latest posts

• How to Debug a Windows 8 Metro Secondary Tile I've been working on Chapter 7 of my upcoming book, Designing Windows 8 Metro Applications with C# and XAML . This chapter focuses on tiles and toast notifications. In the Windows 8 runtime, it is incredibly easy to prompt the user to pin a secondary... Jeremy Likness' Blog 05-19-2012, 8:09 AM Filed under: metro, secondary tiles, tiles, windows 8, windows runtime, winrt

• The Task: Async and Await in a Windows Runtime World In my last blog post , I covered how to wrap your arms around the Task class and its relationship to the new async and await keywords. I mentioned that the post was focused on the .NET Framework only because the Windows Runtime handles these operations... Jeremy Likness' Blog 05-14-2012, 11:43 PM Filed under: asynchronous, task parallel library, windows 8, windows runtime

• The Task: Events, Asynchronous Calls, Async and Await Almost any software application today will likely contain a long-running process. “Long-running” may be a relative term but in the Windows Runtime it is specifically anything that could take longer than 50ms to execute. That’s a fairly small window, and... Jeremy Likness' Blog 05-11-2012, 1:42 PM

• Sample Applications from Designing Silverlight Business Applications I've received a few emails regarding the book that the code files are not available from the publisher website. I've spoken with the publisher about this and they are working to correct it, but I wanted to provide a link for those of you who have been... Jeremy Likness' Blog 04-15-2012, 2:42 AM

• CodeStock 2012 Thanks for everyone's support and votes. I have been selected to present two sessions at CodeStock 2012. Per the CodeStock website: CodeStock is a two day event for technology and information exchange. Created by the community, for the community —... Jeremy Likness' Blog 04-09-2012, 1:34 AM Filed under: codestock, metro, mvvm, windows 8, winrt

• Designing Silverlight Business Applications Officially Released In June of 2011 I started the journey of writing a Silverlight book. The Silverlight team was about to release version 5 with an incredible set of new features that would revolutionize how it can be used in the enterprise. I knew there were already a... Jeremy Likness' Blog 04-05-2012, 5:24 AM Filed under: c#, metro, silverlight, silverlight 5, windows 8, windows runtime, winrt, xaml

• The Top 10 Features Windows 8 Metro Developers Will Love Windows 8 Metro is a new platform for developing applications that are tailored to the devices on which they run. These devices may include traditional desktops and laptops as well as the new tablet and slate form factors. In this article I cover the... Jeremy Likness' Blog 04-03-2012, 6:02 AM Filed under: c#, metro, windows 8, xaml

• Using NuGet PowerShell to Replace Missing Macros in Dev 11 When I first heard that macros were being dropped from Dev 11 I was gobsmacked. (I just love that world!) While the macro story up to Visual Studio 2010 wasn’t great because we couldn’t write macros in our .NET language of choice, I expected the situation... John Robbins' Blog 03-30-2012, 4:55 PM Filed under: Debugging, Visual Studio

• .NET and Metro: The Windows Runtime and the CLR on Windows 8 Many developers tend to look at Windows 8 as a completely new platform and even question whether it heralded the imminent demise of managed code. After spending many months digging into the Windows Runtime (WinRT), Metro style or “tailored” applications,... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-29-2012, 12:53 PM Filed under: .net, windows 8, winrt

• Wintellect T-shirt Design – Help us pick our new design! It’s time for a new Wintellect t-shirt and we want your help. Our Wintellectuals have been hard at work creating designs that we hope all of you will want to wear! We have narrowed down the top 2 designs internally and we want to ask each of you for your... Flirting with Technology 03-26-2012, 2:32 PM

• Jounce MVVM WCF RIA Printing and More Example I finally managed to update and upload my To-Do List Reference Application . This is a Silverlight 5 application based on my Jounce framework that demonstrates a number of different features. I built it as part of my book, Designing Silverlight Business... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-22-2012, 2:52 PM Filed under: Jounce, mvvm, navigation, out of browser, silverlight 5, silverlight printing, wcf ria

• Get Your Next Job Here!! We are growing like crazy at Wintellect and want you to work for us! We’d prefer full time employment, but would be happy to also work with some of you excellent independent contractors. At this time we need candidates to be based in North America. What... John Robbins' Blog 03-16-2012, 4:34 PM Filed under: Wintellect

