Monthly Archives: October 2013

Oct 18

Visual Studio 2013 Resources

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Visual Studio 2013 became available yesterday, bringing a lot of goodness to the best IDE for development on the Microsoft stack. With the announcement of the public availability of Visual Studio 2013, a big number of blog posts and other resources, addressing the new versions features, were also made available. It soon became obvious to me that somehow, I needed to keep the links to all these resources in an easily accessible way, not only for immediate familiarization with the new Visual Studio features, but also for future reference.

Scott Guthrie’s Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework is probably the most comprehensive post about all the new features, not only in Visual Studio, but also in ASP.NET. From the path to unification of the several ASP.NET sub-frameworks (WebForms, MVC, Web API, etc.), to OWIN support, including references to supported authentication mechanisms, responsive templates based on Bootstrap, tooling improvements in Visual Studio and other goodness, Scott’s post is an excellent introduction to the new Visual Studio and ASP.NET changes.

On the .NET Web Development and Tools Blog, Xinyang Qiu’s Announcing release of ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013 offers another overview of some of the new offerings, that complements Scott Guthrie’s post. It offers a slightly more technical perspective and addresses some new goodness that wasn’t covered in Scott’s post.

The Visual Studio page in ASP.NET’s official website, includes multiple videos from Scott Hanselman and Mads Kristensen on multiple features of the new Web Editor: Browser Link, CSS, JavaScript, Publishing, Page Inspector,  HTML Editor and HTML 5 support. It also includes posts from other members of the ASP.NET team, on subjects such as Scaffolding, Web Project creation and Browser Link. Finally, it includes the release notes for Visual Studio 2013. Scott Hanselman’s blog includes the videos in his latest post on Visual Studio, SCREENCASTS: What’s New in Visual Studio 2013 – learn over lunch!.

The Visual Studio website features a What’s New in Visual Studio 2013 page that includes some Channel 9 videos on the Preview and RC editions. It also highlight some of new features, from the editor to web app development and new features on the accompanying release of Team Foundation Server 2013.

Jon Galloway’s Top things web developers should know about the Visual Studio 2013 release focus is web development. The post addresses mostly content from resources already presented, but it includes some details on specific features that will make web developers’ life easier. It also includes a set of top links for the most relevant content on the new VS and ASP.NET.

Web Essentials for Visual Studio 2013 1.0 also shipped yesterday. It can be downloaded at the previous link and read Mads Kristensen post announcing the release. You may also be interested in Mads Kristensen talk at Build:  Visual Studio 2013 for Web Developers: Deep Dive. Schabse Laks’s Making Web Development Wonderful Again with Web Essentials is another very interesting article on Web Essentials.

Andrew B. Hall’s .NET Memory Analysis Enhancements in Visual Studio 2013 is one day older than the other posts linked so far. It details the new memory analysis feature introduced in the Ultimate edition of VS 2013. He had posted initially about the same issue, in June – Using Visual Studio 2013 to Diagnose .NET Memory Issues in Production, a post that has now been updated to reflect the changes in VS 2013 RTM.

Prakash Tripathi’s What’s new in VS 2013 (RC) for web developers? is a bit weird article, as it still refers to the Release Candidate when the RTM is already out. Anyway, it offers an itemized list of new features and enhancements, for web developers, in Visual Studio.

Patrick Desjardin’s Three Top Features That Will Help Improve Your Productivity with Visual Studio 2013 covers three new features of Visual Studio 2013: the possibility of viewing a method’s return value, peek definition, covered by some of the other links here, and the possibility of seeing a map of the code in the scrollbar.

Ken Egozi’s Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5 addresses attribute routing, introduced with ASP.NET MVC 5.

Philip W.’s ASP.NET Web API 2 is out! Overview of features provides an overview of the features in the new ASP.NET Web API 2 version.

P. Kelley’s Git network operations in Visual Studio 2013 describes Visual Studio support for Git network operations.

Although posted a little while ago, Cathy Sullivan’s Notifications in Visual Studio 2013 provides an excellent overview of the notification features in Visual Studio 2013.

Sateesh Arveti’s Look at Peek Definition Window in Visual Studio 2013, addresses the new Peek Definition feature, that allows in place modifications of methods or classes defined in a file different from the one where coding is being done.

Jerry Nixon’s Everything I know about Behaviors in Blend for Visual Studio 2013 addresses Behaviors in Blend for Visual Studio 2013.

Mickey Gousset’s Deep Focus on Your Code with CodeLens describes and shows examples of CodeLens,a new feature in Visual Studio 2013, that shows information about the code, directly in the code editor.

Pranav Rastogi’s ASP.NET features in New Project Templates in Visual Studio 2013 describes the features in the new project templates in Visual Studio 2013.

Tom Dykstra’s Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013 covers the creation of web projects in Visual Studio 2013.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi’s Remote Debugging a Window Azure Web Site with Visual Studio 2013 provides a remote debugging walkthrough, using Visual Studio and the Azure SDK.

