On May 16/17 2014, Microsoft is hosting a free global event, //publish to help you get to 1.0. Microsoft will provide test devices, and access to engineers who can help you crush your last bug, and answer any questions you might have to help you deploy and publish your next great Windows and/or Windows Phone app. If free technical consulting doesn’t get you to show up, how about pizza?

And if my dear readers are able to publish their apps by June 1, 2014, they can enter in the //publish contest for a chance to win a MakerBot 3D printer, a Nokia Lumia 1520, $10,000 USD for an ultimate developer setup, or even a trip to the 2014 Formula One United States Grand Prix in Austin, TX.

I think it’s pretty clear what your next step is, dear reader. Go register, and publish your next app this month.

Full contest details and rules

This service is written in C# on .NET 3.5. That means that this should run out of the box on Windows 7 or later. If you look at the MonitoredProcessName in the VDIMonitorService class you can edit the name of the process you want to monitor. Install the service with InstallUtil and you should be in business. Or download the code on CodePlex and get a jump start on your custom solution.

1) Free Hands-on labs for Unity 3 and Enterprise Library 6. Enterprise Library has a long and accomplished history of providing architectural guidance, recommended practices, and reusable components to help developers, architects, and IT professionals efficiently build line-of-business (LOB) systems. Over the years, it's achieved a significant reach, seeing over 4 million downloads and powering many industrial systems. This is a collection of 46 Hands On labs exploring the new features

2) Microsoft Virtual Academy Successful technologists never stop learning and great technology never stops evolving. Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) offers online Microsoft training delivered by experts to help technologists continually learn, with hundreds of courses, in 11 different languages. Our mission is to help developers, knowledgeable IT professionals and advanced students learn the latest technology, build their skills, and advance their careers. MVA is free of charge, and the entire service is hosted on Windows Azure.

3) Office 365 Ignite The Ignite Summits are a series of limited invitation 3 day workshops for Microsoft's most valued IT Professionals, Developers, and Partners.  Each Summit will feature over 70 breakout sessions covering Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Developer, Project, Visio, and Yammer. Ignite Summits are free of charge, a no-show fee applies.  Session information included on each Summit location page. Events are currently scheduled for Hong Kong, Prague, Washington DC, and Dubai.

No excuses, open the books and get cracking. :)

I do see the value in deep technical training, and I do hope that the knowledge and camaraderie shared by this program lives on. I've met many MCM (and MCM-capable) at conferences, Code Camps, SharePoint Saturday and so forth. The community capable of this certification gives so much in terms of blogging, speaking, teaching, writing, and open source that it would be a shame to see it dissolve. On the other hand, these men and women will continue to be recognized as leaders in their products/geographies/specialties regardless of how many acronyms are on their resume/cv. I encourage all of my readers to keep learning and keep giving to the community. We should see this as an evolution rather than an extinction.

Reminder: I am a Microsoft employee, but my thoughts and these words are mine. I am not involved in the management or delivery of certification programs in any way.

I’ll be the first to admin that I’m not artistically inclined. Unity has an asset store so people like me can procure professional images and sound, leaving me to focus on the programming. Check out the tutorial project to see how to build a level of a stealth game.

First and foremost, I need to keep working on the craft of programming. I've been working through some code katas online. These can run the gamut from homework questions to more realistic one-off tasks that develop over time to become an Enterprise Solution. I've found that these exercises are short enough that I can work them into my schedule, but poignant enough to stay with me after I'm done. Once I've wrapped my brain around an exercise, I'm revisiting it in F#. I'd like to get to the point where I'm seamlessly switching languages to best solve problems, so I'm working on learning a broader set of programming languages this year.

I've also been doing a lot of working in the ALM world over the past year, so I'm going to dive into all of the features of TFS 2012, (continuously updated at visualstudio.com). Any chance to go deeper on requirements elicitation and structured design through coding and unit testing, and following up with exploratory and verification testing. I do so love the art of creating software and I'll take every chance to be part of it.

What are all of you reading this summer? How are you reinvesting in your career?

Commanding patterns – As you are iterating through your application, visiting and revisiting this section while laying out the controls will help enforce a consistent style. This section helps you decide which controls to use, and where to place them to make your app’s information easy to work with.

Animation patterns – This section links you to the common animations and their intended uses. These animations are subtle and provide a feeling that your app is alive. This section is worth a visit because videos of each animation are included, which really reinforced the descriptions.

Usability assessment – In this section, the approach to measuring your progress in usability is laid out in the following three activities with an increasing level in investment and commitment

1. App contacts and extensions- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh464906.aspx
2. Sharing overview: http://www.jonathanantoine.com/2011/09/18/windows-8-the-sharing-contract/
3. Sharing and receiving content: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh758314.aspx
4. Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer Namespace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br205967.aspx
5. Guidelines and Checklists for Sharing - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465251.aspx
6. QuickStart: Adding Search to an app - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/Hh868180(v=win.10).aspx
7. Sharing Data - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/going_metro/archive/2012/05/02/integrating-with-windows-8-share-charm-part-1-sharing-data.aspx
8. Sharing from your App - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsappdev/archive/2012/12/12/sharing-from-your-app.aspx

Another area to review is the gestures and touch interactions supported in Windows Store apps. Microsoft was kind enough to layout the basic uses of the supported gestures. If you are interested in extending the controls, (or just want to learn a bit more), I’d encourage you to read the Design guidance for Windows Store apps.

These topics will be covered in the 70-484 exam. This topic falls in the Program the User Interaction Skills Measured for that exam. The best way to get started studying is to download and review the Windows 8 gestures sample.

MSDN Links

1. Windows.UI.Input Namespace: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.ui.input.aspx
2. ManipulationUpdatedEvent: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/br242026.aspx
3. GestureRecognizer : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.ui.input.gesturerecognizer.aspx
4. User interaction overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465397
5. Quickstart: Touch input http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465387#using_manipulation_events

WebAuthenticationBroker - Supports OAuth and OpenID in Windows 8 apps

1. How WebAuthenticationBroker works: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh750286.aspx
2. Requirements for a Provider to Support SSO

For Windows Store app developers to take advantage of the SSO mode of the Web authentication broker, a provider needs to do the following.

• Allow URLs of the form ms-app://SID, where SID is the user's SID.
• Instruct app developers to call the version of AuthenticateAsync that does not specify a redirectURL. If provider supplies an SDK for Windows Store app development, that SDK should use this overload as well.

Pasted from <http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj856909.aspx>

PasswordCredentialStore

1. Managing user credentials - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/br229572.aspx
   1. PasswordVault can securely store credentials
   2. PasswordCredential just returns resource and userName - retreivePassword is required first

For more details about secure development for Windows Store applications check out this blog post with more great practices along with a whitepaper from MSDN.