Surface Pro 4

Monday, October 19, 2015

Yesterday at a Microsoft Store I got to play with a Surface Pro 4 for a little bit. It is exactly what I feared, a worthy replacement for my Surface Pro 3. It is fast, and although the screen is just a little bit bigger, the resolution on it is amazing. It feels solid and is just a little bit thinner than the Surface Pro 3. All in all I’d say it is an amazing computer.…

New Surface Computers

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Microsoft released some new Surface computers quietly this week. The new machines include a new Surface Pro 3 with 128GB storage on an Intel core i7 processor. Color me surprised when I was in a Microsoft store and saw the list of available machines include this. I personally have the 256GB core i7 model and it is a spectacular machine. Also released this week are the Surface 3’s with 4G capability.…

Build 2015

Sunday, May 3, 2015

This year marks the 4th year that I have gone to the Microsoft //build/ conference. I had to miss last year due to some mix-up at work, but that’s in the past. Every year seems to try and outdo the previous year and this was no different. This year some announcements were made that blew many people away. I was not one of them. I did find many of the sessions were very useful and made the whole conference great.…

Windows 8.1 Update

Saturday, May 31, 2014

I’m a little late to the party of writing about Windows 8.1 Update, but I wanted to get a fair result. My initial thoughts on it were that I didn’t like any of the improvements they made for keyboard and mouse users. Until a couple days ago when I was forced to use Windows 8.1 long enough to install the Update. I have to concede that the keyboard and mouse improvements are wonderful.…

Build 2014 an outsider's summary

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

I was unable to go to BUILD this year, and that made me pretty sad. This year’s theme was “Cloud First; Mobile First.” - but wait, how can both be first? Well, that’s the question they wanted you to ask. So instead let’s ask, “What about desktop?” You see //build (yes I’m going to type it every way I can) was about 2 things this year: Azure (now called Microsoft Azure) and Windows Phone 8.…

Office for iPad is now available

Friday, March 28, 2014

Today at a press briefing in San Francisco, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Office for iPad is now available. The press briefing was entitled “The Intersection of Cloud and Mobile” and there was plenty of information on Microsoft’s new core: The world will not be defined by the form factors that we have today. Everything we do will be digitized. Improve the fidelity of the interactions with all of the digitized information.…

Surface RT and Surface 2 USB to Ethernet Connection

Friday, November 1, 2013

My company has a very secure WiFi connection. Part of that security comes at a cost though. We can’t do remote debugging of the NOOK for Windows 8 app over WiFi. As many of you know the Surface RT and Surface 2 don’t have an Ethernet port. Under Windows 8 there was a single USB to Ethernet device that you could use, and it worked well. Microsoft asked people hosting that ARM based driver to remove it, and Windows 8.…

HttpRequestException in mscorlib.dll

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

If you run into this exception in a Windows 8 App: A first chance exception of type ‘System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException’ occurred in mscorlib.dll you should probably check to make sure that Internet (Client) is enabled in the App Manafest:

EventToCommand is now built into Windows 8.1!

Thursday, October 24, 2013

In MVVM code is separated to make it easier to test. You write a View Model and bind it to the View. Sometimes the View has elements that trigger events that you want to listen for in the View Model. This is where EventToCommand comes in handy. However, up till now this has been a bit of a trick to do in Windows 8 because it isn’t built in. You have to use a third party extension or write all the wiring up yourself.…

Acer Iconia Ad Featuring NOOK!

Friday, October 4, 2013

Recently Microsoft let out an ad that featured that Acer Iconia W3. This is an 8.1 inch tablet that I got at the //build/ conference. I use it quite a bit for reading and some lite web surfing. The neat thing about this ad below is that it is featuring NOOK not only on the Iconia, but on the iPad Mini too! Check it out!