Author: Sam Basu

Sam Basu https://samidipbasu.wordpress.com Dev 🥑 for @UnoPlatform. Into X-Plat Dev & AI. 13xMVP. Speaker. Author. Streamer. ❤️ Family, Travels. 💜 Apple, Cricket, Fast cars. Foodie. Geek. 🌎

Thoughts on BUILD 2013 & Windows 8.1

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I was amongst the thousands who spent much of last week at MSFT’s BUILD conference, this time in sunny San Francisco. Here’s what stood out for me:

  • A developer conference of the size of BUILD takes a lot of logistics planning. Microsoft, along with the 3rd party event management company that you see at all MSFT events now, pulled it off successfully. The event, organization, meals, attendee party, buses, registration etc. all seemed to go without any major glitches. Kudos.
  • BUILD keynotes did not disappoint. Executives including Ballmer, Nadella, Guthrie and other keynote speakers seemed to exude in instilling developer enthusiasm in the MSFT ecosystem. Windows 8.1 & several major announcements were made during the keynotes. Some were disappointed with lack of Windows Phone or XBoxOne news; but there are a whole lot of factors & product life cycle stages that contribute towards what’s being shared. I felt MSFT shared what they could and enticed developers with the opportunities that the ecosystem offers now.
  • As for the giveaways, surely the MSFT Surface Pro with Type cover and the new 8″ Acer Iconia W3 should have impressed attendees. Other goodies included 100 GB of SkyDrive storage (although it expires in a year) and an Office 365 license, along with gift cards towards the Windows Phone store. The Surface Pro is a great machine with near perfect balance of portability & productivity. I can also see the lure of the newer breed of 8″ or smaller tablets running Windows 8. The form factor lends itself wonderfully to reading books or consuming media content, but it would be another device to carry around. Sticking happily to my Surface RT for now ..
  • One of my biggest takeaways from any such big conference is the networking with peers; off course BUILD did not disappoint. Last minute hotel reservation meant that I was stuck in a shady San Francisco neighborhood; but that did not matter much given most of the time was spent with some very smart folks. From hanging out with my homies at the Telerik booth to friends like Brian Lagunas, Micheal Collier, Brent Schooley, Iris Classon, Matt Hidinger, Jeff Blankenburg, James Bender, Phil Japikse, Steve Bohlen & others., it was good times indeed. The Xamarin & DeepFriedBytes parties were awesome – thank you!

Sessions & APIs:

Between spending time at the super busy Telerik booth and offline conversations, I tried attending as many BUILD sessions as I could. There were some great ones, and ones were speakers struggled with technicalities; but that is normal at any conference and specially when showing off Preview software. If you were not at BUILD or missed sessions, almost all of them are now online @ http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2013.

Not surprisingly, lot of sessions focused on new APIs in Windows 8.1 for Store Apps and Azure Mobile Services integration. Amongst the new APIs or features, ones that really piqued my interest were the new native HTTP Client with caching/filtering/OAuth support, Pre-fetch data support for Windows 8.1 apps, POS support with Barcode/magnetic strip credit card reader, people/contacts integration, 3D printing support, Mobile Service integration wizards etc. Here are some of my top sessions picks; highly recommend watching, if you need to catch up:

One of best parts of BUILD is the opportunity to hang out with engineers who actually build the APIs we developers use. I was in several closed door sessions with Windows 8 engineers talking through what’s working and what’s not. And getting to pick the brains of the likes of Tim Heuer, Damian Edwards, Shawn Oster etc. – priceless.

Windows 8.1:

Off course BUILD kicked off the Windows 8.1 Preview and the update was made available for immediate download. The actual polished update would come later in the year through the Windows Store and it looks rather promising. You can get the preview now @ http://preview.windows.com.

Now, Windows 8.1 Preview is plenty solid and you do not risk your PC crashing all over the place. However, it is still very much a Preview and lacks polish, along with being jittery on several fronts. So, evaluate the risks before putting this on your dev machine. As far as I understand, if running Windows RT like on a Surface RT device, you cannot go back to Windows 8, but eventually can move forward once 8.1 becomes ready for GA. If running Windows 8 Pro, you are more likely to have to begin with a clean slate once Windows 8.1 gets ready to ship. So again, weigh your options as to where you want to install Windows 8.1; you pay a little price, but it’s worth it to have a taste of the new features and definitely as a developer if you need to consume the new APIs.

