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 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 …

With the official release of NuGet and the NuGet gallery, I decided to try it all out by uploading the current versions of WiimoteLib and ThinkGearNET to the gallery.  The process was pretty smooth, but I learned a little bit along the way which I thought I’d share.

So what’s NuGet?
From their own page:  NuGet (formerly known as NuPack) is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

In short, this means you can right-click and add a reference to a third party library without having to download it yourself, extract it, locate it manually on your drive, deal with dependencies, etc.  All of this is handled automatically, as is finding and integrating new versions of those libraries with your projects.

NuGet as a User
If you want to use NuGet to download packages, you’ll first need to install the …

Update: Slides and source for my sessions are posted over on my Events page.  Have a look!  Thanks to everyone that came to my sessions!  Comments and critiques are welcome.

I have been selected to speak at the Visual Studio Live! conference in Orlando.  In addition to presenting two sessions at the conference, I’m also coordinating a special event on Tuesday night which we’re calling Devopalozza.  I have created and will host a team Jeopardy! style game-show which will pit three teams of speakers and attendees against each other for fabulous prizes.  I previously created the hardware and software for the Visual Studio Live Redmond conference, which turned into an article on Coding4Fun for those that might want to create a game-show at home or the office.

The two sessions I’m presenting are:

M15 What's New in Visual Studio 2010 Debugging
Date: Monday, November 15, 2010 
Time:  3:00 PM – 4:15 PM
Level: Intermediate

Visual …

Thanks to all who attended my first session today, and a thank you in advance to those attending Thursday’s session on multi-touch.  I’m going to post my slide deck for the What’s New in VS2010 Debugging session now and I will update this post on Thursday/Friday with the source and slides for the multi-touch session.  Feel free to contact me with any comments or suggestions, good or bad.

• Download What’s New in VS2010 Debugging
• Download Multitouch Madness!

Enjoy!

Now that we have finished writing the book, we finally have an official title and chapter listing.  Someday we may even have a cover.

The title has morphed into Coding4Fun: 10 .NET Programming Projects for Wiimote, YouTube, World of Warcraft, and More and the final chapter listing (not necessarily in this order) is:

• Alien Attack: Create a 2D clone of Space Invaders with XNA for the PC, Xbox 360, and Zune
• LEGO Soldier: Create an action game using Popfly with a custom-built virtual LEGO character
• World of Warcraft RSS Feed Reader: Use WoW's customizable interface to have feeds pop up while you're gaming
• InnerTube: Download YouTube videos automatically and convert them to a file format for off-line viewing
• PeerCast: Stream video files from any PC
• TwitterVote: Create custom online polls on Twitter
• WHSMail: Build a website with ASP.NET for Windows Home Server that lets you view the messages stored on a computer with Outlook
• "Wiimote" …

I ran into a bit of weirdness yesterday when trying to install SQL Server 2008.  I have Visual Studio 2008 installed as well as a couple of the Visual Studio 2008 Express products (for testing solutions for the Coding4Fun site and the upcoming book).  I installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and all went as planned.  After looking at the Help –> About screens, Visual Studio and all of the Express products showed the proper version tag:  9.030729.1 SP1.  So I figured all the products were updated and good to go.

Next I tried to install SQL Server 2008 and got an error stating Rule “Previous releases of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008” failed.  I re-installed SP1 figuring something had gone wrong, but no dice.  After digging through the SQL Server 2008 install logs I realized what was happening.  The installer was using the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\DevDiv\XXX\Servicing\9.0\SP keys to determine if SP1 had been installed and the registry settings were set …