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Windows 8 Special Issue 2012

The Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern achieves a separation of logic and UX in Windows Store applications and also enables UX designers to create and test UIs without the existence of the underlying logic. Learn how to create an application using the MVVM design pattern in Visual Studio 12, using the MVVM Light Toolkit.

An example of a View Model Style Modal Popup Unit Test

After spending a lot of time focusing on Client-Side Web 2.0 Performance Problems it is time to focus on specific Server-Side Performance Problems. Last week I worked with a client that runs a custom application on Microsoft CRM 4.0 and experienced performance problems in their test environment. Individual web requests to query or update data took several minutes, with some of them eventually timing out. We analyzed some of these long running and failing transactions and in this article I present my analysis and hope it will be beneficial for other MS CRM Developers.

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Software developers are good at writing applications. Testers are good at testing applications. In the software development world where separation of concerns is a never-ending quest, it seems logical to apply the rule to the software development cycle. “Let the developers code; QA can be responsible for making sure it works.” It provides an object-oriented management approach where each team is responsible only for what they are best at, and the two teams interface through one simple property, each: the result of their logic and expertise. The system is of logical design. It appears to be a logical pattern. Or so it seems.

Most of the new Windows Mobile devices include a GPS receiver as part of the standard configuration. However, one problem is that of the repeated "cold start." Presumably to save battery life, the GPS receiver is turned off when it is not being used. Windows mobile 5 and 6 standard / smartphone editions do not provide user-accessible configuration options to change this.

However, if the GPS remains turned on, even after losing its fix (i.e. by going inside) it will be able to re-acquire its location within seconds of being placed in an area that has a signal.

I designed this utility to run in the background, keep the GPS open, and poll its status at a user-defined interval. This program is also useful if you want to quickly test your GPS to make sure it is configured correctly and/or has a signal.

As software development becomes complicated, writing unit tests provides a protection against constant changes and modifications. Traditionally, unit tests were written by testing each piece of the application layer in isolation. With the advent of behavior-driven development, now our unit tests can be composed into user defined stories. Each story represents a single feature of the application which can be tested from end to end. This method makes sure that the unit test only passes when the story is completely done. In this article I’ll show you how to use SpecFlow and WatiN to write BDD-style tests to implement user stories.

Recently a client made us question one of our fundamental assumptions about the.NET Framework and Web Services by asking, "Why should we use proxy class created by Visual Studio to connect to a web service?" In this particular project we were calling a web service to retrieve data, which was then sorted, formatted slightly and displayed in a web page. The client hypothesized that it would be more efficient to invoke the web service directly via the HttpWebRequest class, retrieve the XML output, populate an XmlDocument object, then use XSLT to output the result to HTML. Surely that would be faster than using Visual Studio's auto-generated proxy class, right?

Prior to this request, we had never considered rolling our own proxy class; we had always taken advantage of the proxy classes Visual Studio auto-generated for us. Could these auto-generated proxy classes be inefficient? Would retrieving and parsing the web service's XML directly be more efficient? The only way to know for sure was to test my client's hypothesis…

If you want to make a difference to a lot of people—users and developers alike—working on a product with many millions of users is a great place to start. The Browser Programmability and Tools team is building a new, faster, more scalable, modern JavaScript runtime for Internet Explorer. We’re also responsible for defining and shipping the entirety of the HTML5/JavaScript toolset and developer experience. With the rise of HTML5, the importance of these tools and the JavaScript runtime will only increase.  

Our team’s charter includes:

Developing a fast, standards-compliant JavaScript runtime Creating great HTML5 and JavaScript development tools for Visual Studio Building the “F12” developer tools that ship in Internet Explorer

We are seeking innovative and experienced developers, program managers, and testers. Feel free to look through the job descriptions linked to below and submit your resume for any you're interested in pursuing:

Development Program Management Test/QA

 We’re looking forward to hearing from you!