Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 03/16/2014

Thursday, March 20, 2014

[Limited Time Offer] Packt celebrates their 2000th with a Two-for-One sale (Only a few days left...). [Updated Link]

[Update] Here's the official link for the campaign, bit.ly/1j26nPN...

Vinz' Blog (ProudMonkey) - Want some interesting books? Check out Packt’s amazing Buy One, Get One Free offer

Wanted to buy interesting books about web development and other related technologies in good deals? Well you must hurry because Packt Publishing are launching an exciting campaign to coincide with the release of our 2000th title. During this offer Packt is giving its reader a chance to dive into their comprehensive catalog and Buy One, Get One Free across their entire range of eBooks.

The campaign begins on 18th-Mar-2014 and will continue up until 26th-Mar-2014. Following are the benefits readers can avail during this campaign.
· Unlimited purchases during the offer period
· Offer is automatically applied at checkout

Packt Publishing celebrate their 2000th title with an exclusive offer - We've got IT covered! (bit.ly/1j26nPN)

Known for their extensive range of pragmatic IT ebooks, Packt Publishing are celebrating their 2000th book title `Learning Dart’– they want their customers to celebrate too.

To mark this milestone Packt Publishing will launch a ‘Buy One Get One Free’ offer across all eBooks on March 18^th – for a limited period only.

...

Their books focus on practicality, recognising that readers are ultimately concerned with getting the job done. Packt’s digitally-focused business model allows them to quickly publish up-to-date books in very specific areas across a range of key categories – web development, game development, big data, application development, and more. Their commitment to providing a comprehensive range of titles has seen Packt publish 1054% more titles in 2013 than in 2006.

Erol Staveley, Publisher, says `Recent research shows that 88% of our customers are very satisfied with the service knowing that we offer a wide breadth of titles in a timely manner, and owing to the quality of service that they receive 94% of customers are willing to recommend Packt to friends and family. It’s great that we’ve hit such a significant milestone, and we want to continue delivering this fantastic content to our customers.’

Here are some of the best titles across Packt's main categories - but Buy One, Get One Free will apply across all 2000 titles:

Web Development

Big Data & Cloud

Game Development

App Development

With this and the O'Reilly MS Press sale, [Very Limited Time Offer] O'Reilly offering 60% off on ALL ebooks from Microsoft Press (one week only!), you should be able to get just about every MS Dev eBook in the known universe (or so). At least enough to fill your read queue for a bit... like a decade or two... :)

[Very Limited Time Offer] O'Reilly offering 60% off on ALL ebooks from Microsoft Press (one week only!)

Tatworth - Microsoft Press 60% E-book deal

From now until 26th March 2014 05:00 PT, O'Reilly are offering 60% off all Microsoft Press E-books at ...

Farewell Microsoft Press!

For one week only, Save 60% on *all* ebooks from Microsoft Press

Microsoft Press is leaving oreilly.com, and we want to send them off in style by celebrating with a 60% off ebook Farewell Special.

This is your last chance to purchase DRM-Free Microsoft Press ebooks via oreilly.com. Get lifetime access to your books, read them on all your devices, and sync them with your Dropbox, Kindle, and Google Drive accounts. All of your Microsoft Press ebooks will continue to be available in your oreilly.com account.

oreilly.com will continue to be your best source of authoritative ebooks and video training on Microsoft technologies from O’Reilly, Wiley, Wrox, Packt, Infinite Skills,
and more.

Use discount code WKFAREW - Deal expires March 26, 2014 at 5:00am PT, and cannot be combined with other offers. Offer does not apply to Print, or "Print & Ebook" bundle pricing

60% off is an awesome offer. If there's an MS Press ebook you've had your eye on, now is the time to grab it at a great price...

Six videos toward helping you upgrade your inner DBA to SQL Server 2014'ness

Channel 9 - Updating your Database Management Skills to SQL Server 2014

Do you manage online transaction processing (OLTP) database workloads? Want to learn about the new and enhanced capabilities in SQL Server 2014 to help you do so? Watch this course to learn about enhancements and capabilities new to SQL Server and the Microsoft data platform since the release of SQL Server 2008.

