With the announcement of Visual Studio Code last week, I thought the best way to try it out was to write a small tutorial. In this post, I'm going to describe how to create a simple Google Chrome extension, that generates a QR code for the currently opened browser tab. Then, any extension user can scan the code and view the opened website on his mobile device. As expected, for this tutorial, I am going to use Visual Studio Code.
This has been a week full of events, from Kentucky Derby, to Mayweather versus Pacquiao and Chelsea becoming the Premier League Champion, just to name a few. In the Technology world, Microsoft held their biggest developers conference called "Build", in San Francisco. Everybody was anxious to see what Microsoft had to offer, since the company was determined to prove that they don't want to keep trailing behind Apple and Google. That message was clearly stated when, recently, they announced cross-platform support for .Net framework (or a subset of .Net), a new unified truly universal experience for Windows and the ground-breaking holographic device called Hololens.
A well defined development process is key for a successful Software Development team. Transparency and common understanding, will help new developers get up to speed more quickly and allow more flexibility for further modifications. This may sound a bit chaotic, but your development process should be prepared to allow constant improvements (modifications). Obviously you shouldn't change something just for the sake of it; identify what value does your modification bring and make a conscious decision before applying it; ask your team members, or even the whole department, what do they think about your change and how it will help them; also, things that look obvious to you, might not seem so obvious to someone else, so think about the impact your tweak will have on your team workflow. What I am saying can be interpreted as common sense, and it should be, however you would be amazed by how often people disregard common sense. And I can tell you, changing something without a reason can be as dangerous as not changing at all.
Last week I did a presentation about "PowerShell 5 and OneGet" for my company. It was an introductory level session where I talked about some of the new features of PowerShell 5 and what is/how to use OneGet. It was a time boxed session set to last no more than thirty minutes, so I had to pick the topics I thought were the most relevant to developers. Small disclaimer, I did my presentation on the month of April of 2015, so keep in mind that some of the things I am going to talk about today, might be out of date by the time you read this post. Additionally, you may be wondering where is the PowerPoint for my presentation; well on my presentations I try to stay away from PowerPoints as much as I can, in a way to provide more demonstrations and engage everybody in a interactive session. On this blog post, I want to highlight the most relevant things I mentioned on my presentation.
As soon as I saw the first peek of Windows 10 adaptive UX displayed at Mobile World Congress 2015, I couldn't wait to try it out. I was already using Visual Studio 2015 CTP5, but the requirements clearly stated that I needed Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 and Windows 10 Technical Preview SDK (and Windows 10 installed, obviously), you can check the full requirements here.
