# Saturday, June 14, 2014

My latest Pluralsight course, Introduction to Visual Studio 2013 - Part 2 is live and ready for action. The modules are:

  • Basic Debugging
  • Additional Debugging Features
  • IntelliTrace
  • Working With Designers
  • Extensions

If you haven't watched Part 1, you really should.

What's my next course? I'm trying to decide that at the moment and will let you know when it's underway.

Kate

Saturday, June 14, 2014 4:21:12 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Friday, May 23, 2014

I've completed my development of my latest Pluralsight course and I'm just waiting for it to go live. Here are the "teaser" images  I posted to Twitter and my public Facebook page as I was developing it:

This was fun to put together and it's nice to get into things so many people don't know. I hope you take a look at it once it's live and learn from it!

Kate

Friday, May 23, 2014 9:38:00 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Do you think Agile and Enterprise can go together? Are you a senior .NET developer who is looking to lead? If so, a client of mine is looking for you. Their job description includes:

We’ll look to you as a team leader who embraces a solid leadership capacity that has truly valuable impact on our team. In this senior role, you will participate in all aspects of the software development lifecycle including planning, technical design and architecture, construction, documentation, testing and deployment. Additionally, you’ll have a big picture view and the opportunity to play a role in the design.

and they're expecting:

  • Proven and deep experience with different versions of .NET Framework and C#/ASP.NET development
  • Demonstrable experience working on N-tier architectures
  • Solid understanding of the full development life-cycle
  • Knowledge and experience with Agile development methodologies (e.g. XP, Scrum)
  • Champion of agile engineering practices (e.g. TDD, continuous integration, refactoring etc)
  • Good understanding of design patterns and their application
  • Experienced unit testing frameworks
  • Computer Science (or related) degree
  • Knowledge of/experience with Sitecore is an asset
  • Knowledge of/experience with Ektron is an asset
  • Knowledge of/experience with Sharepoint is an asset

Sounds like you? Then get in touch with me and I'll make an introduction.

Kate

Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:58:02 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Monday, March 17, 2014

Office Lens went live in the Windows Phone Store today. I happened to have a list of things to do on a whiteboard in my office, so I gave it a try. I had already taken a picture of the whiteboard to transcribe but I went back to the board with the app installed to see if I could save some time.

Here's the picture Office Lens took (resized to 400 pixels wide)

Here's how that looked when Office Lens cleaned it up and put it in a OneNote document for me (I copied the picture out of OneNote, cropped it and resized it):

Much nicer - the glare spots are gone and the background is cleaner. The skew that resulted from taking the picture on an angle (a defensive action to keep the glare out of the important parts of the image) is also gone. As is, this can go into an email. If my handwriting was neater, One Note could have tried to extract the text from it. But this is a lovely improvement and Office Lens is free, so why not give it a try?

Kate

Monday, March 17, 2014 11:19:16 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Friday, March 07, 2014
Over the years I've used a lot of tools to get screenshots. My old standby is Paint Shop Pro (copyright 1991-1997 it says on the splash screen, and I recall I deliberately didn't stick with an upgrade that introduced complicated stuff I didn't want, like layers.) I like it because I can set up a time delay for a shot which lets me get tooltips and the like ready when the capture happens.

Alas, on this Windows 8 machine with a second screen, something confuses Paint Shop and it doesn't capture the whole screen. I experimented a bit with the Snipping Tool that comes with Windows, but it doesn't have a time delay or a keystroke, so I can't get tooltips, context menus, or anything else that requires me to interact with the app before the shot.

I got desparate and started using the PrtScrn button on my keyboard. Your keyboard probably has one. I often type Shirt-PrtScrn but I just checked and the Shift is unnecessary. This captures the whole screen (or both if you have two) and puts it in the clipboard buffer. From there I can paste into whatever I edit images with (usually Paint Shop to be honest) and then crop to the part I want.

So far this is boring. I mean really, this is what you could have done TWENTY YEARS ago. And it's been fine for me except that cropping part. But yesterday I learned about Alt PrtScrn. It gets you just the current window! And if you let go of Alt before Prt Scrn, the alt is not passed along to the underlying app either. This is going to save me some seriously annoying cropping.

Kate

Friday, March 07, 2014 1:00:36 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Friday, February 28, 2014

I have updated my Visual Studio Pluralsight course for Visual Studio 2013 and Part 1 is now live. It covers features that were newly added in the 2013 release as well as older material (so you don't need to take the 2012 courses before you take this one.) It focuses on how to work Visual Studio rather than on the mechanics of a particular programming language or framework. The demos are all in C# but almost all of it applies to other languages equally well. (As C++ developers know, some things we don't get, but we're used to that.)

A number of people who've been using Visual Studio for years have reported to me that they decided to watch the course just to see what features I felt were worth covering - and then accidentally learned something! Chances are you will, too, so why not watch on double speed and see if something comes up you didn't know before?

Kate

Friday, February 28, 2014 12:49:26 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Sunday, February 23, 2014

I was invited to speak to some Imagine Cup contestants in Calgary and delighted to accept. I spoke to the teams informally for quite a while about judging and judges and general team tips. I was really happy to see some teams from previous years so I could hear what happened after they entered. If you're a student (undergrad or grad) and would like to enter, there is theoretically still time, but realistically it would have been better to start several months ago since you do have to build working software. Why not take a look at the contest (there are over a million dollars in prizes, and you can get a cool trip somewhere and meet some industry high flyers) and start pulling together a team for next year? There's a pretty good introduction for Canadians on the Microsoft Canada blog.

For those of you who were at the sessions, here are the slides I used in the afternoon. I talked about the new C++ features and why they matter, and demoed C++ AMP as a great motivator for using C++. (I wanted to upload the pptx files, but they're too big for the blog, so I've exported PDFs.)

Kate

GregoryCppAMP.pdf (1.65 MB)

Cpp11and14.pdf (556.51 KB)

Sunday, February 23, 2014 1:17:11 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Wednesday, January 01, 2014

I'm a January 1st MVP, which means that while dealing with email that has piled up over the holiday break, I'm usually surprised to find my MVP renewal amongst the hundreds of other messages coming in. This year is no exception.

According to the MVP blog, there are 1011 of us awarded today. I'm happy to be included once again!

Kate

Wednesday, January 01, 2014 1:13:38 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #