Testing Your Windows Phone 8 Apps Series.
The second part of the series on “Testing Your Windows Phone 8 Apps” has now been published on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. Testing your apps before releasing them to the store can make a huge difference. A small investment in the key areas described in this post can give your app better results in your market and help bypass common coding errors early in the development process.
Testing your Windows Phone app – Part 1 – Released May 1, 2013
- Beta testing
- Installation and launch
- Fast Application Switching (FAS) and tombstoning
- App navigation
- Launchers and choosers
- UI and layout
Testing your Windows Phone app – Part 2 – Released May 22, 2013
- Push notification
- Live Tiles
- Agents
- Media, audio, and video
- Geolocation
- Resource usage and performance
WebMatrix 3 released, ready for free download.
WebMatrix is a free, lightweight web development tool we first introduced in 2010, and which provides a great, focused web development experience for ASP.NET, PHP, and Node.js.
Today’s release includes a ton of great new features. You can easily get started by downloading it, and watching an introduction video:
Get more in-depth information on http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2013/05/01/announcing-the-release-of-webmatrix-3.aspx
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 is ready for download.
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2) has been released and is now available for download.
Just as with VS2012.1 (which is installed as part of VS2012.2 for those of you who don’t already have VS2012.1 installed), this release contains important fixes as well as a wealth of new functionality, addressing feedback we’ve received from the community and aligning with key software development trends in the market. The new functionality primarily spans (though is not limited to) five areas of investment: agile planning, quality enablement, Windows Store development, line-of-business development, and the general developer experience.
Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 offers enhancements in the following areas.
Agile planning. Visual Studio 2012 introduced a wide range of capabilities focused on enabling agile teams, not only for development but also for planning. With VS2012.2, Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been augmented with an additional variety of features to help make it even easier for agile teams to do their planning, in particular around adapting to a team’s preferences and work styles.
Quality Enablement. This update introduces web-based access to the Test Case Management tools in TFS such that users can now author, edit, and execute test cases through the web portal. It also includes the ability to profile unit tests (with results across both the unit tests and the code under test surfaced through a single report), improved unit testing support for both asynchronous code and for interactions with the UI, unit testing support for Windows Phone 8 apps, unit test playlists that enable a subset of tests to be managed together, significant improvements around testing for SharePoint 2013 (web and load testing, unit testing with emulators, coded UI support, and IntelliTrace support), and more.
Windows Store development. VS2012.2 includes additional new features for Windows Store development, beyond the quality enablement capabilities already mentioned. For example, VS2012.1 included a new memory profiling tool for apps implemented with JavaScript, enabling developers to better understand the memory usage of their apps, to find and fix leaks, and so forth; for VS2012.2, we continued to invest in improved diagnostics for JavaScript apps with a new profiling tool that helps diagnose UI responsiveness issues and latency in visual updates. This release also incorporates the latest version of the Windows App Certification Kit.
Line-of-business development. Beyond improved support for building Windows Store apps, VS2012.2 also brings with it a wealth of new and improved capabilities for developing and modernizing line-of-business (LOB) apps. This includes the ability to use LightSwitch to easily build cross-browser and mobile web clients with HTML and JavaScript, with support to target SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. It includes support in Blend for SketchFlow, WPF 4.5, and Silverlight 5. And more.
Development experience. As developers spend so much of their time using the IDE, it’s important that Visual Studio provide as streamlined an experience as possible. Towards that end, we continually invest in new features and productivity enhancements to make the IDE the best and most productive environment possible, a trend we continue with VS2012.2. Code map has been updated with improved responsiveness as well as with debugger integration, providing a visual perspective on the relationships and dependencies in code being debugged. Symbol loading has been improved across both the profiling and IntelliTrace experiences. The Workflow designer now has an improved debugging experience. The XAML design surface in both Blend and the Visual Studio editor includes multiple performance and reliability improvements, in particular when loading large projects and when using third-party controls. The IDE’s light and dark themes are now joined by a third, blue theme. And more, such as including all of the improvements made available through ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2.
A more expansive list of what’s new in VS2012.2, including new features and bug fixes, is also available.
WebMatrix 3 Preview now available for download.
Download page: http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/next/
Key features include:
Your Companion for the Cloud
When you create local projects, you’ll be able to instantly get a companion website in Windows Azure without ever leaving WebMatrix. Using the Publish button, you can easily keep these sites in sync and save your changes to the cloud.
Remote Site Editing
Simply open your remote sites, make changes, and hit Save. The lightweight performance and full editing capability (including intellisense) make it feels like you are editing a local site!
Source Control with TFS
Team Foundation Service is Microsoft’s hot new source control service in the cloud. WebMatrix 3 makes it simple and fun to work with your code using TFS for any project in the cloud, or on site.
Source Control with Git
Plug into GitHub, CodePlex, and Team Foundation Service to start sharing your code with the world. Whether you’re a newcomer to git, or a seasoned pro, you’ll find all of the features you would expect in a powerful but easy to use tool.
//build/ Conference is coming again! To San Francisco, in June.
Registration opens at 09:00am PDT, April 2, 2013
Early bird (first 500): $1,595 // Full: $2,095
Make sure to visit the website.
It’s simply spectacular.
Coding4Fun Toolkit v2 http://coding4fun.codeplex.com released! New items and the start of Windows Store support! The same XAML / APIs will work against either platform.
The Coding4Fun toolkit is a set of API wrappers and XAML UI controls for building Windows 8 & Windows Phone apps. Keeping with a Coding4Fun tradition of making hard things simple, complex APIs are as simple as Start and Stop and controls all have a system-level polish to them. The new version’s target was to give same API/Control works against Windows Store and Windows Phone applications. Write once, deploy anywhere.
Download from http://coding4fun.codeplex.com/
I have used the toolkit myself for my Sphero Control app. http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=35cd9766-6888-4bfa-b515-13ed5fc9fed5
![clip_image002[4]](https://techpreacher.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/clip_image0024.gif "clip_image002[4]")
Varous Color Picker controls for Windows Phone 8 and for Windows 8.
Windows 8 & Windows Phone Cross Platform Development Resources
With development of apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 getting much closer but still not being the same, there are some good resources out there in regards to creating projects that share a maximum amount of code between the two platforms.
The cornerstone of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 cross platform development are portable class libraries and MVVM pattern that help separate UI and logic.
The main area on the topic on MSDN including articles and code samples is here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj714089(v=vs.105).aspx
There is also a section on the “Microsoft Virtual Academy” called “Building Apps for Windows Phone 8” https://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/tracks/building-apps-for-windows-phone-8-jump-start that has a Module (#19) on this.
You can sign up to the Microsoft Virtual Academy for free using any Microsoft ID.
Furthermore, the following sessions on the topic were presented at the Build conference last fall in Seattle:
“How to Leverage your Code across WP8 and Windows 8”: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-043
Link provided by Stuart Lodge: “Create Cross-platform Apps using Portable Class Libraries”: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2012/3-004
Happy coding (and code reusing)!
modern.IE launches with two great offers for web developers.
The http://modern.ie site has launched today and has two real gems in stock for web developers.
First, an online suite of tools that scan your website and give you feedback on common compatibility problems.
Second, modern.IE offers a free 3 month subscription to BrowserStack.com, hosted and locally managed virtualization that can help provide quick access to a large number of browsers and operating systems for you to test your site against.
Git support coming to Visual Studio 2012 and Git hosting to Team Foundation Server/Service.
Brian Harry has just announced Git support in Visual Studio 2012 coming as a VSIX plugin for the Visual Studio 2012 Update 2.
- You can get a good overview of how to get started (including all the download links) by reading this tutorial.
- Watch this video for a 10 minute walk-through.
- Also you can read the news and the Learn content on the Team Foundation Service welcome portal.
- Team Foundation Service – As of today you can host Git repos in TFService projects. It is “shipping” now and ready for use. We still have lots more capabilities to add but it’s ready to use for real.
- Team Foundation Server – Our plan is to include Git support in the next major release of TFS. No date has yet been announced.
- Visual Studio 2012 support – We provided a VSIX today. It is a “community technology preview” of the Git VSIX on top of a “community technology preview” of VS 2012 Update 2 (VS2012.2). We’re very pleased with the performance/stability of it but it is not yet officially “go-live”. You are welcome to try it out but it is a preview release for evaluation, so be aware that there may be issues. We’ll be releasing updates about every 3 weeks and you should expect it to converge fairly quickly. I don’t know at this time when it will “RTM” but I expect it to have a “go-live” designation before too long.
- Visual Studio V.Next – Our Git plugin will be integrated into all editions of Visual Studio V.Next (including Express) and will appear in the various pre-releases and RTM.
- Older versions of VS & TFS – At this time, we are not planning to include Git integration in older versions of VS or TFS.
Windows Phone SDK update adds Windows Phone 7.8 Emulator and features
Available today, the Windows Phone SDK Update for Windows Phone 7.8 is an optional update that adds two new Windows Phone 7.8 emulator images to your existing SDK installation. These two emulator images should enable you to fully test how your Windows Phone 7.5 app’s Live Tiles will look and behave when they are run on a device running Windows Phone 7.8.
The SDK update requires an existing installation of the Windows Phone SDK:
- Windows Phone SDK 7.1 (7.1 or 7.1.1)
- Windows Phone SDK 8.0
If you have both the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installed on the same computer, both SDKs will be updated.
If you have a Windows Phone 7.5 app in the Marketplace, it is highly recommend downloading the Windows Phone SDK Update for Windows Phone 7.8 today and starting to experiment by using the new tile options in your app.
Sascha Corti aka. TechPreacher 
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