As for me, I put on Windows 8.1 Preview on my Surface RT the very first evening and not repenting it. But please make sure to create a recovery USB stick if you feel you might need to go back to how your Surface was with Windows 8 RT. Here’s the good & bad:

  • It’s the little things, but I love having the Desktop wallpaper as a background on my Start screen. Yes, the Start button is back on the desktop and it overlays the tiles on top of your desktop background, leading to a slightly less jarring difference between the desktop & touch world.

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  • If you had not noticed this yet, Windows 8.1 Preview ships with a preview version of Outlook 2013. Granted the Windows Mail app is being heavily redesigned, Outlook will serve your needs of having enterprise & other emails in one application in the desktop world; makes the Surface RT more friendly for work stuff.

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  • Now, you must have heard about the windowing support for the new Windows 8.1 apps. The fact that you can be on the Mail app and have several IE windows open up side by side as you tap on links is pretty cool, specially on high DPI/resolution monitors. The magic number is 500px for window width; the Windows engineers told me that they had labored a lot to come to this number.  So, this means that the old Windows 8 apps being in Full, Filled & Snapped modes is gone; instead apps can go from 500 px till as wide as needed and the developer gets to control the experience if desired. On lower resolution screens like that of the Surface RT, you will most likely see two/three windows side by side; but it is handy.
  • One after-effect of the window re-sizing is prioritization. Envision this: you have two apps running side by side in Windows 8 in a 80-20 split. The app having the wider screen real estate kinda has priority; so as you swipe from left and bring in another app, it slides into the 80% area. Now, with the new windowing support, there is no clear priority between windows and as a result, new apps trying to get to focus kind of hover on top of existing apps, waiting for the user to snap it in place. Kind of hit or miss in my opinion, but what else could they have done?

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  • One of the best noted Windows 8.1 features is the All-Apps list. Swipe up from the Start screen and voila, you have the list of All Apps. Newly installed apps do no longer clutter your start screen; instead they silently show up in this list. There is a handy sorting mechanism in All Apps list; set it to show the newly installed apps first and you will always know where to find apps in the order in which you installed.

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  • Other cool features of Windows 8.1 include the deferred Reading List available through the Share charm, Bing integration, hands-free mode inside apps, IE 11 with tabs at the bottom and baby/super large tile sizes. The last really contributes towards better organization of your Start screen as per your priorities.

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  • Now for the somewhat ugly after-effects. Windows 8.1 Preview has shipped with a really bad virtualization bug that affects XAML apps which use ListView/GridView etc; scrolling is really choppy and the whole screen stutters. You can see this in any Windows 8 XAML app that has not been upgraded yet, for example the Twitter app. I was told that the engineers have already fixed this and it should become available in the next iteration.
  • Here’s the other little awkward thing. Windows 8 apps used to support Snapped mode with 320px width; now suddenly the preferred width is 500px. So what happens in between? Yep, letter boxing. Until a Windows 8 app has been upgraded to 8.1, the gap between 320 & 500 px will simply be filled with black space. This almost looks as bad as iPhone apps running inside an iPad and I wish they would simply restrict Windows 8 snapped apps from stretching to 500 px. But it is what it is and hopefully major apps will all be upgraded to 8.1 before it hits GA.

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Overall, a great BUILD experience. Awesome times & good food with friends. Lots to learn & re-energize our brains for the next few months. Really looking forward to Windows 8.1 & starting to build Store apps right away. Cheers!

Joining Telerik …

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It was the day before Christmas 2007. My then girlfriend & I packed up all belongings of my single life in a U-Haul and headed out for the long drive down from Minneapolis. Destination? – Columbus OH! After making the airlines plenty rich by flying between the cities, it was time for me to relocate to Ohio.

And so began a new chapter in the very happening Columbus. I joined Sogeti USA as a Consultant in January 2008 and embarked on a 5+ year journey. I must have been a complete tech newbie at the time; so I soaked it all in, delivering work on Microsoft technology stack to various clients around town. We got married & settled down, and my career grew inside Sogeti. The expectation of consultants to always be on top of the technology curve is a major enticement to stay cutting edge; learn like there is no tomorrow. And the experience one earns by architecting software solutions for clients across variety of industries and with varying levels of IT maturity – is priceless, in the life of a software craftsman.

