wintellect-blogs|Sep 10, 2013

Synergy between Services and Directives in AngularJS

You’ve probably heard it a thousand times now. “AngularJS teaches HTML new tricks.” The way it does that is through directives. In my last related post I covered how to build a testable filter. Directives can be tested in a similar fashion, but what happens when they have to interact with the rest of your…
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wintellect-blogs|Sep 7, 2013

Fixing Outlook Hangs

Wintellect’s most important client, my wife, comes to me and says that her Outlook desktop application is all messed up. It hasn’t connected and downloaded emails in over five hours. She’s rebooted the computer and done basic Outlook trouble shooting that she found on the web but Outlook never connects to her Exchange server. Considering…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 15, 2013

Testable Filters with TypeScript, AngularJS and Jasmine

The T6502 Emulator displays a set of registers to indicate the status of the program counter (where in memory the CPU is looking for the next set of instructions), the values of registers (temporary storage in the CPU) and a special register called the “processor status.” The processor status packs a lot of information into…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 12, 2013

Handling Windows 8 Orientations in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 eliminates the concept of a “snapped” or “filled” view and allows apps to run at a variety of sizes. The minimum default size is set to 500 pixels wide, but this can be overridden for legacy apps or apps designed specifically for the narrower resolution. The changes can make migration difficult, however. If…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 9, 2013

Commodore 64 Meets AngularJS and TypeScript

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been spending a lot of time working with a combination of technologies that I believe make it easier and more efficient for large development teams to build enterprise web applications. TypeScript gives JavaScript some discipline and AngularJS brings XAML-like declarations to HTML. Although I’ve been using this power-packed duo…
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wintellect-blogs|Aug 8, 2013

Adding Intelligence to the IntelliSense for Windows Azure Mobile Services

Some of the members of the Visual Studio Windows Azure Tools & Mobile Services teams recently published instructions for “Enabling IntelliSense for Mobile Services JavaScript in Visual Studio.”  Since working with the Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) server-side JavaScript files can be a little bit of a blind experience – debugging happens primarily through strategic…
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azure-mobile-and-cloud-computing|Aug 2, 2013

Managing Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) Server Scripts with Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Git

Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS) has come a long way in a few short months.  At the 2013 Build conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced more than the service’s General Availability date – it also showed that the service had been integrated into the Visual Studio 2013 Preview in several key places.  These included a…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 11, 2013

What’s New for Developers in Windows 8.1

Microsoft recently released the Windows 8.1 Preview, providing developers everywhere with a first glimpse at what they need to do to prepare for the next release of the operating system. 8.1 may sound like an incremental release, but the next version of Windows is packed with features enabling developers to create better, faster, richer Windows…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 8, 2013

30 Years of Hello, World

I recently took a vacation the same week as the 4th of July and had lots of time to reflect upon my career to date. It was a little shocking to realize I’ve been writing code for nearly 30 years now! I decided to take advantage of some of the extra time off to author…
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visual-studio-alm-tfs-and-scrum|Jul 3, 2013

TFS Build Numbers & File Version Now with Hosted TFS Build Support

Over the years I’ve been posting on the blog here at Wintellect a set of MSBuild tasks that make it easy to get the TFS Build number during a build and use it as your binary version string. You can read about that code here and here. In a nutshell, you modify your C#, VB,…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 25, 2013

Improving the Readability of Windows Store Tests

I’ve grown to appreciate the value that testing adds to software development. In my opinion many developers spend far too much time focusing on the red herring of code coverage or writing tests just to check them off, rather than the real benefits they provide when you take a more Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. Although…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 19, 2013

MVVM and Accessing the UI Thread in Windows Store Apps

Any developer who has worked with MVVM in WPF, Silverlight, or Windows Store apps has likely run into the issue of executing an action on the UI thread. This most often happens when work has to be done on another thread. It is a common mistake to perform the work and then attempt to set…
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