Visual Studio Toolbox (HD) - Channel 9

This is the third of a four part series on building cross platform apps using Xamarin and C#. In this episode Robert is joined by James Montemagno, a developer evangelist at Xamarin, who discusses how to leverage Azure Mobile Services and Xamarin to transform an offline app to a cloud connected cross-platform mobile app. We will integrate oAuth into our application to store our data on a per user basis, all of which will be shared using the same C# code across Android, iOS, and Windows from one Portable Class Library. If you missed parts one and two, you can view them here and here. Resources: Full source code for the My Expenses app demoed is available on GitHubTry Xamarin today: www.xamarin.comFollow James on Twitter and his personal blogGet unlimited, live, online mobile development training around the clock: Xamarin UniversityAttend Xamarin Evolve 2014, the largest mobile development conference of the year, on October 6-10Xamarin developer documentation and blog

In the episode, Robert is joined by Youssef Hamadi and Yi Wei, who show us the Bing Code Search extension for Visual Studio. With this extension, you can search for code samples across the coding community, including MSDN, StackOverflow, Dotnetperls and CSharp411. You don't need to switch context and go to the browser to search. You can search from within Visual Studio and then directly add code samples to your code. You definitely want to check out this cool and handy tool. Resources Download the extensionOnline version of Bing Code SearchVisual Studio blogBing blog 

In this episode, Robert is joined by Sayed Hashimi and Mads Kristensen, two of the driving forces behind the Sidewaffle Template Pack. SideWaffle is an extension that adds a bunch of useful Snippets, Project- and Item Templates to Visual Studio 2012 and 2013. The purpose is to make your daily work in Visual Studio a richer and more productive experience. They show us some of the items and templates Sidewaffle provides, as well as how it makes it much easier to create and share item and project templates.

In this episode, Robert is joined by Alok Shriram of the .NET Framework team and Kirill Osenkov of the Roslyn team. They show us the new experience for browsing the .NET Reference Source. You can browse through the .NET Framework source code online at http://referencesource.microsoft.com/. You can also download the source code as a solution and browse through it in Visual Studio. This gives you the ability to debug into .NET Framework code from your project code. For more information: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/.NET Framework blogRef12, a Visual Studio extension that changes the behavior of F12 to jump to the online browser for symbols that aren't in your solution but are part of the .NET Reference Source

This is the second of a four part series on building cross platform apps using Xamarin and C#. In this episode Robert is joined by James Montemagno, a developer evangelist at Xamarin, who gives us a deep dive into code sharing with Portable Class Libraries on Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. We will see how to leverage popular PCL libraries from NuGet and how to share 80%+ business logic from a single PCL in an Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 8 application. If you missed part one, you can view it here. Resources: Full source code for the My Expenses app demoed is available on GitHubGet started today with Xamarin at www.xamarin.comFollow James on Twitter and his personal blogXamarin University: Learn to build native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with C# in just 30 daysXamarin developer documentation and blog

This is the first of a four part series on building cross platform apps using Xamarin and C#. In this episode Robert is joined by James Montemagno, a developer evangelist at Xamarin, who discusses how to create Android, iOS and Windows Phone applications in C# from inside Visual Studio with Xamarin. We will see how to get started with Xamarin and how to share 60 to 90% of your code between Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Windows 8 applications. Resources: Get started today with Xamarin at www.xamarin.comFollow James on Twitter and his personal blogXamarin University: Learn to build native iOS, Android, and Windows apps with C# in just 30 daysXamarin developer documentation and blog 

In this episode, Robert is joined by Carsten Duellmann and Ricardo Wickel, who show us how to improve our unit test using Microsoft Fakes. Fakes help you isolate the code you are testing by replacing other parts of the application with stubs or shims. These are small pieces of code that are under the control of your tests. By isolating your code for testing, you know that if the test fails, the cause is there and not somewhere else. Stubs and shims also let you test your code even if other parts of your application are not working yet.  

We are back in our regular studio for this episode, in which Robert is joined by Mark Wilson-Thomas. Mark shows us the Auto History Extension Preview. This Visual Studio extension gives you automatic, no-configuration history tracking for your local machine. It silently and efficiently tracks the changes you make to any files that you have opened in the Visual Studio Editor. This gives you the ability to roll back changes you made to code in between source control check-ins. Download the extension from the Visual Studio Gallery and let us know what you think.

In this episode, Robert is joined by Koen Zwikstra, the author of XAML Spy, a visual runtime inspector for Silverlight, Windows Phone, Windows Store and WPF apps. Koen shows how to use XAML Spy to view an app's visual tree, examine and modify properties of any element, browse files in isolated storage and more. This is a very cool tool for getting a better understanding of what is happening in your XAML apps.

In part 3 of a 4 part series on control vendors, Robert is joined by Russ Fustino of ComponentOne. Russ shows us some of the many controls ComponentOne provides for ASP.NET development. He also shows controls for LightSwitch HTML client apps.

In this episode, Robert is joined by Alon Fliess and Pavel Yosifovich of CodeValue, the makers of OzCode, a very exciting debugging extension for Visual Studio. They show how using OzCode makes debugging easier and how it provides you with a number of insights into what is happening in your code beyond what the Visual Studio debugger provides.

In this episode, Robert is joined by Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, who shows us the Productivity Power Tools 2013 for Visual Studio 2013. This extension pack provides powerful tools for improved developer productivity. Murali shows the following new features in the Productivity Power Tools: Peek HelpSolution Explorer ErrorsStructure VisualizerDouble click to maximize windowsTimestamp marginQuick tasks – Edit Present OnCtrl + Click to Peek DefinitionHTML Copy improvementsRecently Closed DocumentsMatch MarginPower Commands context menu cleanupThe previous versions for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 were immensely popular and you can expect this one will be too. Download it from the Visual Studio Gallery. Follow the Productivity Power Tools on Facebook and on Twitter (#PowerTools2013).

In this hour long episode, Robert shows you how to get started using the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern in your XAML apps. He reviews what MVVM is and then adds MVVM to an existing Windows Store app. You won't see all of the techniques used in MVVM, but you will see enough to understand how you can start using it in your own projects and what benefits it offers. For more explanation, see Robert's blog and the accompanying MSDN sample.

Mads Kristensen is the author of many Visual Studio extensions, including Web Essentials, Web Essentials 2012, CssCop, and Image Optimizer. In this episode, Mads joins Robert to show his latest creation, Web Essentials 2013 Preview. Web Essentials extends Visual Studio with a number of features that web developers have been missing. If you write CSS, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, or LESS, then you will find that this extension makes your life as a developer much easier. Note: Many of the features Mads shows in this episode are also in Web Essentials 2012, which works with Visual Studio 2012.

In this show, Robert is joined by Merwan Hade, who demonstrates how easy it is to add Azure Mobile Services that use push notifications to a Windows Store app built using Visual Studio 2013. Rather than having to switch back and forth from Visual Studio to the Azure portal Web site, you can do everything from inside Visual Studio. This saves time and should make anyone using Mobile Services very happy.