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (01) Making the Most of…

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (02) Mastering Your Data

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (03) Managing Data Quality

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (04) Always-On High…

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (05) Managing Security

Updating your Database Management Skills to Microsoft SQL Server 2014 : (06) SQL Server and the Cloud

Since the RTM bits are not yet available you can get a jump on your friends and co-workers and start upgrading your DBA brain cells to support (or sell to your bosses) SQL Server 2014. As I've said, this is a pretty awesome release and there's a great deal to grok. The sooner you start...

MEF'ing with WP8 (or Now you're "cooking with MEF")

.Netitude - WP8 Breaks Bad (cooking with MEF)

Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework is somewhat of an unsung hero in the .Net world in my opinion. The framework itself is insanely powerful and magical but when you combine it with other patterns and frameworks like MVVM it becomes pure sorcery. If you haven’t checked out MEFedMVVM, I suggest doing so after you get up to speed on MEF and what it is and offers you as a developer.

Recently, the DotNet team announced an update to their Microsoft.Composition nuGet package (MEF 2) which brings MEF-ability to Windows Phone 8.

To understand what MEF proper (ie: full-blown on the desktop) is and how you can use it, there are numerous examples throughout the interwebs. Check out this one and this one for a good start/overview.

What I couldn’t find, however, were actual code examples of using it on Windows Store or Windows Phone apps. The Windows Store support has existed for a few months now, so that surprised me. Let there be light!

(more…)

...

Now imagine that you separate out your classes to other assemblies, or simply add new classes to one folder w/in your project. The ease with which you can now add and remove features and objects to your applications becomes MUCH greater, and your confidence in your changes goes up dramatically – you know that you *only* added a feature, you didn’t muck with the view, change the view model, write a bunch more code, just added a new class.

Go forth and cook your apps with MEF!

.NET Framework Blog - Upcoming .NET NuGet Releases

We recently concluded a planning exercise for the next few months of work. From this exercise, we’d like to share the next set of NuGet releases that we plan to do. We chose this particular set based on your feedback and internal partner requests.

All of these packages will be released as pre-release packages on nuget.org.

Mostly I just love Brandon's post title... but this is also good news for WP8 dev's. MEF is a great framework and it can really help you build plug-in'able app's.

"Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET" [Currently] free webook (web ebook)

Kris' blog - Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET now as a free ebook

If you’re interested to update your knowledge of simply get started with Web API then there are a bunch of decent books already out there. I noticed however that Glenn Block and others at Microsoft released a book as well and, at the moment, provide for free over at http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000001708.

To get a grasp of what’s in there:

...

Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET

by Glenn Block, Pablo Cibraro, Pedro Felix, Howard Dierking, and Darrel Miller

With this digital Early Release edition of Programming JavaScript Applications, you get the entire book bundle in its earliest form—the author's raw and unedited content—so you can take advantage of this content long before the book's official release. You'll also receive updates when significant changes are made, as well as the final ebook version.

Build HTTP services that reach a broad range of clients—including browsers and mobile devices—with ASP.NET Web API. This practical guide shows you how to build evolvable HTTP services using Microsoft's new Web API framework. It included both real world design and technical guidance from members of the ASP.NET Web API team and it's early adopters. It will cover fundamentals of Web API design and how to apply them properly using the technology. You'll learn fundamentals like how to design and select a media type, how to build out your API, and then move on to more advanced topics like how to use content negotiation, leveraging hypermedia, securing and testing your API, and much much more.

While I really don't dig webooks (I love my kindle entirely too much... even Firing, as in Kindle Firing, my dev book reading...) free is a hard deal to beat.

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Link to Elastic with ElasticLINQ

Brad Wilson - Getting Started with ElasticLINQ

Jim Newkirk and I have been doing xUnit.net for 7 years now (and for Jim, NUnit for many years before that). You could say that open source is part of our blood, and when we left Microsoft, we made sure that open source would continue to be part of our daily efforts at Tier 3.

Fast forward 15 months: Tier 3 has been acquired (and is now the CenturyLink Cloud Development Center), and our first major open source effort Iron Foundry has been accepted into the Cloud Foundry Incubator project. Lots of great developers are working to ensure that you can write .NET code against a Platform-as-a-Service stack that doesn't lock you into a specific vendor.

