ASP.NET 5 is on it’s way which will level the playing field a bit in comparison with other web stacks, primarily enabled through the integration of Node.js with Visual Studio. Exciting times indeed! In the project templates provided with the currently available Visual Studio 2015 CTP, the “non-empty” projects are configured with Grunt and Bower. In this post I will walk through setting up an empty solution with Bower and Gulp, an alternative to Grunt. The goal is to demonstrate how all the new possibilities are actually wired up in an ASP.NET 5 solution and show how you might replace Grunt with Gulp as task runner instead.

Developing a product that is multi-tenant is a pretty interesting challenge. Recently I was in the fortunate situation of having to work on such a thing. By giving organisations access to a tenant through a subdomain of choice is a pretty neat approach that provides users a sense of personal ownership of the product. In this post I will show a simple approach of how to use subdomains to identify the corresponding tenant in ASP.NET MVC 5.

In this post I will show how to customize the title and header section of the Tabbed Page control, when running on Windows Phone. On WP this is the pivot control being used, which is quite different from the tabs used on both iOS and Android.

Let’s say you wish to just change the font or completely restyle the title or the header showing the sections. You can create the complete page as a native Windows Phone XAML page with a pivot control and let that render. This gives complete control of the page and the pivot control, but makes the sacrifice of reducing how much code is shared.

We are increasingly developing applications targeting both iOS and Windows Phone using Xamarin Forms. In this case, when it comes to telemetry, we are interested in putting as much as possible in the shared code. Here is a way to incorporate Capptain into a Xamarin Forms app using DependencyService and a proxy on each platform. You can use the same approach with other telemetry services, as long as a native SDK is provided for the platforms you target.

All CRM plugins must be signed with a strong key in order to be deployed (both for letting Dynamics CRM be able to handle assembly naming conflicts and if you deploy it to the GAC on the server). I have come across a couple of projects where the password for the strong name key file was stuck in the head of another person – and later forgotten – making it troublesome set up a new development machine to build and deploy a solution.

Application Insights is the new analytics platform from Microsoft, currently in preview and part of Visual Studio Online. I had the honor of giving a talk on Application Insights during Danish Developer Conference last week which was very exciting. I plan to write a walk through of the new service soon, but for now I will address a small issue people run into.

Application Insights has a great development feed that provides raw and instant analysis data that can be used to verify that you send the right data before shipping your app:

The Azure Storage Client Library provides some good and easy access to Queue, Blob and Table services. The library requires ODataLib that unfortunately is not available in a version for Store and WP8 yet. The good thing is, we have WCF Data Services based REST API to access the services. The official documentation provides details on the available operations, how to authenticate etc. How to authenticate can be a bit troublesome to derive from the documentation when you are not using the storage client library. I decided to put together this walk through that enables you to connect to the storage services using the REST API from Store and WP8 applications.

The HttpClient added in the .NET framework 4.5 is simply put awesome in combination with the new async/await in C# 5.0. Also if you are doing Phone development or creating a PCL that targets a platform where HttpClient is not available, do yourself a favour and get it from NuGet.

Im gonna go through a way of unit testing code that is dependent on HttpClient, e.g. for retrieving data from a service. It is a bit dirty, as we cannot use e.g. Moq because we are not working with interfaces and members are non-virtual, thus we cannot fully mock/stub the class. Thus, we cannot do something like this:

The last week has been quite special. During the weekend a friend of mine and myself attended the Global Startup Weekend event in Aalborg, simultaneous with events all over the world. I showed up to be useful with my development skills for any project that sounded interesting. However, during the initial idea pitching I came up with my own idea to work on – an electronic math book format for tablets, with integrated interactive assignments. Whenever the students solve the assignments statistics would be collected for teachers in order to more easily perform student evaluations, and spot general issues in a class.

While the Bing Maps SDK is out of Release Preview and made final along with the release of Windows 8, i find that the documentation is still lacking quite a bit. Here is a couple of examples of how you can customize the pushpin control by changing the displayed image overlay, without having to implement a seperate Control.

Custom icon for pushpin using XAML and C#

Add the following to the resources (e.g. in your XAML for the Page containing the Bing Maps Control):