Having great samples to help you learn about any programming language or paradigm can be very valuable. In my opinion, a good sample can be characterized by: Being easy to replicate Having clear steps that guide the reader to replicating the behavior of the sample into their own code base is param...
Building extensions for Visual Studio has its challenges, but as the new PM on the extensibility team I’ve made it my mission to make it easier. One way of doing that is to provide features that can take some of the pain out of common tasks associated with extension authoring. Here are three brand ...
It’s a new year! Even though years are an arbitrary construct and all that, you feel reinvigorated! Alive! Ready to take on the world! And you’ve read all those posts and tweets and instatumblrs about blogging! They’re pretty compelling, really, and you’re in a suggestible st...
If you’ve ever created an MSDeploy web package using Visual Studio you may have noticed that the generated package has the folder structure of where the application was packaged. Since MSDeploy parameters are used when installing the package in most cases the structure of the web package doesn’t mat...
Have you ever wanted to view MSBuild log files in Markdown format? If you are using psbuild then you’ll now get this feature for free if you upgrade your install. psbuild is a PowerShell wrapper for msbuild.exe. You can learn more about it on the github page or my previous blog post on it. Us...
OK, so this off topic, but its so important that I had to blog about this. Let me give you some background. Last week I was traveling with my family on a road trip to Canada. Usually I’m super paranoid and never connect to any open wireless network (I pay for an carry my own mi-fi device due to this...
I'm really excited to announce that two of my latest courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy are now live! Both are recordings of live courses Christopher Harrison and I lead in the beautiful Channel 9 studios, and include downloads of all slides, code and live chat logs.
These are live events with tw...
For the latest info here and for discussion please visit https://github.com/sayedihashimi/slow-cheetah/issues/158. I first developed SlowCheetah around VS2010 SP2 with the idea that I could at some point transition this to the appropriate team(s) at Microsoft. Unfortunately I haven't been abl...
A few weeks ago Mads Kristensen and I created a few site extensions for Azure Web Sites which the Azure Image Optimizer and Azure Minifier. These extensions can be used to automatically optimize all images on a site, and minify all .js/.css files respectively. These are shipped as nuget packages in ...
For the past few months I’ve been working on a project I’m calling PSBuild. It’s an open source project on GitHub which makes the experience of calling MSBuild from PowerShell better. Getting started with PSBuild is really easy. You can install it in one line.(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadStrin...
Web devs in southern California, we've got a great Web Camp event coming up next week in Los Angeles on July 9. We're wrapping up the Summer Web Camps tour I announced a bit ago with a blowout! This is a free, one day event and we've got space available in the fancy new Microsoft Playa Vista office....
Background on NuGet Package Restore and Automatic Package Restore
NuGet Package Restore allows you to reference NuGet packages in your project without shipping them with your source code or committing them to source control. The general idea is that the packages are restored - that is, downloaded an...
UPDATE: The course (including videos, slides, and links to the code) are published here: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/introduction-to-asp-net-mvc
Join Christopher Harrison and me for a fun, free online training event at Microsoft Virtual Academy on June 23, 2014!
Are you a...
Between releases of my other book (Professional ASP.NET MVC, next release due out soon!) Jesse Liberty somehow talked me into collaborating with him on writing a book on Windows 8.1 development. Actually, it wasn't a hard sell, because I've done a good amount of XAML dev, love C#, and Windows 8 / ...
I'm incredibly happy to announce that my blog - and all 750 other blogs running under weblogs.asp.net - are now powered by Orchard and Azure Web Sites! That's 750 blogs, all hosted in 4 Azure Web Sites all running on only one large virtual machine. A bit of nostalgia I've been blogging on weblogs.a...
This week at TechEd, the ASP.NET team announced some pretty exciting updates on the way for ASP.NET. Top Links Blog Posts ASP.NET vNext: the future of .NET on the Server (.NET Web Development and Tools Blog) Introducing ASP.NET vNext (Scott Hanselman) ASP.NET vNext (David Fowler) T...
Web Camps are free, no fluff, lots of code events where you can get learn what's new in the Microsoft web platform and how you can put it to use right away. They're by developers for developers - no marketing, just building web apps.
Upcoming events
Here's the list, with speakers:
May 20 - Lisbon,...
Recently I encountered a customer asking if it’s possible to download a site using msdeploy.exe. This is pretty easy using msdeploy.exe. I’ll demonstrate this with Microsoft Azure Web Sites but you can use this with any hosting provider that supports Web Deploy (aka MSDeploy). To perform a sync with...
You've agreed to present a full day training event, and the day's approaching. What do you do? I'm not a training expert, but I've learned a few lessons on the job over the past few years that I think will help. I'd done some technical presentations over the years, but in the 4+ years I've been at ...
Okay, you've had a week to digest all the video content from Build 2014? Done yet? Me, neither. Well, how about some tricks to make this easier? I'd written up a few tips and tricks for catching up on Channel 9 event videos back in 2011, this is an update circa 2014. Trick 1: Subscribe and watch a...