John Garland’s New in Visual Studio 2013 – Windows Azure Mobile Services Integration addresses Visual Studio built-in support for Windows Azure Mobile Services, a set of services made available by Azure to address typical backend service needs of mobile applications.

Jeffrey T. Fritz’s One ASP.NET – Welcome to the Web Development Buffet! presents the One ASP.NET web project type, that allows the use of Web Forms and MVC in the same project.

The ASP.NET Official site has several articles on Identity in ASP.NET and how to use it with Visual Studio 2013.

Dina Helmy’s What’s new in VS2013 for Windows Phone Developers presents some XAML editor enhancements that improve Windows Phone development in Visual Studio 2013.

Johan Ohlin’s 8 great features in Visual Studio 2013 presents some of the most interesting features in Visual Studio.

Andrew B. Hall’s Just My Code for ASP.NET in Visual Studio 2013 presents Just My Code for Javascript, a feature included in Visual Studio 2013 to provide a better experience when debugging Javascript code.

Shehab Fawzy’s What’s new in Visual Studio 2013 for Windows 8.1 developers? highlights some of the Visual Studio features that matter to Windows 8 developers.

  In a summarized version, we have:

Oct 13

My links of the week – October 13, 2013

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This weeks links cover multiple subjects from to NoSQL to Performance Tuning and  Responsive Design.

  • Buck Woody’s Data Science Laboratory System – Document Store Databases is the 9th article on a series hosted on the Simple Talk website, on setting up a Data Science Laboratory server. The whole series is a great read. In this article, the concept of a document store database is presented. The system chosen for the server is MongoDB and the author provides a brief walk-through of the installation process and includes links to multiple useful references on MongoDB. An excellent read.
  • Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Team Data Access for Highly-Scalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence is a guide to on how to design and build applications and services that can take best advantage of SQL and NoSQL databases by combining them into a polyglot solution. It provides an end to end walk-through of a business application that uses SQL Server with a variety of NoSQL databases, showing how the designers selected the databases to closely match the various business requirements.
  • Brent Ozar’s Performance Tuning kCura Relativity is an excellent overview on how to approach performance tuning in a real world case and includes links to other useful resources for performance tuning. A great article on performance tuning.
  • Jes Schultz Borland’s Get a Report of Your Server’s Top 10 Worst Queries provides a guide to finding a SQL Server server 10 worst performing queries, and building a report with the results, using SQL Server Reporting Services. The article includes additional links that may be of use, even to tune the offending queries, once you find them. A good read.
  • Allen McGuire’s My DBA Toolbox is a good example of a DBA toolbox. Includes links to tools, scripts, articles and blogs that should be present in a DBA’s arsenal.
  • SMG Research Reveals DBA Tools Not Effective for Managing Database Change is an unsigned article that addresses some findings of a study that “examines the views of application development and deployment professionals in large organizations with $100 million or greater in IT department spending”. Including in the findings is the high number of organizations surveyed that feel that the DBA tools available are not very effective dealing with database application changes. The article includes a downloadable infographic with some interesting and surprising figures. A very interesting read.
  • Kenji Hiranabe’s Modeling in the Agile Age: What to Keep Next to Code to Scale Agile Teams raises the question of whether modelling is still useful, in an age where Agile methods are mainstream and working code and tests are considered the most important team artifacts. The article proposes a strategy to overcome the difficulties of making models live beyond conversations, based on keeping “big picture models” on architecture, domain model and key use cases. An excellent read.
  • Rockford Lhotka’s Does .NET Have a Future? addresses the future of .Net as a relevant technology. The author’s opinion is that not only .Net, but also Java and the underlying operating systems (Windows, Unix / Linux) will gradually fade away into “the misty twilight of time”. The article explains how this relevance fading will occur and how developers can deal with the this obsolescence and points to Javascript as the alternative platform. An interesting read.
  • Konstantin Lebedev’s So We Wanted To Build A File Uploader… (A Case Study) is an article describing Russian email provider Mail.ru development of a file uploader to overcome the difficulties experienced with their previous Flash based uploader. An attention grabbing article on the development process, up to the final result, a file uploader using multiple technologies and freely available on GitHub.
  • Daniel Mall’s Now With Responsive, is a great walk-through on the conversion process he used to make the site responsive. The article addresses several steps, from CSS to Sass conversion, changing the page location where javascript is loaded, using webfonts and resolution independent graphics. A very interesting read.
  • Rachel McCollin’s Design-Based Media Queries proposes a rethink of the way breakpoints are usually employed in designs. Considering the frequent design-based media queries are becoming untenable,  due to the explosion of devices used and the multitude of resolutions featured, Rachel proposes defining breakpoints based on the design, to make sure that the designs adapt to any devices widths while ensuring readability and to ensure that navigation items are large enough to be used in touch based and mobile devices. A very interesting read.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.