This holiday season I wanted to take a bit of a break and do something fun with Azure. I’ve spent a lot of time around children recently, and many of them Minecraft. I had heard that we now support Minecraft VMs in Azure, and decided it’d be a perfect time to try it out. I’d finally get to figure out if am as a pick-axe or sword person.

Requirements:

• Azure account.  If you don’t have one yet, sign up for a free trial
• Minecraft account & installed on your computer. $27 available here 
  • You can spin up a Minecraft server in Azure without the Minecraft account, but you won’t be able to play it without the account.

Steps:

1. Log into your account at  https://portal.azure.com/
2. Go to New-> Search the marketplace and search for Minecraft
   
3. You’ll end up with the following results. 
   
4. My personal favorite is the Minecraft out-a-box server, but all of them will work. Select it, and at the bottom, select Create
   
   
5. We’ll now be presented with options for creating our Minecraft VM. There are 4 things we need to customize.
   1. Host name - name of your server. This will be <hostname>.cloudapp.net
   2. Username & Password – how you’ll log into the server
   3. Pricing Tier – when we click on this, we can see the recommended sizes for our Minecraft VM. I suggest at least the A2 Standard, we don’t want our server to lag when we’re fighting a skeleton.
      
   4. Location – this is where your VM is hosted. For best results, pick the location closest to you. Since I’m in the Bay Area, and since there’s no West US, I picked Central US
      
6. Select Create to kick off the creation of our Minecraft VM. I suggest leaving the “Pin to Dashboard” box checked, to make it easy for us to check it’s status and find it in the future.
   
7. Azure will redirect you back to your Dashboard, and you’ll be able to see it processing.
    
   
8. Once your VM has been created, click on it to see more information. (NOTE: This may take up to 20 minutes, depending on resources)
   You’ll see a page like this, and you’ll need to record the Virtual IP Address.
    
   
9. That was our last Azure step, now launch Minecraft on your computer & log in.
   Select Play
   
   Select Mulitplayer
   
   Select Direct Connect
   
   enter your Virtual IP Address & Join Server
   

Success! Time to celebrate the new year by building some cool things

5. Package Tracker for Outlook

Why is it awesome?

Because I get tired of copying and pasting the tracking number into build, when I’m wondering where my package is.

NOTE: It found the embedded tracking number in my email, and pulled up its status

 

How do you get it?

Open a new email     then on the right side, you’ll see apps for office

You’ll then end up in the Office Store: Apps for Outlook.  Then click on LinkedIn for Outlook, and you can add it to your own outlook.

 

4. LinkedIn for Outlook

Why is it awesome?

       When you get an email, LinkedIn will tell you who they are and how they’re connected to you.  No more emails from random person, and trying to figure out how you know them!

 

How do you get it?

       Same process as before

3. DocuSign For Word

Why is it awesome?

                  Even in this modern age, people still expect you to sign things with a pen. NDAs, lease agreements, etc. DocuSign for Work (also for outlook) makes it painless. All you have to do is open the document that needs to be signed, say who’s signing it, and it’ll take care of your signature, and email the document over to the other parties who need to sign. Super easy!

How do you get it?

    Open any word document, and navigate to the Insert Tab. Then go to Store.    Select DocuSign for word and Install

    

2. Bing Maps for Excel

Why is it awesome?

         Let’s say you have some data in Excel with a location and some numbers. Excel automatically will make a pretty chart for you displaying it.

For example, I have this data:

And then click on the bing maps app:

And then choose, show locations. I’ll have a beautiful map!

1. Poll Everywhere for PowerPoint

Why is it awesome?

     You can embed real-time surveys in your PowerPoints.  It’s perfect for keeping the audience engaged.    I love testing if people have been paying attention, or using it to decide what we do next. People can either text in their answer or they can go to a website.

  How do you get it?

     Open your PowerPoint presentation. Go to INSERT –> STORE 

     Click on and install Poll Everywhere. Then you’re ready to go!

That’s it for this blog post. Tune in for the next one where we will build an app for Word :)

Right now, I’m studying for the Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions, Microsoft Exam 70-532. My colleagues have told me that the best way to study for the exam is to take every bullet point from the exam description, and make sure I'm able confident in it. 

Here’s the list of resources I’ve compiled for that process. I hope you can use it to further your studying.  I’ll keep updating it as I continue my process. Leave a comment if you have a resource I should add.

NOTE: There is also a Microsoft Virtual Academy available for Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions.

