My Blog

A week ago I splurged and upgraded my Lumia 920 to the Lumia 1020. So to those of you who were expecting me to switch over the Android or an iDevice; I'm still entrenched in the Windows Phone world. And this phone cements my opinion to stay.  Let's talk about the good and the bad.

No I am not talking the promise that JavaScript will fix everything if you use it. I don't even believe that ;) I am talking about the concept of a promise object that several JavaScript libraries use (including AngularJS, jQuery, Dojo and WinJS).

Today I picked up a Lumia 1020. I am impressed with the camera as you'd expect but I am also loving the size. It's about the same size as the 920 except for the extra camera bump. It feels lighter than I expected. The AMOLED screen with Gorilla Glass 3 looks great too.

I am working with a client on an enterprise Win8 app that is for order taking. They have a specific page that they require to be only in Portrait mode while the rest of the app can support any orientation. Since I've done so much Windows Phone 7/8 work I thought this would be simple. Just specify the value on the Page. But this didn't work…

Ever get perplexed when designing your API for the web? My new course is now available on PluralSight that helps you design your API. The course covers:

I recently helped the Atlanta Code Camp effort by building them a new website. You can see it here: Atlanta Code Camp.  I am pretty proud of what I was able to accomplish in the scant number of hours I had to build it. It's not done as we need to improve it when we have the speakers chosen and set up the schedule, but so far I am pretty happy with it.

I've been honored to help put together the Atlanta Code Camp this year. This year's event is happening on August 24th here in Atlanta and we're expecting to have eight tracks covering a mix of developer, designer and some IT professional talks. I've attended this event the past eight or so years and it's always a good time. I decided it was time to help out.

In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems. In this same time, I've also done quite a number of HTML/JS/CSS talks where I didn't use Visual Studio. Some have conjectured whether I am moving away from the Microsoft stack as a result of the lessened use of Visual Studio in my demos. The frank answer is: nope.

I try to keep this blog relatively technology focused but sometimes something happens in my life that requires an announcement. I am also mentioning it here because I think it makes a good story:

If you build PhoneGap apps and test with the browser, moving to phones sometimes causes a boatload of problems. Because there isn't a great debugging story, being able to see the console window would be of great help.

After my recent talk on Mobile-First Design, one of the attendees tweeted that he thought it was ironic that my talk was on responsive design but my blog wasn't mobile-friendly. I told him that my company site was…but that was a cop-out. I hadn't had time to get the blog setup with a good template. So voila! I haven't confirmed that everything works the way I want but we should be close!

I had a great time at yesterday's online DotNetConf. I think my "Mobile-First Responsive Web Design" talk went pretty well. You can see the talk on YouTube (embedded below). The talk was focused on designing websites to be efficient on mobile platforms by starting with your design on a mobile and scaling up to tablets and desktops.

If you're interested in cross-platform mobile apps, I like the solution that PhoneGap has. It uses HTML5/CSS/JS as the UI stack and I find it compelling to build apps for iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store. I've just released a new course on PhoneGap that attempts to fill in some of the holes in building apps.  The course includes:

I've created a new example of a PhoneGap app for my talk at the Atlanta Windows Apps meeting. The talk I did tonight didn't go all that well, but I got it working and the result is something you can download and see how to use a minimum of WinJS to build your Windows 8 apps.

One of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with lately is the ability to be able to build cross-platform apps. While I spend a lot of time in the Microsoft space (especially Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8), I need to be able to create and deploy apps to iOS and Android platforms. I've decided to do a series on building one of these using Single Page Application for the web, then deploying it to devices via PhoneGap:

Very short post today, but wanted to share something that happens more than I'd like to admit. I work for some clients who use TFS and when I can't in through their VPN I need to zip up my files for them to check-in manually. It's not fun (I miss being able to create a change set in Mercurial or Git). When this happens I need to have a quick way of copying all the files in a project that aren't marked as read-only. Robocopy to the rescue:

With the surprising news of Sinofsky's leaving Microsoft still fluttering in the winds, I knew I'd hear some rants about Silverlight be heard among the XAML-lovers out there. I decided I needed a blog post (albeit a short one) to say my peace.

(UPDATED 11/12/2012: Added links to meetups/groups)

I wanted to get a Type Cover for my new Surface today so I headed to the Microsoft Store. I never go to malls so it wasn't a lot of fun just getting into the mall. But soon me and my girlfriend found the store. I was very surprised by the sheer number of customers. I didn't expect it to be empty on a Saturday afternoon but it was packed. As we walked in we were immediately approached and helped with where to find the Type Covers. Even with all those customers, the store was really well staffed. Was simple to find someone to help us get a Type Cover from the back and answer some pricing questions.

Today Microsoft is finally releasing the new Windows Phone 8 SDK. As I've been updating my Windows Phone book for this new incarnation of the device, I am excited that the SDK is finally going to be available for public consumption.

I've always been a big fan of George Carlin. I remember watching one of his first HBO specials when I was quite young. No matter whether you agree with his point of view, you had to admit he had an impressive mind and a way to stay relevant no matter where the country went.

I had a great time at ReMIX South this year! It's been great to meet developers and designers and learn how they are using design tools of all sorts.