Tagged: December 2011 Blog Posts

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of re-paving of machines and I never had my favorite tools on them, nor did I want to spend the time to re-install a set of tools that I knew I would blow away each day anyway.  Mostly my daily builds have been to do some scenario validation and is quite repetitive.  However there are times where a stable build combination comes along that I keep for a while to work on customer apps or sample development.  When these times happen I find myself needing my helpful little utilities more frequently. Recently I’ve...

One of the features introduced with Silverlight 4 was the out-of-browser feature, enabling you to create an application that can be installed, run offline, automatically updated, etc.  As a part of that feature, some of the major code signing certificate vendors (for Authenticode certs) provided our team with test certificates so that we could go through the same process as a developer would to acquire the cert and apply it to an app…and, of course, validate it works. During that time some of those vendors had promotional codes for the first year for Silverlight developers, providing reduced-rate (but not...

Silverlight 5 is finally released!  Congratulations to the team for getting through some of the toughest parts of finishing a product and validating with customers.  It’s been a pretty crazy year for the Silverlight team and this is a really good release for the product bringing some solid features to the platform for folks to leverage in building their apps. In addition to the platform having a release, I was really pleased to see an update to the Silverlight Toolkit, which has been one of the most popular things almost every Silverlight developer/application uses.  If you didn’t know where...

It seems like a daily question I’ve been answering lately when working on internal email discussion groups and folks report an issue, my initial response is: what build combination are you working on?  As a part of my job, I like to ensure the fastest resolution (or awareness depending on how you look at it) to issues that affect our product.  This involves staying on top of ‘latest bits’ as we call them.  Every morning I come in and install the latest Windows build as well as the latest Visual Studio build.  We have an automated Hyper-V environment...

Today there was an event in San Francisco which introduced the Windows Store for Windows apps as well as some details on revenue sharing and policies.  As a part of that Antoine LeBland, Vice President for Windows Web Services, also opened up a new dialog about the store specifically in a new blog Windows Store for developers.  This blog will help developers learn about aspects of the store as well as serve as a place for dialog between the store teams and you, the app developer.  I think it is great that the store team is following in the footsteps...