Today, I took some time to break out my Arduino Uno and have some fun. Before writing this post, I had no experience with Arduinos, but I did have some with building circuits.

Step 1: Take it out of the Box

I had received the Vilros Arduino Uno Rev 3 Ultimate Starter Kit for Christmas. It’s really awesome. I have like 20 LEDs, a nice breadboard, a motor, and a bunch of other neat components (photo resistor, potentiometer, etc.) It also came with a nice instruction booklet

Step 2: Install & Configure your computer for the Arduino IDE

I started my journey with just following the directions and seeing where I could go. Being me, I followed the directions and downloaded the arduino IDE. The arduino IDE appears like this:

Pretty clean and easy to use, it looked like a great place to start. I started with a simple circuit which cycled a LED on and off.

After building a few more circuits (potentiometer, 8 LEDs color cycling, and push buttons) I thought to myself, there must be a better way of doing this than having tons of windows open (one for each individual project).  I love Visual Studio, and use it all the time already, I wondered if there was an extension for  VS, and with a quick search, I found it.

Step 3: Arduino in Visual Studio

VisualMicro provides arduino programming in Visual Studio.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you’ll notice some changes in your version of Visual Studio, for example, below, I can customize what Arduino I’m compiling for and which port I’m sending my data through.

I did notice that there were many features and optional paid addins which I didn’t know anything about, but I decided to ignore them for a while.

A Quick Exercise with Visual Micro

I built the following circuit:

Then created a new VisualMicro Sketch Project called LightSensor

My code is below:

// We'll create constants to name the pins we're using.
// This will make it easier to follow the code below.

const int sensorPin = 0;
const int ledPin = 9;

// We'll also set up some global variables for the light level:

int lightLevel, high = 0, low = 1023;


void setup()
{
	// We'll set up the LED pin to be an output.

	pinMode(ledPin, OUTPUT);
}

void loop()
{

	lightLevel = analogRead(sensorPin);


	autoTune();  // have the Arduino do the light tuning for us!


	analogWrite(ledPin, 255 - lightLevel); //light up when it's dark outside

}
void autoTune()
{


	if (lightLevel < low)
	{
		low = lightLevel;
	}



	if (lightLevel > high)
	{
		high = lightLevel;
	}


	lightLevel = map(lightLevel, low + 30, high - 30, 0, 255);
	lightLevel = constrain(lightLevel, 0, 255);

	// Now we'll return to the main loop(), and send lightLevel
	// to the LED.
}

Then I went up into Tools>Visual Micro>Tutorial Mode and disabled it, otherwise it would try to teach me how to use breakpoints and other helpful hints.

Then I simply went and ran my code:

The code compiles and starts to run on my Arduino.

 [View:http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-blogs-components-weblogfiles/00-00-01-60-92/1565.LightSensorCircuit.mp4]

In Conclusion

It’s pretty simple and familiar running Arduino projects in Visual Studio, I look forward to my next project :)

Below is the video, and here's part one with picture instructions. 

In this blog post, I'm going to show you how you can build a simple and useful Windows app in a few hours.

You can now follow along as I walk Michael Palermo at DevRadio through building his first Project Siena app.

Step 1: Install Project Siena on your Windows 8/8.1 device.

You can download it here.

If you're going to want to submit this to the store, you should do these two things  as well:
Get a developer account — Use this link to register.
Download and install Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 (don’t download the Express 2013 version). And don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to use Visual Studio, this is just to be able to Submit your newly created app to the Windows Store.

Step 2: Come up with an app idea.

I love teaching people the history of women computing, and that’s what my app is going to do.

I already have 2 premade excel files and an RSS feed I use in a windows phone app I’ve built, which I’ll be using, you can download them for yourself here:http://sdrv.ms/1e2S2LM. 

You will need to replace the images and videos with one on your local computer, as I have not uploaded them.

Step 3: Launch Project Siena & Add Data Sources

Please note, that I am no longer saving dessert until I complete this app. I am eating it while I build the app. Mint chocolate chip ice cream is my favorite.

When Project Siena first opens, you’ll get a screen like this. As you can see on the right side, there are lots of different visuals we can add.

The first thing we’re going to do, though, is add our data sources. If you swipe down form the top/right click in the empty space, a menu bar will appear. Choose File –> Data Sources, and this page will appear. 

On the right side, choose the + and we can add our two excel files (each individually, importing the table from each document one at a time), as well as our RSS feed.

Step 4: Let’s add some visuals.