Today we are proud to announce our second major open source effort: ElasticLINQ.

What is ElasticLINQ?

One of the major challenges when writing distributed software is how to distribute the data. When I started here 15 months ago, we had 4 data centers, and plans to expand into several more over the coming year. The data was being stored primarily in Microsoft SQL Server. As our data center footprint grew, it was becoming clear that centralized data storage was not going to scale with us. Having islands of data means that your application (and your users) can end up spending a lot of time waiting for data requests to go halfway around the world; and if there are any network glitches along the way, you might even fail to get the data entirely.

Almost right away we started evaluating alternatives that would let us keep all the data locally. We decided to use Couchbase as our primary data store, based on its extremely strong Cross Data-Center Replication (XDCR) capabilities. Many object data storage systems end up paired with an index engine for comprehensive searching capabilities. Couchbase provides an indexing integration solution with Elasticsearch, a horizontally scalable wrapper around Lucene.

The Lucene query syntax is based on JSON; ElasticSearch documents are also stored as JSON. Our developers, steeped in the worlds of .NET and SQL Server, were much more comfortable using the Language Integrated Query (LINQ) functions introduced in .NET 3.5.

ElasticLINQ bridges these two worlds by letting us query Elasticsearch using LINQ, and have the results projected into CLR types. We enlisted the expertise of Damien Guard (of Attack Pattern), who worked on both the LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework teams, to do the initial version of ElasticLINQ for us.

How do I use ElasticLINQ?

Connection and Context ...

Querying with the Context ...

Full-text searching ...

Custom queries with ElasticMethods ...

Custom queries and projections with ElasticFields ...

What's next?

This is v1.0 software, so we have a lot left that we can do. We've just recently started using this in our production code, and we are constantly finding new things we want to support. We expect you will come up with things we never dreamed of, too.

We are excited for the community to start using and contributing to ElasticLINQ. The Github site is a work in progress. Soon we will get documentation posted to the Wiki pages on the site, and get a real home page set up. We are anxiously awaiting the first community contributed bugs, Wiki edits, and pull requests.

We hope you love using ElasticLINQ as much as we do!

...

Got to love LINQ Love! :)

Now if only I knew something, anything about Elastic... :/

SQL Server 2014 RTM's, available for download on the worse possible day (no fooling)?

The Official Microsoft Blog - SQL Server 2014 released to manufacturers, will be generally available April 1

Today I am very happy to announce SQL Server 2014 has been released to manufacturing and will be generally available on April 1.

SQL Server 2014 is the culmination of thousands of hours of hard work from Microsoft engineers and thousands of hours of testing and input from our preview customers. The result is an important component of Microsoft’s overall cloud-first data platform. The platform delivers breakthrough performance, accelerated insights through tools everyone uses and the ability to scale globally on-premises and in the cloud – letting our customers get the most from their data.

This release of SQL Server is significant in that, in addition to delivering key hybrid scenarios, it rounds out our journey to embrace in-memory technology. Several years back, we began exploring the changing hardware landscape – memory being one of the key areas of focus. Today, our in-memory technology spans the core workloads in the data platform: business intelligence as part of Analysis Services, Excel and Power BI for Office 365; complex event processing with StreamInsight; in-memory columnstore in SQL Server and our data warehousing product; and now with SQL Server 2014 – in-memory transaction processing.

...

Windows Azure and SQL Server provide a continuum of capability and flexibility in deployment options for our customers – on-premises and in the cloud. Windows Azure also supports an important data workload – Windows Azure HDInsight, our Apache Hadoop-based solution in the cloud. Today, we’re announcing the general availability of Hadoop 2.2 support in Windows Azure HDInsight, which has been updated to take full advantage of the latest Hadoop 2.2 platform, including support for YARN and Stinger Phase 2.

There has never been a more exciting time in the database and broader data platform industry. In an era where nearly everything will become digitized, today we’re delivering the data platform that will help our customers digitize their business. Customers can download SQL Server 2014 on April 1 or register today to be notified once the release is available. Customers can also learn more about the release and our data platform strategy at our “Accelerate your Insights” event on April 15, where I will be joined by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and COO Kevin Turner. In addition, some of our customers deriving value from our data platform today will also be in attendance. I encourage you save the date and tune in for the event.

