My last two posts have both contained an timeline chart in them which I create in Microsoft Excel 2013. Since it is a fairly awesome trick, I have created a short 10min video showing how you can do it too!

While this in itself is pretty awesome to do, because it is Microsoft Office – you can easily copy and paste it into PowerPoint for presentations. Then by simply changing the Effect Options ► Sequence to By Category you can get a great effect where each event pops in one by one.

(click the above image to see a higher resolution version of it)

Join me on Feb 6^th as I present a one hour session on the new async feature of .NET 4.5. You can expect the full run through of how to use it, limitations and pitfalls. Since many people aren’t able to move to .NET 4.5 yet, I will also be covering what you should be doing now to make sure that you can easily take advantage of it in the future.

Async allows you to write code that runs across multiple threads in intelligent ways without the pains commonly associated with it!

• Date: Feb 6^th 2013
• Time: 9am to 10am (South African time - so GMT +2)
• Where: Available over YouTube
• Audience: Anyone with .NET experience

Thanks and I hope to see your (virtually) on the 6^th! Please follow me on Twitter for updates and links for this session!

This tip is aimed at presenting, but is just as useful to those who want to focus in Windows 8 without distractions!

Windows 8 is a great operating system to use, especially the background tasks system that ensures other applications are not destroying your CPU & memory. However, there is a downside to background tasks!

Previously, if I wanted to ensure no annoying Skype popups (during my talks for example) I just shutdown Skype and no popups could occur, but in Windows 8, since the application isn’t running, how do we stop the popups?

It is a simple solution, bring up the settings charm (see image on left) and in the bottom right hand corner is an option called Notifications. If you tap that, you will get options to block notifications for 1, 3 or 8 hours.

I am tending towards 3 hours for my 1 hour talks to allow for setup, clean-up etc.

Once you have disabled it, the icon will change to show you it is disabled! If you want them back, for example when you are finished, then you can tap the icon again to enable them!

What is great is that live tiles & the background tasks still occur, just no popups anymore.

Thank you so much for those people who came to my talks in Johannesburg & Cape Town – from all accounts we broke some size records for the event which is very awesome. Not just for my ego, but also it shows Microsoft that while we are excited about the new awesome stuff – we NEED to hear about the more normal things, you know cause we get paid to work with that and all.

With that said on to the usual post event blog post where I share my slides. In addition my demo script (those masses of paper I used to remind myself what to type) is up, and finally are completed builds of the demo apps for you to look through. About the demos, two things need to be remembered:

• These are demos – they are not meant to best practise. They are as close to that as I can get in 5min, so disclaimer on using them.
• These demos are not the same as on stage, and have no help – so if you did not attend the session the script maybe a better starting point.

btw download the slide deck, there is hidden slides with more info!!

Completed Demos

Large (file size) demos

Small (file size) demos - below

For more posts in this series, see the series index.

I have been talking a lot about Windows 8 recently and my slides have been using the architecture images Microsoft releases at Build 2011 & that awesome one Doug Seven created. However I have still found a lot of discussion exists even with those and they are showing their age.

I have tried to create a new one recently that addresses those issue:

• Age: DirectX can be used by VB/C# in addition to C++ now.
• Age: How does Windows Phone 8 fit the picture – note this may change, it is based on my assumptions and half info we have gotten.
• Discussion: Is WinJS = WinRT?
• Discussion: is .NET = WinRT?
• Discussion: Can I use my own JavaScript libraries like jQuery?
• Discussion: Can I use WinJS on the web?
• Discussion: Can I build desktop apps on Windows 8?
• Discussion: Can desktop apps run on Windows 8 ARM CPU's.
• Discussion: How does the language projection fit in?

Clearly this wouldn’t work in a single image – so I have created a slide deck that has a great overview image and also has build up experiences where step-by-step it builds the image with information and hopefully during that answers all the questions.

With 2012 flying along it is time for the bi-annual presentation dump, where I upload most of the slides I have done in the last six months to share with you! I say most, as some presentations are NDA and those, unfortunately, I can’t share out – but where I can upload slides I do! I will also sometimes edit slides to exclude information that is NDA – so if you have questions let me know!

In this presentation dump we have:

• What is new in .NET 4.5: This talk gives a big brain dump & a few demos of what is new & shiny in .NET 4.5. Focuses on the framework so it is mostly ignoring the language features (like async) & tooling features.
• Visual Studio 2012 Preview: I gave this talk when it was still Visual Studio “11”, so you will see that a bit. Really covers what is new, improved and removed from the next release of Visual Studio. Definitely not a complete look, more a high light reel!
• psake: A look at the psake tool and how it fits in the build/ci/deployment landscape.
• JavaScript proven practises: One of my favourite talks so far this year – covers 12½ suggestions to improve the quality of your JavaScript! I am using this a lot as a reference guide when I build my code!
• Automated UI Testing with Microsoft Technologies: A very interesting talk I gave about what Microsoft offers from a UI automation perspective for testers.

It seems like quieter period than ever before but it was not! In terms of number of unique slide shows that I can share it is very small as there is a fair amount of ones I couldn’t (even edited) and I also already uploaded two this year and finally a LOT of talks have been around Windows 8 and based on the camp in a box.

You can get all the slides and details by clicking “read more” below!

What is new in .NET 4.5

Visual Studio 2012 Preview

psake

JavaScript proven practises

Automated UI Testing with Microsoft Technologies

Yesterday Rudi Grobler & I had awesome fun with a full room of amazing people who took time off work to attend a full day of free Windows 8 training. The audience was amazing, breaking a lot of my expectations of how audiences react at free events, which really honoured Rudi & I to have most people stay to the very end of the day.

For those people who attended the training, or those who didn’t but want the content too:

• You can get the slides: http://bit.ly/win8-slides 
• You can get videos from Build on the topics we discussed: http://bit.ly/win8-videos
• The demo’s I built are available to download from below.

This past weekend was the ever fantastic JavaScript in South Africa (JSinSA) conference. This year focus was on HTML 5, JavaScript & CSS 3 – easily some of the MOST important topics for developers regardless of platform to know about.

It was it’s second year and while I was very lucky to go to it as an attendee in the first year, this year I was even more lucky to be a presenter at the conference. I was also very lucky to present on a topic I am passionate about: Windows 8.

The talk provided an introduction to Windows 8 & how development works, and in the 45mins I was done, we built an application which could take a photo from a web cam and send it to Twitter (the actual photo is to the right).

You can get the slides and bits from the talk below.

Last night I presented on Windows 8 for the .NET developer at the fantastic Developer User Group! We had a bumper crowd there which was great and really had some interesting discussions during and after the talk. Thank you to all that attended!

For those looking for the slides, demo script and demo bits they are below!