I will be presenting 2 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Redmond this August 18-22.  The conference is a full 4 day event and there’s still time to register and save $500 if you register before 6/11/14!  For this event, I’ll be presenting:

TH15 Performance and Diagnostics Hub in Visual Studio 2013
Date: Thursday, August 22, 2014
Time: 11:00am – 12:15pm
Level: Intermediate

Visual Studio 2013 has introduced a new Performance and Diagnostics hub which encompasses a variety of new and old tools to profile your Windows Store applications. In this session, we will take a detailed look at all of the tools that the Performance and Diagnostics Hub has to offer with both XAML and HTML/JavaScript Windows Store apps.

TH25 Writing Asynchronous Code Using .NET 4.5 and C# 5.0
Date: Thursday, August 22, 2014
Time: 3:45pm – 5:00pm
Level: Introductory

A variety of new features were added to the .NET 4.5 Framework, including support for easily writing asynchronous code. This session will …

I have been exploring the Xamarin tools recently and decided to try my hand at connecting some Bluetooth hardware to Android for a project that will be released soon. I have learned quite a bit about Bluetooth on Android and decided to write up a short description on how to connect to a Bluetooth serial device via RFCOMM/SPP.

First, grab an instance of the default BluetoothAdapter on the Android device and determine if it is enabled:

BluetoothAdapter adapter = BluetoothAdapter.DefaultAdapter;
if(adapter == null)
    throw new Exception("No Bluetooth adapter found.");

if(!adapter.IsEnabled)
    throw new Exception("Bluetooth adapter is not enabled.");

Next, get an instance of the BluetoothDevice representing the physical device you’re connecting to. You can get a list of currently paired devices using the adapter’s BondedDevices collection. I use some simple LINQ to find the device I’m looking for:

BluetoothDevice device = (from bd in adapter.BondedDevices …

I will be presenting 2 sessions and speaking on the closing panel at Visual Studio Live! in Chicago this May 5-8.  The conference is a full 4 day event and there’s still time to register and save $200 if you register before 4/16/14!  For this event, I’ll be presenting:

TH10 Performance and Diagnostics Hub in Visual Studio 2013
Date: Thursday, May 8, 2014
Time: 11:00am – 12:15pm
Level: Intermediate

Visual Studio 2013 has introduced a new Performance and Diagnostics hub which encompasses a variety of new and old tools to profile your Windows Store applications. In this session, we will take a detailed look at all of the tools that the Performance and Diagnostics Hub has to offer with both XAML and HTML/JavaScript Windows Store apps.

TH20 Writing Asynchronous Code Using .NET 4.5 and C# 5.0
Date: Thursday, May 8, 2014
Time: 3:00pm – 4:15pm
Level: Introductory

A variety of new features were added to the .NET 4.5 Framework, including support for easily writing asynchronous code. …

I will be presenting 3 sessions at Visual Studio Live! in Las Vegas this March 10-14.  The conference is a full 5 day event and there’s still time to register and save $500 if you register before 1/22/14!  For this event, I’ll be presenting:

LT20 Controlling Hardware using Windows 8.1
Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Time: 4:15pm – 5:30pm
Level: Introductory

Windows 8.1 allows developers to communicate with a variety of devices through several interfaces. In this session, we will look at how to talk to hardware connected via USB and Bluetooth, as well as some of the new APIs which allow Windows 8.1 to talk to Point of Sale (POS) devices, scanners, and even 3D printers using real examples with real hardware!

LT27 Performance and Diagnostics Hub in Visual Studio 2013
Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Time: 1:15pm – 2:30pm
Level: Intermediate

Visual Studio 2013 has introduced a new Performance and Diagnostics hub which encompasses a variety of new and old tools to profile your Windows …

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