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Last time around, we explored the user interface and the server script for our apartment listings application. Today we'll see how to add authentication to the mix, and limit certain operations only to authenticated users. This is particularly important in the Rent a Home application, because you don't want anonymous users deleting and updating apartment listings! In fact, you'd probably want only the user that created an apartment listing to have the right to update or delete it. NOTE...
In the previous installment, we saw the general UI of the application. We'll now turn to see how that UI was implemented on all four platforms. If you're looking for a quick start or documentation on Mobile Services, you should take a look at the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center . Android The model class for apartment listings on Android is the following: public class Apartment implements Serializable { private int id; private String address; private boolean published; private int bedrooms;...
For my Visual Studio Live! talk on Windows Azure Mobile Services , I decided to go beyond the "todolist" quick start samples and implement an application that illustrates more framework-specific and platform-specific features. The application is called "Rent a Home" , and helps users share apartments for rent and view apartments for rent on a map around their location. Although this is not a production quality application -- for one thing, there is no way to contact the apartment...
Windows AzureConf was last month, and it was a blast! This was a virtual conference streamed online on Channel 9 and focused exclusively on Windows Azure, with Scott Guthrie delivering the keynote and the rest of the talks given by Azure community members -- Azure Insiders and Azure MVPs. My first talk was about Windows Azure Mobile Services , which is the piece of Microsoft technology I am most excited about in the last 5 years at least. If you haven't seen this technology, Windows Azure Mobile...
There is so much material on the web (and even on this blog) about memory leak diagnostics in managed code, and a considerable number of tools that make diagnostics increasingly easier. Modern memory profilers can open application dumps, attach to live processes, display live memory graphs, compare snapshots, identify problematic retention patterns, and so much more. Unfortunately, these tools presently don’t work with Windows Store apps. Moreover, the UI model of Windows Store apps poses a significant...
I’ve just read an article on International Digital Times that laments the impossibility of distributing a Windows Store app externally, without using the Windows Store. Setting aside the oxymoron for a moment (distributing a Windows Store app through something that is not the Windows Store :-)), this is not as bad as the author thinks it is. In fact, I sometimes get the feeling that people are bashing Windows 8 and the Windows Store not for its merits or disadvantages, but out of a “someone moved...
As John Robbins repeatedly likes to say , Apple computers are the best hardware for running Windows. To quote, “a Mac Pro […] it's the best Windows machine money can buy”. After yesterday’s release of Windows 8 to MSDN subscribers, I went along and installed it on my new MacBook Pro. Everything went fine—the setup was blazingly fast, all drivers were successfully installed, except for the pesky Apple trackpad settings that were way off what a Windows user comes to expect. In case you don’t know...
Thanks for coming to my session on WinRT internals today at Microsoft Raanana! Preparing for this session has been very interesting for me, especially as I was mucking around with vtable pointers for the Pro .NET Performance book anyway :-) Deep Dive into WinRT In this session we talked about the following: Refreshment of how COM objects work WinRT object layout and relationship to COM The WinRT type system and threading model Asynchronous operations in WinRT Windows metadata files and projecting...
The SDP started with my 40-minute keynote, Introducing Windows 8 . I was working on it for more than 3 weeks, and wasn’t completely sure what I wanted in it until only a few days before the conference. That was also when I decided to ditch the slides and go for a fresh idea: a Metro-style Windows 8 application that contains both the slides and interactive code demos for the session. (The application’s tile and title page.) My personal view of Windows 8, after letting the news sink and playing with...
Another piece of great news delivered at //build/ has to do with device driver development. Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I posted a series of baby-steps with Windows driver development , and if you’ve read some of that you’d notice that the driver dev work is very different from application development – you use a different build environment , you deploy drivers manually, and you debug them with a different debugger . This story changes, however, with Visual Studio 11. You can now build drivers...
I’m interrupting our scheduled programming for an important announcement: we will be hosting the SELA Developer Practice at the Crown Plaza hotel (Tel Aviv) and the SELA headquarters on December 4-8, 2011! The format is (again) slightly different—we will be having a day full of keynote sessions on Windows 8 and other //build announcements , including Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5. Then, we will host 22 full-day tutorials on a wide variety of topics—old and new—parallel programming, Windows...
We are all so used to reformatting Windows boxes every couple of years, especially for not-so-technically-savvy relatives’ machines infested with malware. Refresh your PC is a refreshing feature of Windows 8 that maintains all the files and settings you have on your machine, but removes all applications (other than Windows Store apps). A couple of days ago I had to perform a refresh on my Samsung Developer Tablet, after connecting to it a ZTE USB modem caused all Metro apps to fail at the splash...
The amount of confusion generated by the first two keynotes at BUILD was immense. The blogosphere and Twitter were brimming with bold rumors of the “.NET is dead” kin. I even heard someone discuss seriously the possibility that C# Metro apps will be compiled directly to native WinRT bindings, bypassing IL and JIT altogether, so that clr.dll won’t even be loaded. Even though I disproved these rumors two days ago, it was still great to hear Krzysztof Cwalina explain in detail how .NET remains a fully...
The WinRT type system relies strongly on WinRT components, which are COM objects implementing a specific set of interfaces and adhering to a certain ABI (Application Binary Interface). We will examine here this ABI and how C++ compiler extensions help reference that ABI without exposing the nitty-gritty details of dealing with COM interfaces and COM activation. A WinRT component implements the IInspectable interface , which derives from IUnknown (however, WinRT components do not have dual interfaces...
After experiencing it first hand, I can only say that Windows To Go feels like magic. The potential uses are truly overwhelming. Read on to learn why. Windows To Go allows you to capture a fully configured Windows environment on a USB stick and use it to boot on any host. This is not just booting Windows from USB – which was theoretically possible before – this is about specializing the image for each host you boot from it. It’s about taking your operating system on the go. Some of the enterprise...
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