<rant>April Fools Day? Really? You couldn't release it a day earlier or later? Think what a Build bullet point this would have made during the Day One Keynote on the 2nd? But noooo... This will now and forever be known as the SQL Server April Fools edition.

Yeah, yeah, I know we're all tired of the April Fools crap, but ... really? really?

Don't get me wrong, I think this is one of the more existing versions of SQL Server in a while and there's some awesome tech in it. Congrats to the team, just do me a favor and smack the marketing wonk who pick this date...</rant>

Creating and adding a custom IE Search Provider (an oldie but goodie)

expression{web.blog} - Add a search provider to IE manually

I wanted to add a custom search provider to IE to raise funds for a charity. It wasn’t obvious how to do this until I found the EnhanceIE site and their SearchBuilder. Simple to use and appears to work with IE7 onwards.

...

IE Search Provider Builder Tool

Every six months or so I need to do this, create a custom IE Search Provider (using when setting up a new PC and needing to add a search provider for my blog) and I always forget this site's URL. It used to be easy to find, but in newer IE versions, not so much...

iXplain helps you explain, recording your voice, screen and pen (think "Killer Surface Pro app for anyone teaching or explaining about anything")

Australian Teachers Blog - Creating Tutorials using the Record Voice and Pen App

This post follows on with our focus on sharing tools which can help you make engaging tutorials for your classroom.

If you’re currently using a Windows 8 device and need to create a tutorial that records your voice, writing or annotations, it’s time to master the Record Voice and Pen App.

Since first exploring Record Voice and Pen, I have put it in my must-have apps for Windows 8 in Education. It is such a simple and effective app that suits a variety of skill levels. I also like that you are given the ability to save your video onto your device, then share it through whichever platform you currently use in your classroom. It is a great tool for the Flipped Classroom.

Some handy uses for tutorials made with this app include:

Flipped Classroom style tutorials

Mathematic tutorials showing working out

Explanations of diagrams in Science or Geography

Discussions of Sport positions and movement

Script writing for Foreign Languages studies

Students creating their own tutorials for each other

Students creating presentations which describe images, diagrams or concepts

...

Step 1

Install the Record Voice and Pen app onto your Windows 8 device. You can access Record Voice and Pen via the Windows Store.

Step 2

Watch video...

Step 3

Plan the tutorial that you would like to create. Here are some questions to help you plan your tutorial

...

Step 4

Use record Voice and Pen to create your tutorial. Save and upload to your video to YouTube, Vimeo, or your own online space for students to access it.

Optional Activity

Share with your peers for feedback to help you improve your tutorial style.

Record Voice and Pen is a great way to make classroom tutorials more engaging and memorable whilst also having a resource for future use. So why not have a go and share your experiences in the comments section below.

...

iXplain

Description

Explaining something in a presentation or a classroom is easy when you can use your voice, use images, and can annotate on them, all at one go. In iXplain you can record all this at once. It creates a video file which can be shared through email, Facebook or YouTube, or used in a presentation or a classroom.

Features

Recording of your voice and pen drawings at the same time

Import images

Export recordings to video files (mp4)

Supported processors

x86, x64, ARM

This and the Surface Pro and you've got a cool, fairly inexpensive, teaching tool... (and the app's price of Free doesn't hurt).

[Time Sensitive] Automagically locking your PC is just a key fob away with GateKeeper (GK-Chain). Only a few hours left!

KickStarter - GateKeeper

Multipurpose Bluetooth Smart proximity tag - never leave your phone/keys behind, keep track of valuables, or auto lock computer.

Many features, 1 device, and useful to everyone. A versatile Bluetooth 4.0 proximity tracker that performs item loss prevention, item locating, auto locks and unlocks your Mac or PC. Syncs with our Android app for even more functionality (and iOS iPhone if we reach our stretch goal). The GateKeeper (GK-Chain) is just the start of an amazing proximity technology product.

...

What's the problem?

