Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 01/04/2015

Thursday, January 08, 2015

Coding4Fun Toolkit Lives! v2.0.9 released with more WinRT/WP 8.1 support

Invoke IT Limited - Coding4Fun v2.0.9 released #wpdev #windev #winrt

Coding4Fun toolkit v2.0.9 for Windows Platform dev has been released and packages are available for download from Nuget.

This update builds additional support for Windows Runtime on Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1. Controls added to this release include

MetroFlow control (Windows 8.1 and WP 8.1)

Prompts (Toast, User, Message, Input, PasswordInput) for WP 8.1

BrushToBrushConverter now allows use of parameter to set output Opacity.

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SubramanyamRaju Windows Phone Tutorials(C# - XAML) - Great News! Coding4Fun Toolkit Controls are supported for Windows Phone 8.1- Part 1 (C#-Xaml)

Introduction:
Yesterday i found from twitter as 'Coding4Fun Toolkit is Supported for Windows Phone 8.1'.And i want to be say thanks to Hermit Dave for sharing this info on twitter. Now Coding4Fun toolkit v2.0.9 for Windows Platform dev has been released and packages are available for download from Nuget.
In WindowsPhone 8.0 we got lot of additional controls from Coding4Fun,The Coding4Fun Toolkit has multiple controls and useful items for XAML based applications.And current version v2.0.9 includes following controls.

MetroFlow control (Windows 8.1 and WP 8.1)

Prompts (Toast, User, Message, Input,About, PasswordInput) for WP 8.1

BrushToBrushConverter now allows use of parameter to set output Opacity.

Note: In Version 2.0.8,support was added for windowsphone store 8.1 and now more controls were ported across in 2.0.9. So that 2.0.9 is second version for wp8.1 store :)
...This article will teach you about 'How to use MessagePrompt control in WindowsPhone store 8.1 ?'.

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Coding4Fun Toolkit

I thought I was seeing things when I started seeing activity on the Coding4Fun Toolkit project. Nope, it's alive and still kicking... Okay, so it wasn't a huge release, but still it's STILL a release! Kudo's to the new team and their work...

Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.5.0 Now Available...

Coding4Fun Windows Phone Toolkit (CF4 Blog Post)

Coding4Fun.Phone.Toolkit v1.3 Released (New Message Prompt, Password Prompt controls and Toast fixes + now NuGet'able too)
The Coding4Fun team has done it again, released another “Kit” that is… The Coding4Fun Windows Phone Toolkit
CF4DevKit (Coding 4 Fun Development Kit) 1.0 Released
Cool Coding with VS2008 and Vista via the Coding4Fun Developer Kit 2008 Vol 1 (Beta

Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition ($9,975 value WITH updates/support) now available for free for individual and small companies

SuperDevResources - Free Toolkit worth $9,975 from Syncfusion for Individual Developers & Small Companies

Syncfusion has decided to follow the steps of Microsoft and is giving a great New Year present to Individual Developers & Small Companies. Similar to Visual Studio Community Edition, Syncfusion is now offering free License for its product Essential Studio which includes over 650 components across 12 platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows & Windows Phone.

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Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition Community License

WHAT IS THE COMMUNITY LICENSE?

The Essential Studio Enterprise Edition Community License provides free access to our entire product offering for individual developers and small businesses

What's included?

All products available in Essential Studio Enterprise Edition and Syncfusion Plus are included. This comprehensive offering includes over 650 components across 12 platforms, an easy-to-use big data platform, and much more. Support and updates are also included.

FAQ

Who is eligible?

Individual developers or up to five users at companies with annual gross revenue below $1 million USD.

Can the products be used to build commercial applications?

Yes.

How long are the licenses valid ?

The community licenses do not expire. You will continue to receive support and updates for new versions.

Why are you doing this? What's the catch?

We loved what Microsoft did with Visual Studio Community Edition and decided to extend it to our products as well. There is no catch, but we would really appreciate it if you help spread the message through Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

We really like what you are doing. How can we help?

We hope to add even more value to this program in the future, but we need your help in reaching more developers. We would appreciate any help spreading the message through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, email, or blogs.

WOW. Now that's a gauntlet thrown! I wonder how the other top tier component vendors will respond?

My VM is larger than yours... (32 vCPUs, 448GB RAM, 6.59 TB SSD... oh my)

Azure Blog - Virtual Machines - Largest VM in the Cloud

Today, we’re announcing the release of a new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud. This extraordinary performance will allow customers to deploy very large scale-up enterprise applications. G-series offers up to 32 vCPUs using the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 family, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. ...

