Ex Nokia employees launch phone

Jolla:Ex-Nokia employees launch smartphone

Ex-Nokia employees launch a non-Windows smartphone.

I wish them good luck with this, if it is the phone Nokia would have made without the intervention of Microsoft then it deserves to succeed.

From the pictures it looks to be an attractive phone,the homescreen has none of the (IMHO) awful hideousness of the current Nokia phones. Great that it runs Android apps too.

BitTorrent

Interview with Bram Cohen on BitTorrent

EF6

Entity framework 6 RTM

VS2013

What’s new in Visual Studio 2013…

How to opt out of googles ads

Link to Naked Security article on how to opt out of Googles latest advertising scheme.

More entity framework stuff

Julie Lerman on the EF Designer.

Entity framework stuff

Link to EF Power Tools… “The EF Power Tools provide a preview of features that we are considering adding to the main Entity Framework tooling in a future release.”
Looks useful, worth trying now.

The race to the bottom

$10 an hour?  For a consultant. Really??

That’s £6.28 at today’s exchange rate.

UK National Minimum wage is £6.31 per hour.

How much do you value your business? I mean if it is not that important to you then great!

Asp.net mvc4 course

Jon Galloway – free ASP.NET MVC4 course

Online university courses

FutureLearn provides free online courses from UK Universities.
This one looks like a fun starter course for programmers who want to get into mobile games.

Game dev resources

A nice list of game development resources from Simon Jackson, Darkside. Something like the hanselman list, but for games development.

MVC cascading deletes

How to handle cascading deletes in Entity Framework

MVC links

MS Certifications: “Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications”

Useful training resources: Microsoft Application Architecture Guide

Also: a free training event

MVC scaffolding

This seems to be a tidier way to add scafolding to your MVC projects.

Thirty days of TDD

30 days of Test Driven Development by James Bender, Telerik

Please hack someone else

Troy Hunt has an interesting course on Pluralsight and a novel way of marketing it, with a public web site you are invited to hack.

Useful blogs

Scott Guthrie on Azure improvements

The Official Windows Azure blog

Entity framework home page

ADO.NET blog

Julie Lerman’s Programming Entity Framework blog

Online magazines

Two Online free .Net magazines…
.NET Curry
&
MSDN Magazine September

Game development stack

This is an unusual approach... http://pedro-ramirez-suarez.github.io/cloudwarsgame/

Links

Here’s a link for all those people who want you to “just write a vbscript…”
Getting started with Powershell

And for more advanced scripts…

Entity Framework
Entity Framework 6 Release Candidate is available… Includes a list of what’s new in this version of the framework and a link to guidance on Updating Applications to use EF6

This is a reminder for me to watch Scott Hanselman's video from Build : What’s New in ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2013

Configuring Relationships with the Fluent API

Reminder to self to look at the MSDN Magazine June Issue when it comes out.
  Windows Azure Insider gets you up to speed on concepts and principles behind multi-tenant applications...

A useful web developer tool from Google.

Get Mobile

It allows you to test and score a web-site on its mobile readiness. This blog score's 6 out of 6, which is all donwn to Google. The last web-site I built (some years ago) only scores 2 out of 6. An indication of how the times keep changing.

CSS links:

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time.

W3C CSS Validator

Minify your CSS

Zen Garden

An excellent site for 3D tutorials, AeroTwist

I had heard of Microsoft BizSpark before but never really looked into it. It is surprising to see how many entrepreneurs have been supported by it.

There is an interactive map showing companies set up by people on the programme which is fun to browse around. Some of the companies look to have been going for a while, others have not got going yet.

More about BizSpark

Having used the Beekeeping App at the hives today I realised two things.

Firstly, it was incredibly useful to be able to look at the previous hive inspections, just to know what state the hive was in on the last visit, because it is difficult to remember the details, even with only four hives

 And, secondly, there is a lot more detail that I would like to be able to record, on diseases and treatments, configuration of the hive and more.

With more information collected it would be possible to automatically analyse the data and come up with suggestions as to what might need doing. It would also be possible, with the data being in the cloud to analyse information from multiple beekeepers, and provide insight into the health of bees nationally.

I think this has a lot of potential and I'm going to redesign the app and get it to a state where others can use it.

A Microsoft book on Developing Multi-tenant Applications for the Cloud. 246 pages, free to download. This is so much better than having to buy those paper things.

Dino Esposito has an article on Social Authentication in ASP.NET MVC 4 in this month's MSDN Magazine.

This was the article on OAuth that shows how to authenticate with facebook / twitter...

It is almost too easy to add OAuth authentication and authorization with Facebook, or Twitter to an MVC 4 Internet application. Include the commented out lines in the AuthConfig.cs file and add your facebook appId and appSecret and the job is done.

The only difficulty I had with this was down to a NuGet package that was not up to date. Click the update button and NuGet solves it for you. Microsoft are really making this easy.

Having fun with Windows Azure and ASP.NET MVC 4...

My Bee Hive Inspection app is coming along nicely. It is remarkably easy to create a web based data driven app, put it in the cloud and access it from your mobile phone...