- "$30 billion worth of phones lost in the U.S. every year"

- "Coffee shops, offices, bars and restaurants top the list as the most common venues to lose your phone in the U.S."

- "...people typically lose up to 9 items per day, which calculates to 198,743 in a lifetime!"

- "...according to Boston Marketing firm, the average American burns 55 minutes a day looking for things they know they own but cannot find. That adds up to a total of almost 14 days a year people spend just trying to find lost things."

Our reply:

Never lose or leave your phone, keys, or valuables behind EVER again

Save time by automatically locking and/or unlocking your computer

Increase security with 2-factor authentication

...

Application Scenarios:

Track Your Valuables: Purses, pets, luggage, phone - you'll be alerted when you move too far from your GK-Chain.

Parents: Can warn you if your children go out of range.

Teachers: Consistently lock your PC to prevent students from accessing it.

Health Professionals: Unlock computers automatically so that you can attend to patients.

Office: Keep co-workers or visitors from accessing your computer when you're gone.

Dorms: Don't let your friends change your Facebook status again. Ever.

Home: Protect your PC from siblings or children downloading unwanted programs.

Coffee Shop: Outside with your laptop? Ensure your privacy.

Instead of typing in your password every time, the GK-Chain unlocks your computer when you approach, and locks when you leave. Or, if you want additional security, you can set the GK-Chain to actually require the key and the password.

The GK-Chains also serve as Bluetooth 4.0 trackers. Using our free companion app, you can find your GK-Chain with a Bluetooth 4.0 enabled smartphone. This way, you'll have a little more help finding your lost keys, wallet, bag, even your luggage at the airport. The GK-Chain app will alert you when your bag is at hand.

...

This is something I've wanted for forever. I hate uber tight timeframes to auto lock my PC and I hate it when I forget to lock my PC when I walk away from it (which only happens once a month [my forgetting to lock it ;] I've wanted to use my camera or phone, badge or something to automagically lock and unlock my PC...

So backing this was a no brainer... :)

I hope they make the 40K goal so the WinPhone support achievement is unlocked. lol

(via technabob - GateKeeper Locks Your PC Automatically, Perfect for the Lazy and Security Conscious)

Monday, March 17, 2014

Eric Ligman's List of "Free Microsoft Office 365 Resources, Training, Virtual Courses..."

Microsoft Sales Excellence Manager - Eric Ligman - How To Get Free Microsoft Office 365 Resources, Training, Virtual Courses, and More

Microsoft Office 365 provides a cloud-based service that enables individuals and businesses to accomplish the tasks they want to, where they want to, when they want to, all with the familiar Microsoft Office platform they’ve been using for years. By enabling this experience across devices, both in the cloud and offline, it lets people accomplish more, easier, in a much more efficient way. Whether you are new to Microsoft Office 365 or have been using it for awhile, I thought I would let you know about many free resources we have available to you from Microsoft to help you get the most out of your Microsoft Office 365 subscription.

What’s New – Find out what’s New for each of the Microsoft Office 2013 applications you get with Microsoft Office 365:

What’s New with Word

What’s New with Excel

What’s New with Outlook

What’s New with PowerPoint

What’s New with OneNote

What’s New with Access

What’s New with Publisher

Quick Start Guides –

Microsoft Virtual Academy Sessions –

Free eBooks –

Video Sessions –

Are you a U.S. Microsoft Partner?

Support -

You've been hearing allot about Office 365 recently. If you're new to it, here's a bunch of great resources to help get you up to speed quickly... and cheaply... :)

Feel that Code Regions are the devil's work? Exorcise them with Regionator for VS2012

Visual Studio Gallery - Regionator

Regionator - removes (with vengeance) all the regions from your source with a simple click or keyboard shortcut (default Ctrl+Alt+Shift+K). Regions often hide code that should be open, organized and readable; other times they simply get in the way with unnecessary grouping that sometimes scross scopes. This extension removes all of the regions from your current c# and vb.net source file and replaces them with nothing.

This extension is open source. The sources can be found at: https://github.com/davidchipping/regionator all comments and pull requests are welcome.

Personally I don't mind regions and use them myself to help me focus on code of interest, but some feel regions are from the Devil, so might also find this tool very welcome.

