Our agile project management tool TeamPulse just released our R5 2012 bits and let us tell you, TeamPulse has never been that Agile. R5 marks the release of the much requested Kanban boards, as well as some other great features like TFS 2012, Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 support.

Let’s take a closer look at the new TeamPulse features.

TeamPulse becomes more Agile than ever with Kanban!

With this release TeamPulse introduces the new Kanban board functionality which allows users to visualize their development flow and gain better control over their flow of work.

The Kanban boards leverage the already popular TeamPulse...

Have you reached a point in your application where you want to rewrite some portion of the code, change a public API or even switch to one of the third party components that are widely used today? It's very likely that you've bumped into this wall like most of the developers out there and you know that usually a comprehensive evaluation of the pros and cons of the switch is required to ensure the same improvement can't be achieved with some small tweaks in the existing solution. Either way, you might end up fighting with strange issues and spending tons of time...

Continuing my series based on the presentations I’m giving on Europe, today I return to Tiles to look at creating Secondary tiles.

A secondary tile can be created by the user and pinned to the start menu to provide deep access into your program.  A classic example of a secondary tile would be to pin a tile for your home town in a weather application, or a specific stock in a portfolio program.

I’ve stripped down the Microsoft SDK sample to its essentials to make it a bit easier to see how to create a secondary tile.

To begin, create a new application,...

JustCode has long been helping developers navigate their code and quickly find Files, Types, Members, and Symbols.  The most recent Service Pack (released 12-September 2012) has made it even easier! 

Go To File (Ctl-Alt-G)

Camel Case Searching

Entering capital letters (or a combination of capital letters and lowercase letters) into the search box will filter the files accordingly.  For example, I know that I have two BDD concerns that test logging in, both starting with “When_Logging_In”.  By Typing “WLI”, the Go To File dialog filters down to the files that have the capital letters W,L,I in their name (in order).  The result is...

MobilityDay 2012 Official Windows 8 app is the next app built with the Telerik Windows 8 UI controls. In case you’ve missed this piece of information, the last version of the suite is Release Candidate, which means that it is still free, but you can submit apps to the store. And you know how important it is to be among the first out there. You can download Telerik Windows 8 UI controls here.

Mobility Day 2012 Conference targets business decision makers and IT professionals who are involved in business and technical aspects of mobile solutions. It will be held on Sept...

When building an application for Windows 8 we find the same known feature for Globalization through the CultureInfo.CurrentCulture and CultureInfo.CurrentUICulture properties, used in many cases where it comes to using culture-specific strings, formatting dates, numbers, etc. And while developing, you might be surprised that, in the common scenario, the current culture does not derive from the OS culture for the current machine.

Then, how the current culture is resolved?

It turns out that there is a way to get the correct OS UI culture. To understand the process I will start from a blank app and modify it for our needs.

Package.appxmanifest default language

When...

After the official release of our new Add OpenAccess Service wizard you have shown some great interest in using it to shorten the efforts for creating the Web Services and start developing your N-Tier solution. As we are always trying to help you achieve your goals faster and easier, we decided to enhance our resources on the matter with two video tutorials, covering all you need to know about using the wizard for generating WCF Plain Services and WCF Data Services.  

WCF Plain Services

As many of you already know, for exposing your OpenAccess Domain Model through a Plain Service, we are generating a layer of Data Transfer Objects....

There is a great tendency among web browsers nowadays - the wide and fast adoption of HTML5 APIs. Why should we, as web developers, be excited about it? Well let's take the canvas tag, for example. Imagine that you can render raster graphics in the browser, edit an image purely on the client-side, apply filters on it or draw complex animations without the need for plugins, just JavaScript. Imagine the power and features you can implement without bothering with the overhead and complexity of server-side calls. This all and much more is possible with the canvas tag. In this blog...

One of the biggest struggles that developers have with adopting Unit Testing, whether it’s Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD) or even just Test Eventual Development (TED), is the difficulty some code is to test.  This is typically when code doesn’t follow the SOLID design principles. If you aren’t familiar with Robert C. Martin’s SOLID Principles, here is a quick summary.

There are five SOLID principles put forth by Robert (Uncle Bob) C. Martin.

Single Responsibility Principle

A class should have one, and only one, reason to change

Did you ever have a Swiss Army knife?  64 features, but you could never...

I often get the question, “why the focus on hybrid development for your accelerator?” This question has come up more and more as Mark Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s focus on HTML5/hybrid development was a mistake.

As I argued over a year ago on this blog, it is mistake to bet exclusively on native or hybrid since some Apps will call for a native approach and some will call for a hybrid approach. Projects that need maximum performance and hardware interaction will require a native approach (medical scanning/rendering apps and some games come to mind) and projects that require larger reach and very fast time to market require a hybrid...