Did you ever get lost in the myriad of SDKs and Microsoft Nuget packages? If you did then let me tell you a secret: you’re not alone. Luckily Microsoft listens very carefully to feedback from their users and community and has put a couple of pages together with some handy overviews:

• .NET Framework SDKs and Targeting Packs for Visual Studio 2012
• Microsoft .NET Framework NuGet Packages

Grz, Kris.

Since several years javascript has become increasingly more popular. Because of that a slew of frameworks and libraries became available and usually there starts the journey for developers to spend their, usually free, time to learn it all. The choice is so overwhelming nowadays that it becomes hard to focus and choose those frameworks in which one wants to excel.

Luckily there’s such an initiative as TodoMVC which gives a slew of code samples for the same application, a todo list, built with different javascript frameworks. A very interesting approach and one to keep in the back of your mind the next time you want to start a new SPA (Single Page Application).

Grz, Kris.

It’s great to see that an awesome platform like Windows Azure is gaining more and more traction along the way. Recently it was announced that Oracle is partnering with Microsoft. This enables users to run Oracle software on Windows Azure with the following benefits:

• Effective immediately, customers can run supported Oracle software on Windows Server Hyper-V and in Windows Azure.
• Effective immediately, Oracle provides license mobility for customers who want to run Oracle software on Windows Azure.
• Windows Azure images with popular configurations of Oracle software including Java, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, and Oracle Linux are now available in preview in the Windows Azure image gallery.
• Microsoft now offers fully licensed and supported Java in Windows Azure.

Taken from http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/cloud/faq-1963009.html.

Especially the last sentence will be of interest to my friends and colleagues in the Java space.

Grz, Kris.

You want to know more about ASP.NET MVC (4) and Web API? Well tomorrow you can do just that. Simply join the Microsoft Virtual Academy broadcast and enjoy the ride of these awesome technologies.

This will be covered during the course:

• Overview of MVC
  • What is MVC?
  • How is MVC different from Web Forms?
  • Why use MVC?
• Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Controllers and Models
  • Creating Controllers
  • Adding Actions
  • Creating MVC Models
  • Working with Code First
• Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Views
  • Razor Syntax
  • HTML Helpers
  • Partial Views
• Integrating JavaScript and MVC
  • Using AJAX
  • Using jQuery
• Implementing Web APIs
  • Developing Web API Controllers
  • Calling HTTP Services from Client-Side Code
• Deploying ASP.NET MVC Site Walkthrough
  • Creating a site on Windows Azure Web Sites
  • Deploying an ASP.NET MVC Application with Visual Studio Web Deploy
• What’s Next and Resources
  • Sneak peak at Visual Studio 2013 (Preview) and ASP.NET MVC 5 tooling
  • A look at real-time communications with SignalR
  • Resources for keeping up with new ASP.NET releases

Simply register here: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/liveevents/developing-asp-net-mvc4-web-applications-jump-start#fbid=r4qO—FJ7Ye.

For more information about these technologies also be sure to read about them here:

• ASP.NET MVC
• Web API
• SignalR

Grz, Kris.

Last evening 5 colleagues from ae and me went out for an adventure: to run 9 km in het Rivierenhof without the comfort of lights except the headlights all 5700 runners were wearing. It was raining, muddy, slippery from time to time but it was awesome fun! As I only started training somewhere in August after having not been running for a couple of years I was glad that I was able to tackle this run down in 54:40 .

To give you an impression of how the start looked like (I’m somewhere one of those shiny lights as well):

Picture originally shared on the GVA website.

I look forward to doing it again next year as well together with my awesome colleagues.

Update: the other pictures came online and these are my colleagues:

And me: at around 7km, still going well:

Grz, Kris.

Get it while it’s still hot people! You can download the .NET universe 2013 poster here.

Grz, Kris.

As a moderator on forums.asp.net I sometimes see quite unreadable copy pasted code in all shapes and ranges.

Some I kind of started to like and for me writing this post so I won’t forget about them:

• C# or related: http://www.prettyprinter.de/module.php?name=PrettyPrinter
• ASP.NET or HTML: http://www.freeformatter.com/html-formatter.html#ad-output

Grz, Kris.

Grab it while it’s hot at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8396.

Grz, Kris.

Unfortunately I can’t go myself but I do hope a lot of people of the community will go and that they also get more recognition as it’s a tool well worth spending time on to get more intimate with.

Grz, Kris.

Hi,

just in case you haven’t heard about it yet: community day 2013 is around the corner. I hope to see many of the Belgian/European community over there.

Grz, Kris.