Select Add Visual + to open Add Visuals, and then click Galleries

Click Image gallery with Caption.

An Items menu will pop up. I’m going to use Table 1 to create a famous women in Computing gallery. When I select Table 1, we’re brought to the following screen.

We want to change the caption on each woman to be her name, so if we choose Title 1, we can change it to be Name.

Next we’ll resize the gallery of famous women in computing to be pretty large as well as change the background color.

The background color can be changed by clicking on the empty part of the page, and selecting fill. I decided to go with a pretty blue.

We can resize things like we do in any other program. By dragging the corners of the object.

Step 5: Add a back button, a title, and name the page

Let’s add a back button and a title to make this page more complete.

Back button. I want people to come to this page from another page, and then be able to return to that initial launch screen.

Add a new Visual, select Shapes. Scroll down to the bottom and select a back arrow. Place it in the top left corner. I’m also going to change it to white, by selecting fill, and choosing white as the color.

Title: I want my user to know where they are within my app, and to understand what they’re seeing.

Add a new Visual, select Label. I’m going to title my page “Famous Women in Computing”.

Under Data, select Text to change the text of the label.

Under Design, I’m changing my label to white, size 45, and style:lighter.

Lastly, in the top left corner of Project Siena, you’ll notice it says Screen1 and Label1. We can change these so they’re more logical and are easier to navigate. I’ll change screen1 to FamousWomen, and Label1 to Title.

Step 6: Add a new page with linked data

I want my users to be able to select one of these famous women, and learn more about her.

If you swipe down from the top/right click, you’ll see a menu. Here, add a screen.

On this screen

1. Change the background color to match

2. Add a back button & a title (I recommend just copy-pasting from the FamousWomen Screen)

3. Add a new image from Visuals.

4. Change the name of the page to IndividualWomen

Next, we’re going to change the title of this screen to reflect which woman the user has chosen. Project Siena can tell which item in the gallery we’ve selected, and we’ll use this feature. This means that instead of creating one page for each individual woman, we can create a template, and it will auto-fill based on who’s selected.

Select the title you’ve added, then choose Text, select Gallery1!Selected, and then choose name. It should look like: Gallery1!Selected!Name

We’re now going to do the same thing with the image. Set the image to be Gallery1!Selected!ImageLocation. This pulls the image from my computer using the image path I specified in my excel file.

If we now go to Design for the image, we can add a border for our image. You can find all the border controls under (…) more. 

I’m going to choose:

BorderStyle!Solid

BorderColor: White

BorderThickness: 3

Beautiful! 

One more visual element left. We’re going to add the description/biography about the woman on this page.

Add a new label, make the font white, and stretch it to be next to the photo. Set the text to Gallery1!Selected!Description

LAST THING!

Select the back button, choose On Select, Navigate, and we’re going to have it go back to the FamousWomen page.

Step 7: Linking a gallery and to a page

We’ve told the app to go  back to the FamousWomen page if we’re on the IndividualWomen page, but we haven’t told the Famous Women page to go to the IndividualWomen page when someone’s been selected.

On the FamousWomen page, select the first photo. Choose OnSelect, and Navigate to IndividualWomen.

REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR WORK!

From here, we can run the app, by selecting Preview from the top app bar.

Step 8: Add a video gallery

I have many inspirational and educational videos about women in computing, and I want to add a gallery to share them.

Add a new page. Set the background color to match the rest of the app. Name it VideoScreen

Add a custom gallery, and link it to the videos table we imported from Excel.

Select the first gray box, and then add a label. It will auto populate with the title of the video.

Select the gray box again, add a video player, and then set the fill of the Gallery2!TemplateFill to be transparent.

You may also want to play around with the Gallery2!TemplateSize and the width and height of the video player to make it look pretty.

Tie the videos to our video links by choosing the video player, selecting Media, and setting it toThisItem!VideoLocation.

Set the video titles to be white, and reasonably sized.

Add a page title and back button, as we did previously.

Step 9: Add a page with an RSS news feed

As with every other new page:

Set the background fill

Add a Title

Add a Back Button

Set the name of the page

On this page, we’re going to add a Text Gallery and link it to rss_1. (We imported the rss feed earlier)

Set:

Body1 to description

Heading1 to title

Subtitle1 to pubDate

Also set the fill of the gallery to transparent, and the text white. Resize as appropriate.

Lastly, I want to launch a web browser to the article when the user clicks on the headline or description. This is done by choosing OnSelect and then calling the command Launch(ThisItem!link).

