Visual Studio Toolbox (HD) - Channel 9

In this episode, Robert reviews a Windows 8 app he built. This line of business app provides the ability for employees to create and submit expense reports, and for managers to view and approve or reject them. Robert is joined by Nadine Fox of Macadamian, the design firm that helped create the app's user interface. Robert and Nadine cover a variety of topics, including navigation patterns, the use of app bars (including what buttons go where on the app bar), modal vs non modal data entry screens, notifications, and more.

In this episode—taped at TechEd North America—Robert chats with Billy Hollis, a consultant and trainer who is a widely recognized expert on XAML and design. Robert and Billy have a freewheeling discussion that focuses mostly on the design of Windows 8 apps.

In this episode, taped at TechEd North America, Robert chats with Jay Schmelzer, a Principal Director of Program Management at Microsoft, and John Papa, an independent consultant, speaker, and trainer for Pluralsight. Jay's team owns the business application tooling in Visual Studio. He and Robert discuss what's new in Visual Studio 2012 for LightSwitch [01:00], Azure [12:30], and SharePoint and Office [16:00]. Robert and John used to work together, and after catching up John offers his opinion on XAML developers making the move to Windows 8 [21:00] and developing with JavaScript [27:00].

In this episode, Nick Harris joins us to talk about what's new in Windows Azure tooling. On Cloud Cover, Nick and his co-hosts covered the Windows Azure June 2012 Release from a much broader perspective. Here, we take a different approach and look at the new release from the perspective of a Visual Studio developer who is either new to Azure or only somewhat familiar with it. Nick shows the following: Windows Azure Web Sites [07:45] Virtual Machines [24:15] Cloud Services [28:45]

Portable class libraries enable you to write and build managed assemblies that work on more than one .NET Framework platform. You can create classes that contain code you wish to share across many projects, such as shared business logic, and then reference those classes from different types of projects, including those that target .NET Framework 4 and above, Silverlight 4 and above, Windows Phone 7 and above, Windows 8, and XBox 360. In this episode, Daniel Plaisted introduces us to this very exciting technology. Want more information on portable class libraries? Check out these resources: MSDN Portable Class Library Documentation MSDN: Using Portable Class Library with Model-View-View Model Portable Library Tools for VS2010 Portable Library Tools blog post with supported feature/platform matrix Create a Continuous Client Using Portable Class Libraries "Going Deep" Channel 9 Video with David Kean and Mircea Trofin on Portable Libraries Reactive Extensions – Towards a Portable Library world MEF and TPL Dataflow blog post Understanding the Portable Library by Chasing ICommand Portable Libraries Json.NET – JSON framework Autofac – IoC Container MvvmCross – MVVM framework for MonoTouch, MonoDroid, Windows Phone, and Windows Metro style MVVM Light Toolkit portable fork – Popular MVVM framework Portable Class Libraries Contrib – Portable adapters and APIsh

In this episode, Sayed Hashimi joins us to demonstrate SlowCheetah, a Visual Studio extension that enables you to transform your app.config or any other XML file based on the build configuration—you can have both debug and release versions of your configuration files and swap between them when you run the application. No more changing configuration files at runtime, and no more worrying about if you are really using the right one.

In this episode, Jason Zander joins us to celebrate the availability of Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate. Jason shows off a number of features that have been added to Visual Studio since Beta, including IDE updates [02:55] Web site optimization (bundling/minification) [07:00] Web publishing [10:35] Enhancements to Blend for designing both XAML [16:00] and HTML apps [20:30] OData support in LightSwitch [29:45]  

In this episode, Kael Rowan of Microsoft Research joins us and shows the Debugger Canvas. Debugger Canvas is a power tool for Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate that pulls together the code you're exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows the methods that you're debugging, including call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture as well as the details.

Previously on Visual Studio Toolbox, Robert showed how to use Visual Studio 11 and XAML to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. In this episode, Joanna Mason shows us how to use Visual Studio's XAML Designer and Blend to make these apps better looking. She demonstrates how powerful Blend is as a design tool and why it is an indispensable tool you should master as you are building XAML-based apps.

Previously on Visual Studio Toolbox, Robert showed how to use Visual Studio 11 and JavaScript to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. In this episode, Kirupa Chinnathambi shows us how to use Blend for Visual Studio to create good looking apps. He demonstrates how Blend is an excellent tool for authoring HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Previously on Visual Studio Toolbox, Robert showed how to use Visual Studio 11 and XAML to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. In this episode, Robert shows you how to use JavaScript, demonstrating each of the three project templates Visual Studio provides as well as building an app that uses real data instead of sample data.

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been available for download for about a month now and if you haven't started building Metro style apps, now is a good time. In this episode, Robert takes a look at how you can use Visual Studio 11 to start building Metro style apps for Windows 8. Robert will focus on using XAML and will show you how to use each of the three project templates Visual Studio provides. He will then demonstrate building an app that uses real data instead of sample data.

In this episode, Erik Ejlskov Jensen joins us. Erik is a SQL Server Compact MVP and the author of the SQL Server Compact Toolbox add-in, which has been downloaded more than 100,000 times! If you are using SQL Server Compact in an application, you will find this add-in very helpful. You can connect to a database and explore the objects it contains, run queries, script both tables and the data they contain, import data, and migrate data between SQL Server Compact and SQL Server or SQL Azure.

When you view offline help in Visual Studio, you use the Help Viewer. In this episode, Paul O'Rear shows us some significant and welcome improvements to the Help Viewer in Visual Studio 11, including Default install of a minimum level of documentation [01:30] Choosing between online and local help from within Visual Studio [04:45] Adding additional help content [06:00] Dockable windows [12:15] Filtering help content [13:15] Creating a list of help content favorites [16:00] Filtering the help index [18:25] Searching for help content [19:40]    

In this episode, Sam Zaiss and Dan Dole of the Visual Studio User Experience team join us to talk about simplification and reduction in the Visual Studio 11 development environment. They show how much easier it is to navigate both within code and within the IDE, and also that the complexity of the IDE has been reduced. Here's a quick episode guide: Searching in the Solution Explorer [03:50] Using the Preview Tab [05:00] Viewing the classes contained in code files and the class members while in the Solution Explorer [12:00] Viewing the relationships between classes while in the Solution Explorer [12:45] Using multiple Solution Explorers at the same time [13:00] Navigation history [15:30] Viewing the relationships between methods while in the Solution Explorer [19:00] Using Quick Launch to find and execute commands [22:30]