Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: 02/08/2015

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

TouchDevelop [Browser Client] is now Open Source (MIT) and on GitHub

Canadian Developer Connection - Microsoft Research makes Touch Develop open source

Touch Develop is a tool developed by Microsoft Research that allows developers to build mobile apps, games and websites in a browser. As of this week it is now open source on Git!

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s that introduced many of us to the power of programming. TouchDevelop brings that magic to modern touch-based devices. The result is a tool that you can use to write basic code using a browser and can play on websites or mobile devices

What is TouchDevelop? ...

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TouchDevelop has always been a very open tool, with developers having the ability to share their scripts with other Touch Develop users. But now they take the next step – they have released the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. You can fork it there, submit pull requests with bug-fixes or new features, submit and comment on issues in the bug-tracker, and check on latest activity. TouchDevelop consists of about 160,000 lines of TypeScript plus some CSS and a tiny bit of HTML. ...

TouchDevelop - TouchDevelop goes open-source

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s. This is how many in our team learned about programming and we wanted to bring that magic to modern touch-based devices. In very beginning, with our first Windows Phone 7 app, it was about programming your own device, 80s style.

Soon after, we have moved to the open web as the platform and added the capability to publish and share your programs (scripts) with other users in source form, so others can learn from and even improve upon them. We believe this openness has helped the platform quite a bit, with over 200,000 scripts published over the past 3 years.

Today, we’re taking another step on this path – we’re releasing the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

Join the party!

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. ...

What’s not there

You’ll notice we’re not releasing the source of our Windows Phone and Android apps, as they will become obsolete very soon, when we switch to Apache Cordova. Also, running a cloud back-end for a major service like TouchDevelop is costly and complicated. We’re thus not expecting you to do that (and we’re not releasing the back-end). Instead, you can run your forked version of the TouchDevelop client web app against our cloud services. This will work as long as you’re running the client on localhost. If you want to run it from a different domain, drop us an email and we can talk about it.

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Microsoft/TouchDevelop

TouchDevelop is a touch-friendly app creation environment for iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux developed with <3 at Microsoft Research. Our mobile-friendly editor makes coding fun, even on your phone or tablet!

This repo contains the source code of the TouchDevelop editor. If you are intending to write TouchDevelop scripts, you probably want to go to touchdevelop.com:

stable: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app

beta: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app/beta

Other pages of interest:

landing page: https://www.touchdevelop.com

blog: https://www.touchdevelop.com/blog

Hour Of Code tutorials: https://www.touchdevelop.com/hoc

What's in this repo?

The repo is mostly written in Typescript with tiny pieces of HTML gluing.

This repo contains the source code for:

the browser client

the compiler

the editor

the runtime

the node.js client

However, you will not find the cloud backend code here. Indeed, https://www.touchdevelop.com takes care of storing and managing the scripts.

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute to TouchDevelop....

I tweeted this earlier, but wanted to follow-up with a normal blog post (and there's also going to be a Coding4Fun, http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog, post on it next Wednesday too ;)

The two words a DBA or Dev loves to hear, "It's Slow..."

Brent Ozar - “It’s Slow” Is Not A Metric

When I start a SQL Server Critical Care with a client, the first thing I ask is, “What is your #1 pain point? Where does it hurt?” The answer I hear most often is, “The server is too slow”.

I’m a runner. If I was able to run a 5K race at an 8:30 per mile pace, I would think I was the fastest runner on earth. The world record for a 5K by a woman is at a 4:34 per mile pace. She would think an 8:30 pace was…slow.

Slow is relative.

Slow is not a metric.

In order to effectively measure our systems, we need metrics.This is why baselines for our systems are so essential.

Getting Started with Baselines ...

Tools for Baselines ...

Have metrics, not feelings

“Slow” is relative. “Slow” is not a metric. You never know when someone is having a bad day and everything feels slow to him, or he needs to rush out the door early because his kid is sick, or she is getting ready for vacation and time has slowed down in her world. Measure and track. Numbers don’t lie.

Brent says: You get what you measure. The instant you start putting a graph on your cubicle wall, people start paying attention.

