And now React native for Windows…

Microsoft launches React Native for Windows

Amazon Portfolio

How many of these have you tried already?

Everything You Want To Know About Anthos – Google’s Hybrid And Multi-Cloud Platform

Google finally chose to compete with Microsoft Azure Stack and AWS – VMotion consortium, with Kubernetes support. Seems like lot of potential in the strategy. Let’s see how the community and the multi cloud ecosystem supports the platform as that’s the real key to the success…

https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2019/04/14/everything-you-want-to-know-about-anthos-googles-hybrid-and-multi-cloud-platform/

HTML5 – Time to reckon. Enter Modern.IE

As the whole web world is responsibly moving and targeting to HTML5, developers around the world are getting challenged by addition of dozens of browsers, devices and configurations across a plethora of devices ranging from desktops, tablets to mobiles. 

Note the big problem here: Developers test only against the latest versions of the most popular browsers because they all (sensibly) aggressively update themselves. IE has finally started doing this and also provides (via F12 Developer Tools) excellent support for testing against older versions. For the other browsers you either need to install multiple versions or use a VM. And for testing on different Operating Systems you need a second computer or devices or VMs or emulators.

To get the multi-browser testing right Microsoft has come up with a nice tool Modern.IE keeping in mind their philosophy of “Testing across browser with few simple clicks”

Probably they are just 10 years late in doing it, but better late than never.

The best thing about Modern.IE is the ability to validate your page before actually testing it. 

There’s no point in iteratively fixing your HTML across multiple tests on multiple browsers if you’re starting with suspect HTML to begin with. Enter Modern.IE.

On Modern.IE you just enter the URL of the site you wish to check and it runs a bunch of checks to ensure you are targeting standards and checks common compatibility problems. Its goal is to “suggest a fix or enhancement with web standards like HTML5 & CSS3”

If you want to get further updates on the development as it happens probably you should follow their Twitter handle @IEDevChat

Even they have tied up with BrowserStack to help you try out BrowserStack free for 3 months which is like a cherry on the cake as you can really get a look and feel of how your application looks across different browsers.

Lastly the “20 tips for building modern sites while supporting old versions of IE” is also there to guide you through the basics of cross browser tech jargon

Time to do some serious Touch enabled applications

Are you into Touch first or Touch Only application development? Then you must have been using the inevitable “IsManipulationEnabled” attribute a lot.

As we all know that the default or rather primitive WPF controls are not so touch -savvy as explained very elaborately in this post : http://nui.joshland.org/2010/04/why-wont-wpf-controls-work-with-touch.html 

Microsoft has now made available the surface controls for developers. The Microsoft Surface team has announced that the Surface SDK is now available from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=26716.  Since the toolkit is a subset of existing Surface 1.0 SDK assets ported to WPF4, you can get a head start by evaluating the Surface 1.0 SDK. If it is too late in the game for you, then you might even want to consider building your app on the Surface 1.0 SDK and porting it to WPF4 / Windows 7 when the toolkit is available.  Of course, you will have to stick to the subset that is being ported to WPF4, but your code will only need minimal changes (if any) to run on a Windows 7 PC once the toolkit is released.

Visual Studio 2010 Testing and Lab Mgmt Tools

Visual Studio 2010 Testing & Lab Management Tools

As Microsoft wanted Visual Studio Suite to graduate from a Code editor to an end to end Application Life-cycle Maintence (ALM) Platform, they started building Visual Studio 2010 on the single point Agenda – Collaboration.

The whole idea was to avoid things like,

1. I do not know how the whole system does or works

2. These bugs are not reproducible

3. It takes hours to prepare the lab setup to begin testing

Social Networing giant is taking Baby Steps

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is ready to have children. Not necessarily with his new wife, but on his social networking site atleast…
Though the polls in various sites are increasingly showing that parents are not readily willing to give their Under 13s a direct access to Facebook but all you need is really an email ID to indulge yourself in to the ludicrous world of overly simplified world of social netoworking where people meet, chat and share feelings so fluidly unlike they do so when they actually meet in person!
According to Wall Street Journal:
Mechanisms being tested include connecting children’s accounts to their parents’ and controls that would allow parents to decide whom their kids can “friend” and what applications they can use, people who have spoken with Facebook executives about the technology said. The under-13 features could enable Facebook and its partners to charge parents for games and other entertainment accessed by their children.

So gone are the days when we will have jokes like
Son: WTF! Dad is on Facebook
Dad: What is WTF son?
Son: Welcome to Facebook!

For FaceBook it’s all about Money Honey… More children means more online game revenue and companies like Zynga will also rake in more mullah through the whole process as the Wall Street pundits keep on proclaiming day in and day out.

Simplicity rules…

Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations. A great illustration to watch out.

Hit the Link for more.

Twitter… to be or not to be

Why to tweet when you can post your daily dose of life here in your blog or use services like Google Buzz? Seriously speaking, Please! Let’s all gradually move away from Twitter. This mandatory 140 character limit is just plain silly!

Using DynamicObject to intercept and marshal property changes

The Risky Route of “var” to “dynamic” – What you lose in safety, you gain in flexibility.
An insight into C# 4.0’s most deadly feature. Read on Josh’s post to get a detail overview…

One of the most interesting (and potentially dangerous) new features in C# 4.0 is support for the dynamic type.  It allows certain pieces of your code to bypass the normal compile-time type checking features that we have grown to know and love.  You can use a dynamic object however you want to, and the C# compiler will ignore the members you use on it.  At runtime, if the methods/properties/etc. your code tries to use are not actually present on … Read More

via Josh Smith on WPF