My biggest gain in Columbus however, was the developer community involvement. Starting out with User Group participations, I soon found a group of like-minded developers to fall back on for networking & continuous learning. Along came the passion for speaking and the travelling to regional software developer conferences; the depth and breadth of knowledge to be gained from fellow developers from varied backgrounds is extraordinary. Even now, as we run User Groups or organize big conferences with relative ease, the committment of the developer community in Columbus amazes me. This is the reason why, even after moving out to PA last year for wife’s job, I am still involved with the developer community in OH and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future.

The two last years in Sogeti have been super interesting. We created a national group focused on MSFT Mobility, in particular app development for Windows Phone & Windows 8 platforms. I had the pleasure of leading the group, and in the process, got to work with some of the sharpest developers/designers I have known; together we churned out many internal/LOB/B2C apps with a whole lot more in the works this year. And while I am reminiscing, let me be open to mention my present client – Safelite Autoglass. This is possibly the best MSFT-tech based shop I have worked at, with a superb understanding manager and a genuinely awesome team of developers. I have learnt much and had a whole lot fun. Relaxed environment with cutting-edge work – isn’t that what we all seek?

But as they say, change is what is continuous. My alternate weeks of travel from PA is taking a toll and I lose precious time on the road every week. And as fun as it is to be in consulting, the desire for solutions work often means piling on more on our already-full work plates. I have often desired to work for a pure software products company to have a taste of what it is like on the other side, and some developments recently may have clicked to provide that opportunity. Sadly, that means it is the end of the road for me in Sogeti after 5+ years. There is no love lost and I step out with cautiousness. I wish my talented colleagues at Sogeti all the very best, specially in the mobility front. If our hectic transitioning is any indication, excellent leadership will ensure our continued success.

Now, that brings us to the next chapter in my life. I am very very excited to join the Telerik team next week. My long term adoration of Telerik as a company, its excellent control suites and unwavering support for the developer community provided the zeal when an opportunity opened up in the Hudson OH based Services division. Several interviews and a day spent with the energetic Telerik team made me firmly believe that this was a great fit. Thankfully, folks at the helm agreed – the simply excellent Steve Smith & Michelle Smith. My immediate partner in crime – the distinguished Chris Woodruff. Actually I owe a huge thank you to Woody for making the connections, starting way back in Codemash this year. Networking and putting in your dues in our software community truly pays dividends.

My immediate goals – focus on enterprise/developer training & evangelism for the Devtools division; but in time, I am sure we will end up touching just about everything in the Telerik stack. My passion for the XAML stack should come handy with Telerik’s generous offerings in the DevCraft space; but I am eager to dip my feet into other technology areas like cross-platform mobile, CMS, productivity & testing. My developer community involvement gets added boost; just might be more easy to spot in bright green Telerik shirts at conferences. In short, I am super excited to start working in a position that demands passion for latest technology and join the impressive Telerik team studded with rockstars. Using or considering Telerik products and have questions? – let’s bring it on.

Cheers everyone!

Tips for Passing Microsoft Certification Exam 70-484: Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps

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So, you develop Windows 8 Store Apps? Awesome – you are already a step ahead of other developers on Microsoft stack and dabbling into the latest in development paradigms. If you’re on the XAML/C# stack, you’re already dealing with latest language advancements in C# 5.0, framework features in .NET 4.5, asynchronous programming, security, application life-cycle & data management. May be you are even using or considering leveraging cloud infrastructure for your App’s backend. To top it all, you have mastery over the Modern UI design principles to make your App feel at home in Windows 8.

All the above skills needed to be a successful Windows 8 App developer necessitate a broad knowledge base, along with grasp of architectural patterns to keep your codebase clean. Now, if you are already doing all of that, kudos to you! Apart from having your Apps shine in the Windows 8 Store or impressive LOB Apps for Enterprises, there is another way to “let them know that you know” – yup, Certifications. Additionally certification tests validate your knowledge & give you confidence in your abilities on a development platform.

For Windows Store App developers, an MCSD certification takes two routes – HTML/CSS/Jscript or C#/XAML. For those of us inclined towards C#, the MCSD path includes the C# Fundamentals test in 70-483 and then two tests focused on developing Windows Store Apps. Exam 70-484 [Essentials of Developing Windows Store Apps Using C#] is the one of them and is the first obstacle towards establishing your certification klout for Windows 8 App development. I recently cleared this test & can share a few tips for my fellow developers. So, here goes my top 21 list:

Read the whole article on the SilverlightShow site HERE.

Thanks for reading & Best of luck!
Adios