Sweet, we have three awesome pages, and now we need to have a screen to launch them all from.

Step 10: Creating a home screen

Create one more screen.

Set the background, add a title, and add three images.

One image will take me to my famous women in computing gallery, one will take me to the videos gallery, and one will take me to my news gallery.  I had images for each already, and uploaded them using the (+) Add Image button.

For consistency, add a the same border we had earlier. BorderStyle!Solid  BorderColor:White BorderThickness:3

Add a new rectangle (visual, shapes), and arrange one at the bottom of each image. Set the transparency to 0.9 (as seen below).

Then add a white text label on top of each rectangle.

When the user clicks on one of the images, we want to take them to the appropriate gallery.

Choose the image, OnSelected, and navigate to the correct page.

The last thing we need to do is tie our back buttons to the LaunchScreen.  Go back to FamousWomen, NewsScreen, and VideoScreen, and have the back button when selected navigate to the LaunchScreen.

Step 11: Save and Publish!

Save your project one more time.

Under the file menu, choose publish. Pick a name for your app and add a logo.

We want to publish the resources locally, because all the content is coming from my local computer, and we want to have it saved locally on each user’s computer.

You are able to choose where it’s saved.

Congratulations! You’ve completed your first Windows 8 app. (And may even still have some ice cream left)

You can download my completed app, and see all other related files here http://sdrv.ms/1e2S2LM. 

You’re also welcome to download it from the store here: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/77d461b1-89d1-4052-a066-837d057e71f6 

(Optional) Step 12: Publishing to the Windows Store

A) Get a developer account — Use this link to register.

B) Download and install Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8 (don’t download the Express 2013 version). And don’t worry, you don’t need to know how to use Visual Studio, this is just to be able to Submit your newly created app to the Windows Store.

C) The Project Siena will creates a folder named PublishedPackage. Enter the folder and double-click InstallApp.exe and select “Install on this PC” — if required, enter your Microsoft Account credentials.

Also download the ProduceAppForStore.zip from https://aka.ms/ProjectSienaProduceAppForStore and extract all the files inside the PublishedPackage\YourAppName folder. If you’re prompted to overwrite any file, click yes.

You’ll also see a file called ProduceAppForStore.cmd, double-click it. If during this step you get the message “Windows protected your PC”, click the “More info” link and select “Run anyway”.

Time to submit your app to the Windows Store:

D) Start Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8, go to Store > Reserve App Name, and create a good name for your app.

E) Select Store > Associate App with Store and follow the instructions.

F) Select Store > Edit App Manifest, select the Capabilities tab, and uncheck any capability that your newly created Windows 8.1 app doesn’t have.

G) In the Solution Explorer, double-click privacy.html to edit your custom Privacy Policy for your app built with Project Siena.

• Remove the placeholder text “[REVIEW PRIVACY POLICY]“ and edit the rest of text to accurately describe your app’s privacy policy

• Substitute “[INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]“ with your own email address(es). The text should now look like this:<a href=”mailto:someone@somewhere.com”>anyone@somewhere.com</a>

• Substitute “[INSERT DATE]“ with the actual date

H) Select Store > Create App Packages and follow the instructions to create the app package (.appx).

I)Select Store > Upload App Packages to open the Developer Dashboard website. Then enter the require information: In the section ”Packages”, select your .appx using the path on step (8). In the section “Description”, choose the Windows 8 tab (but don’t be afraid, the app will work in both operating system 8 and 8.1). Finally, complete any remaining information and click the “Submit for certification” to finish.

You done it! Now just wait for Microsoft to approve and publish your app in the Windows Store. For more information on these instructions, visit this Microsoft web page.

If you agree, we’d love if you’d take a few minutes out of your day to help us rate apps, so the good ones bubble to the top charts (and the not so good ones fall to the bottom). Right now, a majority of apps have few (or no) ratings, making it hard to rank them – this is totally fixable, though!

If you’re willing to help, here’s what you can do:

1. Click on an app below.
2. Download it.
3. Rate it.

Every week I’ll update this post with new apps.

1. Travel IQ Quiz

2. Raul Seixas FANfinity

3.  Eindhoven Airport + Flight Tracker

4. LIA

5. Ashlee Simpson FANfinity

6. Equals

7. Wizard vs. UFOs

8. Sticker Tales (Dell)

9. Novi Library

10. Numbers with Dally Dino

I wanted to let you know that I’m giving my first talk tomorrow at the SoCal Code Camp at USC.