Love that he released the source... :)

Going gaga for Google APIs Client Library for .NET (because it's gone GA)

Google Developers Blog - GA Release for Google APIs Client Library for .NET

We strive to make our APIs accessible to anyone on any platform: ReST, HTTP and JSON mean that from nearly any language on nearly any hardware, you can call any of our APIs. However, to be truly useful on many platforms, it helps to have a client library -- one that packs a lot of functionality like handling auth, streaming media uploads and downloads, and gives you native language idioms.

Today, we are announcing General Availability of the Google APIs Client Library for .NET.

This library is an open-source effort, hosted at NuGet, that lets developers building on the Microsoft® .NET Framework to integrate their desktop or Windows Phone applications with Google’s services. It handles OAuth 2.0 integration, streaming uploads and downloads of media, and batching requests. For more than fifty Google APIs, it is the easiest way to get access for any Windows developer. Whether you are plugging Google Calendar into your .NET Framework-based application, translating text in a Windows Phone app or writing a PowerShell script to start Google Compute Engine instances, the Google APIs Client Library for .NET can save you tons of time.

Want to try it out? Visit the Getting Started tutorial. Want to hear more about about using Google’s services from .NET? Follow the Google APIs Client Library for .NET blog here. [GD: Post leached in full]

google-api-dotnet-client Announcements - Announcing the release of 1.8.1

Did you notice we have dropped the beta and rc labels out from this release?

That's right; the Google APIs Client Library for .NET is now in GA (General Availability).

Thanks for all your help and support getting out of beta!

From today, all our Google.Apis NuGet packages are stable. There have been no real changes in the libraries since the release candidate (RC) version, but we have worked hard on improving the documentation on developers.google.com/api-client-library/dotnet/.

As usual, feel free to open new threads in StackOverflow with our google-api-dotnet-client tag for any questions, suggestions or bugs. [GD: Post also leached in full]

NuGet - Google.Apis

I've been using their .Net Library for the better part of a decade, but it wasn't as uber (i.e. as Google API wide) as this one. Anyway... Good to seem them push this forward and give it some love (kind of/mostly, but better this then dead I guess!).

Something great to note, the OneNote services API!

Office Dev Center - Getting started with the OneNote service API

In this article
Publish popular apps with the OneNote Service API
What does the OneNote Service API do?
Using the OneNote Service API is EASY
Start coding fast

Write apps to take notes, gather research, and succeed. The OneNote service API is designed to make it easy to write apps that let students do research for term papers and reports, families share plans and ideas, shoppers share images—all the things that interest them most. They use your app to grab the information they want and your app then uses the API to send the information to their personal OneNote notebook, stored in Microsoft OneDrive.

Integrate with OneNote to organize information, plans and life. Combining your apps with the simple notebook, section and pages metaphor, your app users can make plans, organize projects and groups, and handle the overflowing information that is their life.

Reach millions of OneNote users on all the major platforms. As part of Microsoft Office, and available separately on a wide variety of platforms, millions of people worldwide actively use OneNote. When you publish your apps to capture information into the fully-featured OneNote environment, the cross-platform market potential is simply too big to ignore.

Capture information in many formats. The API enables your app to capture HTML, images embedded in the request or at a URL, video, audio, email messages, and other common file types. Your app can even capture a snapshot image of a web page for historical records and archiving.

Stay tuned as we expand and improve. Capturing to OneNote is just the start for the API. We have some great ideas, and are adding features regularly. Jump in early, add capabilities as we do, and grow with us.

..."

Of today's many OneNote announcements, the best is hard to pick (free is heard to beat), but being a dev I have to pick the new OneNote Services API. With it and the new ITTT support, I've been able to make a very workflow change to how I gather the news items I find cool. Before I used favorites (yeah, yeah, I know, but it worked and has worked for years), today I've moved to OneNote, but the new Clip Note and NewsBlur - IFTTT support. I've now got full text indexing, search and syncing for everything I find that's "cool." Now that's cool! :)

And I can't wait for what else this new capability enables.

Was today the day that OneNote finally takes over? Could be... could be... (we'll know for sure if it becomes a verb, "Just OneNote it... " :)