes to turn a program into a “proper” application. This includes a variety of topics, from how to give your program a custom splash screen and icons to how a program can store data on a phone device.

Windows Phone Marketplace
You now know enough to make complete applications and games that will work correctly within the Phone environment and use the built-in features of the phone system. In this section you are going to find out how you can take your completed applications and submit them to the Windows Phone marketplace and maybe make some money from them.

…”

Here’s a snap of the zip;

The doc;

And some thumbnails to give you a feel for some of the content;

How is this resource not awesome? ;)

“Developing a Silverlight Application for Windows Phone 7” Refcard
“Creating High Performance Silverlight Applications for Windows Phone” - 1 zip, 6 samples and 26 pages
Microsoft Patterns & Practices “Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide” RTW
Windows Phone 7 Dev for Beginners… And we’re talking absolute, new to development/programming, just learned to spell IDE, beginners
A one-stop-dev-shop for WP7 Dev, the “Windows Phone 7 Development Best Practices” wiki.
Windows Phone 7 Dev - Your directions to coolness with the “Educational Roadmap”. [Phase 2:Performance - Part Two Samples now available]
12 for 7 - The 12 Windows Phone 7 Development Jump Start sessions are now available on demand (we’re talking 600’ish minutes, yeah, 10 hours, of WP7 Dev’ness)
Windows Phone 7 Jump Start–Four free three hour (12 hours total) virtual sessions to jumpstart your WinPhone7 development (Space is limited)
Windows Phone 7 in 7 – Learning how to develop for Windows Phone 7, in 7 minute blocks… [Coming soon, starting April 5th]
Windows Phone Developer Training Kit, now April and VS2010 RTM Fresh…

WordPress for Windows Phone 7 app RTW (Free and open source too!)

WordPress for Windows Phone 7

“WordPress for Windows Phone 7 makes it easy to manage your blog or website while on the move.

Writing and editing Posts and Pages is a breeze, as well as being able to quickly moderate comments and check statistics. And it's all made to get you in and out quickly.

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…”

WordPress for Windows Phone 7 - Development

“WordPress for Windows Phone is an Open Source project, which means anybody can get involved and help evolve the project. Wikipedia explains it well:

Both the app and the source code are free for you to download and use in any way you want. Of course we’d greatly appreciate your help in making WordPress for Windows Phone even better, so if you know your way around the code, or if you just have some good suggestions for the app, you’re more than welcome to contribute to the project.

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SVN Source (https://windowsphone.trac.wordpress.org/browser?order=name)

“…”

Not having a WP7 to load this on means I can’t play with yet, but the fact WordPress released the source makes it “officially cool” in my book.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Plugins.Live.com is now… (i.e. the new Movie Maker, Photo Gallery and Windows Live Writer Plugin gallery)

meraTechPort - Windows Live Plug-ins site launched !

“The plug-ins are one of the most useful additions to various Windows Live products. These enhances the usefulness immensely. Now a new , neat , clean site has been created featuring these plug-ins.

http://plugins.live.com/” [GD:Post leached in full]

Windows Live Plug-ins (plugins.live.com)

I have to thank Microsoft, and the team behind this, for not forcing all plugin authors to resubmit our plugins… THANK YOU! :)

Also thank you for keeping the plugin download statics. For example, on my Text Template WLW Plugin , found here Text Template, you can see the 9K downloads from when it was on the gallery.live.com.

I do like the clean UI and presentation. It does feel simpler, cleaner and easier than the old gallery implementation. I still like the Visual Studio Gallery and VS2010 Extension Manager better, but this is a good step forward.

Thoughts (in random order):

Search?
Plugin Author Submission editing (i.e. I’d like to edit the description for my plugin)
Online submission form (instead of the email)
RSS Feed
More Team Transparency (I’d really like to hear more from the Windows Live/WLW team. What they are working on, plans, etc, etc… something maybe like the CodePlex team?)

In any case, this is MUCH better than I originally feared. Thank you again MSFT/team for listening :)

Monday, December 13, 2010

LINQPad isn’t just for development any more… (Chris Sells and how he uses it as a budgeting, as in money, tool)

sellsbrothers - Using LINQPad to Run My Life: Budgeting

“I use LINQPad all the time for a bunch of stuff, but most recently and most relevant, I’ve been using it for a personal chore that isn’t developer-related: I’ve been using it to do budgeting.

What is LINQPad?

LINQPad is an interactive execution environment for LINQ queries, statements or programs. The typical usage model is that you point LINQPad at a SQL database or an OData endpoint via a dialog box and then start writing queries against the tables/collections exposed by that connection, e.g.

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You’ve GOT to love developers. We’ll so some the weird stuff because, well… we can! I mean what in life can’t be fixed with a little code? :P

Seeing Chris do his budgeting in LINQPad, one of the must have .Net development utilities, really tickled my fancy (okay, it made me snort-laugh… ;) and I just had to share it…

“Developing a Silverlight Application for Windows Phone 7” Refcard

DZone Refcardz - Developing a Silverlight Application for Windows Phone 7

“Overview

Windows Phone 7 is a new platform bringing together developers from the .NET, Silverlight and XNA eco-systems into the mobile development arena. This DZone Refcard combines reference information and tips for developing and publishing a Silverlight application for the platform using Visual Studio.

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