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Learn More

If you would like more information on the G-Series VM sizes as well as other Azure VM Sizes then please see the following page for additional details: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure

Now THAT's a VM! Nearly 1/2 TB of RAM, 7TB local SSD... yeah... wow. That would eat up my MSDN Azure credits in about 4 seconds... lol

.NET Code Contracts are now OSS

CodeContractsDotNet/CodeContracts

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs.

The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages. We currently provide three tools: Runtime Checking. Our binary rewriter modifies a program by injecting the contracts, which are checked as part of program execution. Rewritten programs improve testability: each contract acts as an oracle, giving a test run a pass/fail indication.

Automatic testing tools, such as Pex, take advantage of contracts to generate more meaningful unit tests by filtering out meaningless test arguments that don't satisfy the pre-conditions.

Static Checking. Our static checker can decide if there are any contract violations without even running the program! It checks for implicit contracts, such as null dereferences and array bounds, as well as the explicit contracts.

Documentation Generation. Our documentation generator augments existing XML doc files with contract information. There are also new style sheets that can be used with Sandcastle so that the generated documentation pages have contract sections.

Quick Links

Download: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1ec7db13-3363-46c9-851f-1ce455f66970

FAQ: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/faq.aspx

Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/codecontracts/threads

JabbR chat room: https://jabbr.net/#/rooms/CodeContracts

Nice to see this open sourced, given the recent silence about it...

Wednesday, January 07, 2015

"Wax keeps your candle burning" (You'll get that if you know WiX)

Visual Studio Gallery - Wax

Wax keeps your candle burning
While it's easy to create an empty setup project with the WiX toolkit, populating the list of deployable files and even more keeping the list up to date can be a very fumbling task.

This tool is a Visual Studio Extension that helps you to create, verify and maintain the list of deployed files in an interactive gui.

Documentation, source code etc. can be found on https://waxsetupeditor.codeplex.com/

I know, I know. "Real WiXers don't need no stinkn UI!"

Well, I guess I'm just not a real WiXer then. :P

While the Visual Studio Setup and Deployment support is back for VS 2013, Visual Studio 2013 gets Installer Projects support back!, WiX is still a great setup/installer choice, if you can get over the learning curve (i.e. XML editing). There's a number of extensions that will help you there, with this one, Wax is a new entry. Plus its source is available too.. :)

Rich Interactive Narratives - RIN Studio download now available

Microsoft Research - RIN Studio - RIN Authoring tool

Rich Interactive Narratives (RIN) is a technology developed by Microsoft Research. RIN offers a way to seamlessly combine cinematic experiences with user exploration to create rich interactive and immersive narratives. One example of RIN is Everest project done in collaboration with GlacierWorks as described here: http://blogs.windows.com/ie/2013/05/28/internet-explorer-reaches-new-heights-on-the-web-with-everest-rivers-of-ice/. The Everest tours found here (http://explore.glacierworks.org/en/) are implemented using RIN. More example narratives can be found at http://digitalnarratives.net. RIN Studio is an authoring tool for creating these RINs without any coding. RIN Studio provides an interface similar to video editing tools. The output is delivered as RIN JSON files that can be hosted using RIN JS (http://rinjs.org) in any web server. The narratives can also be published in windows store as apps. Contact rindev at microsoft -dot- com if you have questions or want to use it in commercial scenarios.

digitalnarratives

GlacierWorks:Everest

Here's a snap of the Desktop RIN Studio app;

Check out the RIN examples first. They will really wet your appetite. Then grab the RIN Studio and start building your own!

This is SO Blade Runner... Extracting facial images from reflections in your cornea in highrez pictures

Identifiable Images of Bystanders Extracted from Corneal Reflections

Abstract

Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-resolution face photographs, we were able to recover images of unseen bystanders from reflections in the subjects' eyes. To establish whether these bystanders could be identified from the reflection images, we presented them as stimuli in a face matching task (Experiment 1). Accuracy in the face matching task was well above chance (50%), despite the unpromising source of the stimuli. Participants who were unfamiliar with the bystanders' faces (n = 16) performed at 71% accuracy [t(15) = 7.64, p<.0001, d = 1.91], and participants who were familiar with the faces (n = 16) performed at 84% accuracy [t(15) = 11.15, p<.0001, d = 2.79]. In a test of spontaneous recognition (Experiment 2), observers could reliably name a familiar face from an eye reflection image. For crimes in which the victims are photographed (e.g., hostage taking, child sex abuse), reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators

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