The talk:

Your First Windows 8 App

Katherine Harris
Christine Matheney

10:15 AM - Sunday, November 10, 2013

Location: USC ZHS 252

You want to build a Windows 8 app, but have minimal (to no) experience? Katherine & Christine will teach you!

Join them as they introduce you to the basics and more!

They will be using Windows 8.1, Visual Studio 2013 RC, and XAML/C#.

The Talk

If you attended our talk, please fill out the survey here: http://bit.ly/1stWin8app

https://aka.ms/StartBuilding

http://bit.ly/DeveloperDownloads

http://bit.ly/FirstWin8AppSlides

This blog post will go through the talk Christine Matheney & Katherine Harris gave on 11/10 on Your First Windows 8 App.

About us!

Katherine is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia with a degree in Computer Science. In school, Katherine was active in AOE, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, and with the gaming club. She also interned at VeriSign while in school. Originally from northern Virginia, Katherine is now living in San Francisco.

Christine is a recent graduate of Marquette University with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Christine has been an active Girl Scout since kindergarten, and has always been interested in robots. In school Christine interned with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Microsoft, and Tesla Motors.

Katherine and Christine are both technical evangelists with Microsoft, meaning they help secure the future of the platform (windows 8, windows phone, windows azure) through enabling developers to build and maintain quality apps.

Agenda. Self-explanatory.

When you go to build you app you need a full toolbox first. Very similar to my blog post earlier about your toolbox, but I’ll go over them quickly.

Update!

My app is now in the store!

The screenshots and description we developed earlier are now viewable, and people can download my app. Here’s a link if you want to check it out, download and RATE IT!

You can check out my code here: https://github.com/stinethebean/WinPhoneAppB4Lunch.git

Not too complicated, I’ll walk you thru some of the auto-generated code.

First, the Model – View – ViewModel is auto-generated for each individual page. You can learn more about MVVM here.

Then we have our data for each page. The blue circled pages are made of tables, while the red is the pure HTML pages.

And just to take a peek at the HTML. Really do-able!

Now that we’ve seen what it looks like, I have faith that you could go and write your own app in HTML/JavaScript or C#/XAML.

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions!

Step 1 – Register

at http://apps.windowsstore.com/ 

Step 2 – Choose a Template

As you can see below, there are tons of options! I decided I’d create one for my hometown, Castro Valley, CA

Step 3  - Title, Description, & Content

Super easy! Hopefully if you’re building this app, you have an idea for a title and a description. As for your image/logo, you can either refer to my earlier post about logos, or pick a nice image off of Bing. Bing has an awesome feature where you can find images which are free to use commercially (which is what you probably want for your app)

Content

Each tab is a different “page” of your app, meaning that you get to it by swiping left or right. I decided to change my pages a bit from the original categories

The two main ways of presenting information I used were pure HTML5 and tables.

The HTML5 sections were simply text, for example, Geography:

If desired, I could have gone in and edited the HTML…. but lunch depended on me finishing the app….so beautification was not a priority.

Tables were slightly more challenging, but still totally do-able.

You can either add each place individually:

Or Import data via excel.  (I recommend exporting it first so you can see the formatting, and then modifying that) It’s all CSV formatted

So, I did that for each of my sections/pages as appropriate.

Step 4 – Style, Tiles, Splash & Lock

There isn’t much to say for this section, basically pretty straight-forward. But I’ll show you what I did:

I chose the flip template:

And I chose default splash screen and lock screens:

Step 4: Generate!

App studio says it’ll email you when it finishes generating your application, but it doesn’t really take that long, I didn’t mind waiting.

Soon, you’ll get this page. You’ll want to download the publish package. It will download as a .xap filed

I would also recommend downloading the source code so that you can easily grab screenshots

Step 5: Publish!

https://dev.windowsphone.com/en-us/publish

It’s only a 2 step process!

Name your app, describe the category, and choose your pricing

Upload your downloaded xap file

You also need to add a description for the store as well as keywords.

LAST PART – Upload images.

App tile icon. You should already have that from your App Studio project.

Screenshots. These were a bit more complicated. What I recommend is opening your source code (as mentioned earlier), and running it in the WXGA phone emulator.

You can then take and save screenshots

Then you’re done! You can go ahead and submit your app for review.

Update!

My app is now in the store!

The screenshots and description we developed earlier are now viewable, and people can download my app. Here’s a link if you want to check it out, download and RATE IT!