DarksideCookie

For the last year, there have been few things in the development space I have heard as much about, as I have heard about Windows Azure. Microsoft has been pushing the Azure platform hard, we all know that, but not all of us have had the chance to try it out though.

Luckily I have had the fortune of being on a few projects that have been using it, but to be honest, I haven’t been really blown away yet. Yes…it does offer some awesome features that work extremely well in certain scenarios, but I would still claim that it isn’t for everyone. Having that said, I admit that I have only scratched the surface of the platform…

Lately however, more or less every time I hear Azure, it comes bundled with the term Service Bus. Either in “this would be such a great scenario for the service bus”, or in “wonder if we can get the service bus in there so that we can try it out”. Ok…so one of these are ok, the other isn’t to be honest… Playing with the service bus isn’t hard, as I will show you in future posts, and thus does not need to be added to a project to be tried. But before I start coding, I want to have a little rant about what it is. Or at least a rant about how I have understood it…

More...

A couple of weeks has gone by since Microsoft unveiled Windows 8 at the BUILD conference in Anaheim, and things are kind of back to normal. Except for the fact that Microsoft has gagged all of their normal information channels.

Apparently, Microsoft representatives are not allowed to talk about Windows 8 at all. And speakers at some conferences have been informed that they are not to talk about Windows 8 on stage. At least not their personal opinions. I assume that they are allowed to talk about the facts that were unveiled in Anaheim…

More...

I feel that the one thing that has been lacking here at Build is information about the fact that “old” windows application technologies are still there in Windows 8, and are just as much first class citizens as the new Metro style apps. They even have a lot on offer that the new apps don’t.

Microsoft promises that any application that runs on Windows 7 will also run on Windows 8. They are also saying, repeatedly but not loud enough, that the “old” technologies are still a very viable option for developing apps. You should not necessarily default to building a Metro style app when creating a new application. To be honest, in my world at least, I am very likely to lean towards another technology when starting a new project.

More...

Windows 8 introduces a new concept called “charms”. Charms are basically a set of features that is handled by the OS, but is used/implemented/extended by the installed apps.

That sounds really confusing…but it isn’t…or…well…I will try to explain…

When you expand the “toolbar” on the right hand side of Windows 8 (swiping from the right edge of the screen towards the center) you are faced with a couple of buttons. First off the start button (Windows logo), but also share, settings, search. These are all “charms”. A charm is basically a feature that can be called up through the OS by using that toolbar, but should be implemented by the individual apps.

More...

Ok, so I will only quickly mention this as I find it awesomely cool, but have limited information. But basically, all apps get the ability to store settings and a certain amount of data in a roaming data store. This roaming data store is then synched “up” to Live services, and then down to all the users devices. This way, all settings and app things that makes sense to have identical in all places will just be on all devices automatically.

This means that a setting only needs to be done once, and then all your devices will have the same setting. I do however assume that you can manipulate what settings are synched, but I have to check…

More...

Earlier today, I made an update to a previous post, cause I had misunderstood some things regarding WinRT. It is however getting clearer and clearer as we get more and more information.

This post is a way for me to try to explain the Windows 8 developer story as I see it today. I am probably wrong in a hundred different ways, as I am trying to stitch together lots of little pieces of information to get a bigger picture… But I am at least going to try to get what I believe down on paper, and also add my own reflections of course…

More...

Ok, so Build is onto it’s second day. A second day that has been a lot “slower” than day one. The keynote contained a lot of different information, mostly focused around connected apps and Windows Server 8, which I assume was to be expected.

The keynote did contain some gems though…

More...

Ok, that was day one of Build Windows…and I am left very impressed! I had high hopes, but to be honest I guess I still had low expectations for today, but I can honestly say I was blown away. I know I am a Microsoft fanboy, and that I like most of the things Microsoft comes up with, but people who know me also know that still trash a bunch of their things as I find them lacking. But this really seems very good!

There has been so ridiculously much information coming out today that I don’t even know where to start. The keynote had a bunch of interesting points, but the following sessions were just packed with awesome stuff.

More...

Holy f@#%&! That’s all I can say… Microsoft just pulled the biggest rabbit out of the hat ever! My expectations, as well as the rest of the attendees were high, but I really do feel that they managed to live up to those expectations and then some!

Everyone I have spoken to over lunch have been impressed and just want to get their hands on a Win8 device ASAP. It will change the way we work with Windows to an extent that I think few can fathom at the moment. But I think the companies that produce touch panels will be the ones who gain most from this new OS.

More...

At the moment, I am sitting at the back of a jam-packed room waiting for the Build keynote to begin. The room has 6 massive displays counting down the time to the start of the keynote…13:23 left…

It sounds severely geeky, but you can really feel the anticipation I the air! I am SOOOO happy that I am not doing the keynote. But hopefully they have something good enough to wow the crowd! Otherwise I would consider going on stage a suicide mission. People would rip MSFT a new one. So my expectations are high!

However, we have still not heard anything about anything! All we know so far is that the whole day is in the same MASSIVE room and the “sessions” are all called “Big Picture”.

My guess for the day…? Well, I would expect a ridiculous amount of talk about multiple connected device, and cloud based services. And the word of the day will most likely be “end-user experience”, which I think is really good. As long as Microsoft doesn’t try to copy Apple too much… It’s a fine line…

Well, time to listen to what they have to say!

PS: Sorry for having made several posts with no information at all… But it just shows you what the situation is here!