Kendra says: User complaints per day is also a metric! Find out what parts of the application people are complaining about and what their experience is specifically. As you work through issues, “Numbers of complaints solved” is a really useful metric for your next performance review.

I swear, Brent and team have someone slipping them information from my day job [Yes, I'm looking at you... ;] We've recently been having some "It's Slow" and conversations and "Prove It" benchmark tests so this topic is nice and timely.

It's also funny just how long us Dev's and DBA's have been having this conversation. I remember fielding "It's slow" questions around my VB1 app running on Windows 3.1 (where we had to use a floppy disk to do our daily information transfers... lol...). The answer is still the same today, "define slow"...

Monday, February 09, 2015

"Mort"

I see this on the train home and chuckle every time. Do you know why? (As a long time MS Sphere Dev, where would I have heard this before...hum...)

Yep, you guessed it [and I'm not going to say a thing about someone being something of an old timer...(in Net Years at least;) ], one the VS 2005 Personas.

You all remember the "Mort" flamewars? Seeing this brings me back... (I was, and am, a Mort and damn proud of it! :)

Pluralsight Learning Path Dev Insanity ("Understanding the .NET Framework", "C# End to End" & "T-SQL CRUD")

Pluralsight blog - Learning Path: Understanding the .NET Framework

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Learning path objective:

The courses outlined in this learning path provide a comprehensive look at the operation of the CLR, as well as a tour of key classes in the Framework Class Library that every .NET developer — regardless of the type of application or service they’re building — should understand.

Target audience:

This learning path is designed for developers who have been introduced to C#, and want to develop a deeper understanding of the foundation upon which every .NET application is built.

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Pluralsight blog - C# End to End

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Learning path objective:

The goal of this learning path is to take you from having little to no experience with C# to understanding how to leverage the language’s advanced features and how it works on the CLR. This includes basic logic flow, generics, interfaces, collections and enumerables, extension methods, asynchronous operations and LINQ.

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Pluralsight blog - T-SQL CRUD

CRUD! It’s everywhere. And by CRUD I mean the Create/Read/Update/Delete operations used by applications that rely on persistent storage. In my career, I would venture that 90 percent of the applications on which I’ve worked have revolved around CRUD operations against a relational database. Transact Structured Query Language (otherwise known as T-SQL) is a superset of the ANSI SQL language that operates on Microsoft SQL Server. Being able to leverage T-SQL is key to incorporating SQL Server in your business workflows and custom software applications.

Learning path objective:

This learning path aims to help make you proficient in using T-SQL to query and manage data on SQL Server 2012. The path begins with gentle introductions to reading and updating data using ANSI SQL, and then guides you through more specialized aspects of applying T-SQL to business problems including working with dates and times, XML data, Common Table Expressions and analytic functions.

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Want even more? Check out all their Learning Paths, http://blog.pluralsight.com/category/learning-paths

Podcasting 101

MaximumPC - How to Start a Podcast

The ABCs of podcasting

Car rides and long commutes have been mitigated by the immense popularity of podcasts. What’s great about podcasts, unlike radio, is that they’re largely democratic endeavors. Anyone and everyone is free to record, edit, and publish their own podcasts.

In an effort to help out any aspiring podcasters out there, we’ve decided to outline the process in a guide. Now’s probably a good time to plug our kickass No BS Podcast, because it’ll act as our benchmark for what we’re trying to accomplish. We can’t guarantee that your podcast will be the next Serial, but we’ll teach you how to get your finished product out to the masses

Planning the Podcast ...

Recording the Show ...

Editing the Recording ...

Exporting the Podcast ...

Getting it on the Web ...

Wrapping Things Up

With your podcast listed on iTunes and Stitcher, you should be all set to produce spectacular shows on whatever schedule you set for yourself. With each episode, you’ll have to upload the file, convert another Google Drive URL, and post the episode on your blog. FeedBurner and your content providers will do the rest.

This is mostly for my reference. I hope to start helping produce the RadioTFS Podcast (no, it's not dead... just sleeping a little) and thought this post would REALLY come in handy... And who knows, maybe I can start my own
Cool Thing of the Day/Week/Month" podcast or something. :)