• Understanding the Portable Library by Chasing ICommand (3 of 3) Part 1: Creating the Portable Library (this post) Part 2: Portability in Silverlight and WPF: a Tale of Type Forwarders Part 3: Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair (this post) Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair In this series... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-14-2012, 12:16 AM Filed under: .net framework 4.5, metro, portable library, windows 8

• Updated PowerShell Scripts to Manage Symbol Server and Source Server Settings With Dev 11 Beta now in our hot little hands, I needed to update my symbol server and source server PowerShell scripts that automate setting up a developer machine. I’ve packaged up all the scripts previously published on this blog into a module, WintellectPowerShell,... John Robbins' Blog 03-13-2012, 8:28 PM Filed under: Debugging, PowerShell

• Understanding the Portable Library by Chasing ICommand (2 of 3) Part 1: Creating the Portable Library Part 2: Portability in Silverlight and WPF: a Tale of Type Forwarders (this post) Part 3: Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair Portability in Silverlight and WPF: a Tale of Type Forwarders In the last... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-09-2012, 9:20 AM Filed under: metro, portable library, silverlight, windows 8, winrt, wpf

• What’s New in SOS for .NET 4.5? One of these days Microsoft will release a version of .NET where we don’t have to worry about memory. HA! Who am I kidding!? All you worry about in a .NET application is the memory. Naturally, I personally never want Microsoft to come out with the memory... John Robbins' Blog 03-08-2012, 4:27 PM Filed under: Debugging

• Understanding the Portable Library by Chasing ICommand (1 of 3) Part 1: Creating the Portable Library (this post) Part 2: Portability in Silverlight and WPF: a Tale of Type Forwarders Part 3: Portability in Metro: A CLR and WinRT Love Affair The portable library tools have been available for several months now. The... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-08-2012, 12:45 PM

• Cool Dev 11 Trick: Diff Random Files Easily Dev 11 has a diff and merge view that is simply outstanding and using it to compare changes before checkin is just dreamy. I ran into a situation where I wanted to diff the output of two files and thought that it would be nice if I could do that in Dev... John Robbins' Blog 03-07-2012, 8:56 PM Filed under: Visual Studio

• Windows 8 Icons: Segoe UI Symbol Here’s a quick and easy tip for developing Windows 8 Metro applications. Are you looking for decent icons to use in your Application Bar ? Windows 8 makes it incredibly easy by using the built-in Segoe UI Symbol font. There are tons of icons embedded... Jeremy Likness' Blog 03-06-2012, 2:28 AM

• Using the New Caller Information Attributes for Reliable Property Change Notifications As anyone who has implemented the INotifyPropertyChanged interface knows, the fact that the PropertyChangedEventArgs takes a property name as a string means that you are one fat-fingered mistake away from a bug that can sometimes be difficult to track... John Garland's Blog 03-04-2012, 10:03 PM

• Fixing Stuck/Hung Build in TFS Preview and Dev 11 Beta Build Server Realizing I hadn’t updated my build server that ran against TFS Preview to the Beta Dev 11 TFS, I upgraded the machine and ran into a problem. The first queued build stuck and could not be canceled or deleted from the queue, thus blocking all builds.... John Robbins' Blog 03-03-2012, 3:22 PM Filed under: Bugs, TFS

• Initial Thoughts After Using the Dev 11 Beta for Two Weeks So today is the day everyone gets to see if that monochrome/metro UI look for Visual Studio Dev 11 works. Given the huge number of “constructive criticism” comments   that everyone gave on the first look it will be very interesting to see what people... John Robbins' Blog 02-29-2012, 12:08 PM Filed under: Reviews, Visual Studio

• Windows 8 Consumer Preview 101 It’s finally here! Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you have heard the buzz around the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. If you haven’t had the opportunity to grab it and install it, I suggest you browser over to this link now and download your copy!... Jeremy Likness' Blog 02-29-2012, 4:27 AM Filed under: consumer preview, windows 8

• Going to the MVP Summit (or in Seattle)? We’d Love to Meetup! So I guess February 29th ought to be quite interesting with Windows 8 Consumer Preview and VS 11 being released. An even more important date is Monday February 27th as that’s when we are holding a Wintellect Tweetup where we want to hear your thoughts... John Robbins' Blog 02-24-2012, 2:10 PM Filed under: Wintellect

• What are YOU Looking for in the Consumer Preview? It seems there is quite a bit of anticipation surrounding the imminent release of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. I've read the speculation about what it will actually include, or not include, and if this release really means anything in the larger scheme... Jeremy Likness' Blog 02-24-2012, 5:06 AM