Brian (and Infragistics) is having a theme give-away... As in giving away some of their WPF and Silverlight themes

Brian Lagunas - FREE Metro Light and Dark Themes for WPF and Silverlight Microsoft Controls The quest for a good application theme never ends.  You spend hours scouring the realms of Google and Bing looking for a clean, modern, and touch friendly theme to use in your application.  That is, until now!  If you have been looking for a free Metro theme for WPF and Silverlight, then look no further. Infragistics ships a number of...

Read More

MarraLAB for Visual Studio, your new DDE (Debugging, Deployment Environment)

Visual Studio Gallery - MarraLAB for Visual Studio Traditionally, esoteric knowledge on how to tear down, troubleshoot and debug applications has been difficult to surface, discover and reuse among teams: MarraLAB solves this problem. MarraLAB helps teams graphically surface solution-specific scripts, processes and workflows ... CREATED BY: Grey Ham (BrekIT) SUPPORTS Visual Studio 2012 LAST UPDATED 5/31/2013 VERSION 0.5 ... ...

Read More

TechEd Reveal - Looks like BizTalk ain't dead yet... BizTalk Services on Azure to be announced next week?

Winson's Technical Multiverse - BizTalk Services (on Windows Azure) prequel Once the NDA lifts, I will be able to provide additional information on what is known as BizTalk Services. This should be in early next week. ... Interesting! Good to see BizTalk isn't dead and is being "cloudified"... Depending on price, options, etc, this might spur adoption. Then again, thinking about how I've heard of BizTalk being used, getting the biz to buy off on it being in the cloud might be interesting. Then again, it might be a no brainer too. Looks...

Read More

From A to W... The US Gov goes Git (and API crazy too). There's an insane about of data, API's and OSS projects from the US Government...

Nextgov - White House Releases New Tools for Digital Strategy Anniversary The White House marked the one-year anniversary of its digital government strategy Thursday with a slate of new releases, including a catalog of government APIs, a toolkit for developing government mobile apps and a new framework for ensuring the security of government mobile devices. Those releases correspond with three main goals for the digital strategy: make more...

Read More

Windows 8.1 Pre-beta WinRT API Spelunking (Think, "What's new in the Win8.1 WinRT API's" or "Wow, this is a ton of information..." or "OMG, Justin needs a life..." ;)

Justin Angel - Pre-beta Windows 8.1 WinRT Developer APIs In this article we’ll review new developer WinRT features that’ll be released in the upcoming Windows 8 release (dubbed “Windows 8.1” / “Windows Blue”). Microsoft recently announced that during June 2013’s BUILD conference a developer preview of Windows 8.1 will be released for download. In the meanwhile many Windows 8.1 “leaked” images are available online. These “leaked” images allows...

Read More

Edward Farley and the Fantastic Library - A 12 part tale of the Entity Framework Code First

Software Meadows - Edward Farley and the Fantastic Library Part 1 1) Preface 2) Introduction 3) A Simple Table 4) One to One or Many 5) Zero or One to Zero or Many 6) One to Zero or Many 7) One to Zero or One 8) One to One 9) Many to Many, Simple 10) Many to Many with Payload 11) Enumerables 12) Inheritance Entity Framework 5 Code First Relationships Preface When I started this series about Entity Framework, I needed a good metaphor for the database relationships. I decided on...

Read More

SQL Server Database Project SqlBuildTask failing after installing SSMS 2012 SP1? Here's how to fix it (Update your SSDT)

Michael Mairegger's Blog - Error 04018: The “SqlBuildTask” task failed unexpectedly I intend to use a SQL Server Database Project in my Visual Studio Solution to manage the database. This is a very nice feature and you should try it. Nevertheless, after upgrading the SQL Server Management Studio 2012 to SP1 I was not able to build the SQL Server Database Project anymore. I always got the following error message: Error 2 04018: The “SqlBuildTask” task failed unexpectedly. System.MissingMethodException: Method not found: ‘Void Microsoft.Data.Tools.Schema.SchemaModel.DataSchemaModel.Serialize(System.IO.TextWriter,...

Read More

Your plate will never be full with all the great Geek Champ Windows 8 Templates...

Geek Champ - Design Templates Here's an example of one... Windows 8 App Design Template: News Project Description News template is an emulation of a News app with placeholders for News category, article and video data. Download package includes the following: Source (C# and JS) Package Snapshots Documentation Enough cool templates to get you going? Maybe?   Related Past Post XRef: ...

Read More

Go long and thanks for the 1's, 2's and 3's... Lotus 1-2-3 (and SmartSuite, Organizer) is to be no more...

IBM - Software withdrawal and discontinuance of support: Lotus SmartSuite , Lotus Organizer and Lotus 123 Effective on the dates listed below, IBM® will withdraw from marketing, part numbers from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement: Effective on the dates listed below, IBM will withdraw support from the following product release(s) licensed under the IBM International Program...

