Category Archives: Windows 8

A lap around Team Foundation Service online

.Net, Tools, Visual Studio, Windows 8, , ,

Back in September at //BUILD/ I got an invitation code for a new cloud service powered by Windows Azure: Team Foundation Service. A few days after I created an account but I didn’t had the chance until today to really use it. Now that I have some extra-time + an interesting project (involving Windows 8 and Kinect…) it’s the perfect moment to get started. In this post, I share a couple of images (click any of them for full resolution) to show you what TFS online looks like.

Get a TFS online account

TFS online is available in as Preview as requires an invitation code to get in. If you don’t have a code, you can request on the website: https://tfspreview.com/_account/Signup

I have no idea how long it can take to get an invitation code now… Once you have your code, you can create your account and pickup your server URL: https://your-server-name.tfspreview.com.

Log to TFS online

Once you have created an account, it’s time to log in. To do so, simply navigate to the URL your created previously and you will be prompted for your credentials:

You will then land on the home page of your account:

Create a new team project

You can now create a new team project. You must pick-up a name (which cannot be changed when the project is created) as well as the process template you want to use. In the preview, you have the following templates available:

  • Microsoft Visual Studio Scrum 2.0 – Preview 3
  • MSF for Agile Software Development 6.0 – Preview 3
  • MSF for CMMI Software Development 6.0 – Preview 3

I like the dialog when the message when the creation completes 🙂

Connect to TFS online from VS11

Now that the configuration stage is completed, it’s time to log in to TFS from Visual Studio 11.  All I had to do is to open the Team Explorer

And then configure the server URL:

Then the Team Explorer dialog is ready:

Check-in some code

Just for the demo, I created a new WinRT XAML application and check the “Add to source control” checkbox during the creation of the project. Visual Studio asked me where to store this new project:

Then using the Team Explorer, I choose the Source Control Explorer in order to check-in the code, and I got this new dialog right in the Team Explorer panel:

Which in my opinion is very nice and better than the previous version.

Code review

We know have the ability to request a code review right from the Team Explorer. This is another very nice feature:

Project home page

Because I chose the agile process template, the project homepage is “agile-oriented”:

Conclusion

This post was a very quick overview of what Team Foundation Service online looks like. I didn’t dig in any specific feature but I wanted to show you how it looks like. The experience from Visual Studio 11 is very straightforward and the new Team Explorer dialog easy and powerful.

Of course the benefits of TFS in Visual Studio 11 are now restricted in Team Foundation Service Online, it was just easy for me to do so.

MVVM framework explorer updated !

.Net, Silverlight, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF, , ,

After several requests, I finally took the time to update my MVVM Explorer Silverlight App !

Here is the changelog:

  • update all download stats (based ONLY on CodePlex stats)
  • refresh popularities
  • remove StructuredMVVM (not available on CodePlex)
  • add WinRT support (however, no toolkit seems to support if official yet)
Top 5 (most downloaded & supporting WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone):
  1. MVVM Light (95k downloads)
  2. Caliburn Micro (27k downloads)
  3. nRoute (22k downloads)
  4. Simple MVVM toolkit (10k downloads)
  5. Catel (8k downloads)

As always, feedbacks are welcome !

Windows Phone vNext & Windows 8 next week

.Net, Events, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Windows 8, Windows Phone, WPF

Update 26th 7:37PM: Nokia keynote live tomorrow morning at 8:30 CET. Live webcast here: http://www.nokia.com/global/about-nokia/webcast-mwc/webcast/

The coming week should be pretty interesting for any folks interested in Microsoft technologies. The Mobile World Congress will take place in Barcelona from Monday to Friday.

Windows Phone

On the mobile space, we can expect first official information about Windows Phone Tango. Tango is expected to be a version of the OS dedicated to low-end devices. From the various leaks that occurred in the last weeks we already have some ideas of what Tango might look likes:

  • ability to import and export contacts directly from the SIM card
  • ability to send multiple images in a single MMS
  • more languages supported (120, whereas Mango supports “only” 35)
  • ability to run on devices with only 256MB or RAM
None of those information have been confirmed yet but it’s only a matter of hours now 🙂
Of course in the Windows Phone world, the next big step will be Apollo. Apollo is expected to be the next major version of the Windows Phone platform. At this point, we don’t know if Microsoft is going to talk about Apollo during MWC.
After a leak about Apollo, Paul Thurrot wrote an article describing various aspects of this new version. Here are some expected features:
  • support for multi-core processors, new screen resolutions & NFC support
  • shared components with Windows 8 (this brings a lot of question: are we talking about WinRT for example ?)
  • app-to-app communication (similar to what is available in Windows 8 )
  • IE10
  • SkyDrive & Skype integration
Again, none of those information have been confirmed yet. We will see if MWC brings more answers.

Windows 8

On wednesday 29th Microsoft will hold a special event in Barcelona for the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The Consumer Preview will be available for download to anybody and should be feature complete. I’m expecting a lot from this release as the Developer Preview was quite incomplete regarding XAML development (for example Blend was only able to target HTML WinRT projects).

Visual Studio 11

With the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Microsoft confirmed this week that we are also going to have access to Visual Studio 11.

Visual Studio 11 will include most of the extensions currently available in the Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2010. The XAML designer will be shared with Blend (hopefully that we will to better performance & less design-time issues). There are tons of other changes, improvements and new features…

For more details, you can check out those posts: Introducing the new developer experience part 1 & part 2.

Of course I’ll try to play with all those new toys as soon as possible. So you should expect more blog post this week !