Tag Archives: Development Resources

Free ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7

Microsoft are now giving away the eBook Programming Windows Phone 7 by Charles Petzold.  For detail information of this ebook, view http://blogs.msdn.com/b/microsoft_press/archive/2010/10/28/free-ebook-programming-windows-phone-7-by-charles-petzold.aspx

You can download a PDF here (38.6 MB).

And you can download the ebook’s sample code here (5.03 MB).

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Microsoft Training Kits

The Microsoft Training Kit is free download that contains useful training resources. Here is a list of some latest useful training kits, the training content includes demo, videos, presentations, hands on lab and some code samples. Enjoy it

Update History

  • 2010 Apr - Add Silverlight 4 Training
  • 2010 May – Add Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 Training Kit
  • 2010 June – Add Windows Azure Training Kit
  • 2010 Aug – Update SQL Server 2008 R2 & Windows Azure Training Kit
  • 2010 Sep – Add Windows Phone 7 Training Kit
  • 2010 Dec – Add VS LightSwitch & Lync Server 2010 Training Kit
  • 2011 March – Add PHP on Windows SQL Server Training Kit
  • 2012 March – Add SQL Server 2012 Developer Training Kit
  • 2012 April – Add Windows Server 8 HOL
  • 2012 June – Add Azure Training Kit
  • 2012 Dec – Add Windows Phone 8 Training Kit

Visual Studio Themes and Color Schemes

I just came cross this site http://studiostyles.info/ which provides Visual Studio color schemes for free download. All color schemas work for both Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Every schema has screenshots so you can see how it looks like before downloading it.

You can follow following steps to import the color schema into Visual Studio.

  1. In Visual Studio, choose Tools > Import and Export Settings
  2. Choose Import Selected Environment Settings and select whether you want to back up your existing settings or not
  3. Click Browse... to choose the file you downloaded.
  4. You get a choice which settings you want to import - choose all of them since the file only contains color settings and won't touch your other VS settings.
  5. Click Finish and you'll see the new colors.

Note: if you save the file to My Documents > Visual Studio 2010 > Settings, you'll have quick access to choose the settings file in step 3 above.

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GhostDoc Tutorial

Earlier I have introduced this excellent comment auto generation tool – GhostDoc. Now you can follow this instructions to get GhostDoc working in just 5 minutes.

  1. Download GhostDoc and install
  2. GhostDoc is a Visual Studio plugin, so after Visual Studio is launched, you’d need to assign a hotkey for automatic comments generation, or just  click skip to use default hotkey Ctrl + Shift + D Continue reading

MSI and WIX How to Tutorials

WiX tutorial
http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/

Introducing WiX
http://www.ondotnet.com/pub/a/dotnet/2004/04/19/wix.html

WiX Tutorial - Steps to Create an Installer MSI with WiX
http://www.dalun.com/wix/01.09.2005.htm

Windows Installer Guide from Microsoft MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/msi/setup/windows_installer_guide.asp

General WiX Documentation and Help

Find Dead Code

Dead code means block of code that is not reachable in application. They can cause noisy in code debugging and confuse developers. Sometimes I might spend a few hours to figure out why a breakpoint never hit.

Most of code defect is result of old function no longer used and referenced. Remove them will prevent developers from wasting time investigating wrong code. Thanks to FxCop in visual studio, now finding dead code is pretty straight forward. Continue reading

List of dev and test tools for IE8

From http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/readiness/testing-tools.aspx

Here is a list of convenient development and test tools to help test and modify applications to run on Internet Explorer 8:

Debugging websites

Debugging User Agent String Changes
This program produces a report on Internet Explorer's current User Agent String, along with scripts to simulate User-Agent Strings for other Internet Explorer versions and links to MSDN User-Agent String articles.

Internet Explorer Developer Tools
Internet Explorer 8 includes tools needed by web developers to efficiently debug and profile their sites directly in the browser.

Fiddler
This is an HTTP Debugging Proxy that logs all HTTP traffic between a computer and the Internet.

Process Monitor
Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, registry and process/thread activity.

Process Explorer
This program displays information about which handles and DLL processes have opened or loaded (Vista and Windows XP SP2).

W3C Validator HTML/XHTML
This is a W3C service to check the syntax of HTML and XHTML.

W3C Validator CSS
This is a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) service to check the syntax of CSS.

RSS Feeds Validator
This is a W3C service to check the syntax of RSS feeds.

Windows Internet Explorer Testing Center
Test pages that we developed in conjunction with World Wide Web Consortium working groups.

IE Compat Test Tool
The Internet Explorer Compatibility Test Tool (IECTT), part of the Application Compatibility Toolkit (ACT), helps identify application and website compatibility issues on Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 7. The IECTT identifies your web-based issues, uploads the data to the ACT Log Processing Service, and shows your results in real time. These tools help customers lower their costs for application compatibility testing, prioritize their applications, and deploy Internet Explorer more quickly.

SuperPreview
Expression Web SuperPreview for Internet Explorer is a visual debugging tool that makes it easier to migrate your websites from Internet Explorer 6 to Internet Explorer 7 or 8.

Designing/Creating websites

Expression Web
Microsoft Expression Web is a professional design tool to create modern, standards-based sites that deliver superior quality on the web.

Visual Web Developer Express
Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition is a free, easy to use, and easy to learn program that allows everyone—from the novice to the professional developer—to create ASP.NET websites.

Visual Studio plug-in: GhostDoc

Are your tired of documenting you code using C# /// XmlDoc syntax for each and every method?

It is time for you to meet SubMain’s GhostDoc. SubMain’s GhostDoc is a Visual Studio plug-in the was design just for you. It will parse your method/property/parameters names and will create a great documentation just for you with simple Ctrl+Shift+D.

Download it Free at: http://submain.com/products/ghostdoc.aspx. Continue reading

Install Local WordPress Environment on Windows

WordPress is one of most popular blog applications. This application is very easy to use however setup a local environment for theme or plugin development on windows system is not that easy for bloggers. In this post, I will walk thru you how to setup local WordPress environment using Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 with just a few clicks. (I am using 64bit Windows 7 in this tutorial but same steps work windows server 2008 as well)

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