Read More

Many events, lots of devices, one you and your new Channel 9 Events App

Channel 9 - Stay Connected with the Ch9 Events App No matter what device you're bringing to TechEd this year, be sure to bring the Ch9 Events app with you! Browse all the content of the conference, follow your schedule, and stay connected throughout the event. Download Ch9 Events for Windows 8 | Windows Phone | iOS | Android After creating your account in the app, link it to your Channel 9 account to enable synchronization of your personalized...

Read More

Extended WPF Toolkit gets all v2.0 and now includes AvalonDock too!

Extended WPF Toolkit  - Extended WPF Toolkit - 2.0.0 What's new in the 2.0.0 Community Edition? Improvements and bug fixes Another 67 improvements were made for v2.0.0 Community Edition, including some new controls, almost as many as last releases' record-breaking 70. See the complete list of improvements in v2.0.0. New! Live Explorer app available online as a Click Once app. Try it now! Today only, get the...

Read More

Cool Kid Training from Pluralsight, that's free too! Because coding kids are cool kids, right?

Pluralsight - Kids Portal Your kids use technology everyday. Yet schools don't teach them how to program or code. With Pluralsight, now every kid can learn the basics of programming languages and building apps. And best of all, it's absolutely free. ..." Something to keep the kids busy this summer! THAT should have been the title of this post... lol...

Read More

Visual Studio ALM Ranger Solutions Catalog - All ALM, all awesome...

Willy's Reflections - Visual Studio ALM Ranger Solutions Catalog The following Visual Studio ALM Rangers solutions have been developed for the ALM community: While I usually keep ALM Ranger stuff for RadioTFS this was just too awesome a resource to not share here too. Seeing all this on one page really shows the level of cool that are the ALM Rangers and their work... I mean, like, wow......

Read More

Just the SSMS Mama, just the SSMS... (Getting just SQL Server 2012 SQL Server Management Studio)

STRATE SQL - Get Just The Tools: SSMS Download Ever jump on a machine to connect to a SQL Server and find out… whoops! No tools.  For some reason, the client machine doesn’t have SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) installed.  Now I’m not talking about not having the SSMS installed on the server, but on the local workstation that you need to connect to the server with. No tools has happened to me many times and, in fact, happened...

Read More

"The database is slow!" Here's a SQL Server Performance Crib Sheet [well almost book] that might help you...

simple-talk - SQL Server Performance-The Crib Sheet Contents Introduction Overview Measuring Performance Perfmon Perfmon Counter Set Using perfmon Evaluating perfmon data Server health Memory Memory Grants Pending Lock Requests/Sec Deadlock/Sec ...

Read More

A little heritage of the BSOD

Quora - Blue Screen of Death: Who designed the original Windows Blue Screen of Death? John Vert, ex-Windows NT kernel guyex-Windows NT kernel guy Back in 1991 I wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (and a truly gnarly bit of code it was!). I used the white on blue colors for two reasons. The MIPS workstations we were using for the MIPS port had firmware that presented a boot option screen in white on blue, so it made sense that the bugcheck screen...

Read More

"Hello dotPeek plugin" Creating a dotPeek plugin is New Project, NuGet easy...

JetBrains - Creating plugins for dotPeek In a previous post, we’ve seen that dotPeek supports creating and loading plugins. The NuGet plugin for dotPeek is a good example to demonstrate how to get started creating plugins for dotPeek. Sources for this plugin are available on GitHub. But let’s create a plugin of our own! Before we start: dotPeek does not have a formal SDK yet. However it shares a lot of commonalities with ReSharper. In fact:...

Read More

Okay, Okra! Windows Store Templates that make MVVM apps, and pages, easier and quicker

Andy On WPF, Windows 8 and Beyond - Windows Store MVVM Templates for Visual Studio If you have ever tried to create a Windows Store application using the MVVM pattern then you will probably have found that the Visual Studio project and item templates are a bit cumbersome. I often find myself adding a new page to my projects using one of the default templates, only to need to rewrite it to follow the MVVM pattern before I can even start adding...

Read More

GBoD [Geo-distributed Bunch of Data centers] or "Using Dark Fiber to Replace Diesel Generators"

Microsoft Research - Using Dark Fiber to Replace Diesel Generators Cloud providers and other data center operators use geo-distributed data centers. But these data centers largely continue to employ the same designs as were appropriate for single data centers. These designs are wasteful because they do not take full advantage of geo-redundancy. Geo-redundancy can reduce other redundancy at multiple intermediate layers in individual data centers...

Read More

More on Mission Control (Coding4Fun Style) "A Flexible API for Remote Device Control"

Channel 9 Coding4Fun - MissionControl - A Flexible API for Remote Device Control In a race to optimize everything, developers often go to extremes to build software that performs routine tasks. MissionControl is a system that allows users to program a control center that stores interfaces with attached hardware sensors, allowing the users to control any other devices that can be activated via the underlying protocol. For demo purposes, the MissionControl...

Read More