Visual Studio 2012 Archives - Applied Information Sciences

At AIS, we work with clients to help define the overall vision, scope and detailed requirements for the applications they want to build. I recently had the opportunity to work on a project where a client wanted to reach a new set of users through a Windows Store app that was based on an existing iPad app.

We had a very short timeline and limited budget to work with. That was the bad news… The good news was that we were able to use Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) — in this case the TFS 2010 version — in conjunction with Visual Studio 2012. This gave us the opportunity to leverage new PowerPoint 2013 storyboarding stencils for defining the app’s User Experience (UX), and TFS for efficiently creating and managing our product backlog. We also used Visio 2013 for visually defining the overall functional scope and high-level release plan for the app.

In this post, I’ll share how we used these tools to rapidly define the requirements for the app, and talk about some topics related to converting the iPad app information architecture to a Windows Store app information architecture. Read More…

William Shepherd

@iam1will

ASP.NET 4.5 has introduced some cool new features and enhancements for web developers using Visual Studio 2012. One of the new features introduced deals with the framework’s Web Forms technology. In previous versions of ASP.NET, if you wanted to display data-bound values in a control, you needed to use a data-binding expression with an Eval statement, e.g. <%# Eval(“Data”) %>.

Using an Eval Statement to display data-bound items

This approach works, but it introduces a few problems. In my experience, the Eval statement approach is prone to developer error. If you are like me, then you have undoubtedly misspelled a member name or tried to bind to a nonexistent member. These mistakes, while trivial, tend to make themselves known only at run-time thus making them more difficult to track. Due to the Eval statement being dynamic in nature, it is impossible to enforce compile time error checking.

With ASP.NET 4.5, we can now take advantage of Strongly Typed Data Controls. These controls allow us to specify the type of data the control is to be bound to, providing us with IntelliSense (which solves another problem for me: remembering which members belong to the DataSource) and compile time error checking. Adding a strongly typed data control requires minimal effort!

AISblog

@aisteam

Some Friday links from our contributing AIS bloggers‘ personal blogs:

Kendo UI Mobile with Knockout for Master-Detail Views: Toying around with Kendo UI Mobile to build iPhone apps. (Steve Michelotti)

Dynamic Test Data Using Rhino.Mocks Do() Method: Controller action testing with Rhino.Mocks. (The Agile .Netter)

Smith MBA Long-Term Schedule Planning with PowerPivot: Using Microsoft PowerPivot as a Business Intelligence tool. (SQLScape)

Headless Javascript Testing with Visual Studio 2012 & Chutzpah Test Adapter: A video demo on how to use Chutzpah to run Jasmine tests inside Visual Studio 2012 RC. (cromwellhaus.com)

Web.Config Tips – File vs ConfigSource: Investigating the pros and cons of the file and configSource attributes in web.config. (dben codes)

BlogPosts tagged with “Visual Studio 2012”