Patiner on the Windows Store

After creating a similar app on Windows Phone, I had fun making a similar app on Windows 8: Patiner.

The app allows you to view the status of the ice rinks on the island of Montreal by navigating the map. It’s very simple and that’s intentional, but improvements are already planned for future versions.

The data comes from Patiner Montreal, which offers an excellent web portal and links to apps for other operating systems.

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Back at it?

After almost a year without activity, this blog is almost on life support. A new job, the little family, and other elements have kept me away. But I will try to remedy that:

  • I updated the blog engine and fixed some issues.
  • Changed the theme.

I already have some blog ideas, so in some time they should appear on this blog.

Stay tuned…

Review of .NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer at Alt.NET Montreal

logoFooter\[1\] Wow, a great evening: an attentive and interested audience. Here are some links that were discussed during the evening:

You can download the files and the presentation in zip format here and on the .Net Montreal group website.

I forgot Gadgeteer stickers at home, so if you want some, let me know and we’ll arrange to send them to you!

Thank you, if you have any questions feel free to contact me and I look forward to seeing your projects!

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.NET Micro Framework and Gadgeteer at Alt.NET Montreal

On February 25th, I will be giving a presentation titled .NET Micro Framework and .NET Gadgeteer: Embedded Computing for Everyone at the Alt.Net Montreal meeting. I will go over the Framework and Gadgeteer with examples: things that blink, move, and provide useful information ;)

If you have projects you would like to show to the group, feel free to bring them along, we will be happy to discuss them.

Looking forward to meeting you there!

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Create your first Azure Mobile Services application

It is very easy to create your first Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 or iOS application with Azure Mobile Services tools. In this post, I will demonstrate how to create a sample “ToDo” application. In fact, it will take you longer to read this post than to execute the steps in it!

Log in to your Windows Azure portal and go to the Mobile Services section. Click on the Create a mobile service link.

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SharePoint 2013 RTM

Microsoft announced yesterday that the Office and SharePoint teams have released the 2013 RTM version.

Availability for Volume Licensing (VL) customers as well as those with an MSDN or Technet account should be available by mid-November (Just in time for the SharePoint Conference). General availability is expected by early December.

Office 365 should also be updated by mid-November to take advantage of the new features.

IRON SharePoint

Four colleagues at Alcero and me have register a team (Hot Box) for this year IRON SharePoint competition at SharePoint Summit in Toronto. We will be building a SharePoint solution in less than three during the summit (May 14-16) and present to the judges our solution.

Beyond the 5000$ price for the winning team, as per the IRON SharePoint page:

The winners will also enjoy IRON SharePoint immortality and be the envy of their peers.

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Visual Studio 11: Caller Attributes

One of the new features of Visual Studio 11 and the .NET Framework 4.5 are the Caller attributes:

  • CallerMemberName: allows you to obtain the method or property name of the caller to the method.
  • CallerFilePath: allows you to obtain the full path of the source file that contains the caller. This is the file path at compile time.
  • CallerLineNumber: allows you to obtain the line number in the source file at which the method is called.

These attributes help to simplify the code in certain scenarios, such as logging or when using the INotifyPropertyChanged interface (as in MVVM) and you need to pass the name of the calling property.

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