A while back I did a talk on Windows 8, learning students how to develop apps for this new version of Windows. Back then I promised to make the samples and the slide deck available to you somewhere on the interwebs. It’s been a busy period with hospitals, doctors, work and the lot, so I haven’t gotten around to posting the samples.
So here’s as promised, the sample and the slide deck 
Since a few days I’m running a mac computer for my work. Why? Because I do a lot of mobile development. I started out with Android phone development, but now I’m expanding my skillset more and more into the iOS/Mac world. This requires apple hardware, so I got a mac computer to work on.
A mac is a great piece of compution hardware, however it also provides me with new challenges. I am after all a .NET developer. .NET doesn’t really run on Mac, except with Mono. There’s no Visual Studio on Mac and there’s no Windows Phone 8 emulator on Mac.
The only alternative you have for running Visual Studio and tools like that, is installing Windows on a VMware or parallels virtual machine. A great solution, since modern Mac computers have a lot of processing power on board. My Macbook runs a Core i7 2.7Ghz with a boatload of memory, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
So far so good you might guess. Just run Windows inside a VM with Visual Studio and you’re good to go for Windows Phone development. I would be if I was still running VS2010 with Windows Phone 7. The new Windows Phone 8 SDK requires some very specific hardware. It runs inside a hyper-v image. Which means it’s essentially a virtualized piece of hardware.
Running a virtualized piece of hardware inside a virtualized piece of hardware. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? In this blogpost I will explain how you can run the Windows Phone 8 emulator on a VMWare virtual machine.
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On the internet there’s a ton of tutorials on building Orchard modules. In fact, I think I can name 10 within a few minutes that all do the same thing. However, none of them tell you about the awesomeness of using features within a module. The Orchard documentation mentions them, but doesn’t show you how it’s done.
All things considered, I thought it might be useful if I just showed you how you can use features to make your modules even more modular.
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As most developers will know, Android runs on both tablets and phones these days. Supporting a tablet and a phone could mean that build a tablet version of your app. This would require to copy all of your code and provide a different layout for it. There is however a far more efficient way of building an Android app that runs on tablets and phones.
In this article I will show you how you can build such universal apps. Of course, this includes examples 
and a few tips and tricks on how to get the most out of this way of building apps.
A while back I moved my weblog to Azure websites, because it was just cheaper than the hosting I had. I’m happy with the service I’m getting from Microsoft and the way the weblog performs. Zero downtime so far and the pages are pretty fast.
When Microsoft came up with the mobile services API I was pretty excited. If this thing is as good as the websites feature, they will get another bag of money from me and I will be putting mobile services in the cloud for my Windows 8 apps. Or so I initially thought….
This is the second post in a series on Mono for Android by Example. This time I’m going to take you on a tour around the listview in Android and how you can bind data to a listview. Please note that this post will not be as extensive as the previous one on action bars, this one is meant to show you the basics.
Orchard is a CMS that has a lot of power in a very nimble package. It’s only a couple of megabytes in size, but houses a huge amount of flexibility. Especially when you start working with shapes and templates. For me, this part of Orchard is the thing you need to understand properly to get full power out of it.
In this post I’m going to show you what’s going on inside Orchard when you ask for a piece of content and render it in one or more templates you defined in your theme or module.
In the past few months I’ve been designing and developing a new webapplication with a few other developers. During the project As a rare mix between designer and developer I’m responsible for making designs for each of the screens in the web application. On the other hand I’m responsible for making sure it’s technically in top shape.
As part of this weird mix of things I’ve been watching the CSS files of the website with growing interest. I’m seeing a lot of cool tricks and a lot of things that can go wrong.
In this post I’ve written down a few tips that I think will help to make your website more awesome and maintainable.
One of the most annoying parts of developing for Android is the use of the emulator. I am always using a real device for my development, because that is simply the fastest way to get the app running and it works the best for testing stuff.
Testing your app on a real phone is a must, as there are too many differences between the emulator and the real phone that may cause your app to malfunction. However, there are cases where you cannot use a real phone or need to test on a different version of Android than what you have a device for. Since there’s so many versions of Android, you actually need the emulator to keep costs within reasonable limits.
In this post I want to show you a good trick to make running the Android emulator for some versions of Android a lot faster by using the Intel Hardware Acceleration Manager (HAXM) on Windows 7 or Windows 8.
Apple just released its latest version of Mac OS X called Mountain Lion. They improved a few things so I had to have it, especially at the price they sell it for. I know there’s not much in there I will use, but still.
As with the previous version, I could install the whole thing by going to the appstore and selecting the update there. After waiting a bit for the download to complete, the install went down without a hitch and soon I was running Mac OS X Mountain Lion and happily browsing away on the internet. Or so I thought….
