I use the fantastic AbstractSpoon ToDoList for task tracking. I recently discovered the exist.io personal metrics app and wanted to track my daily completed tasks.

I created an integration to do just that, and used it as an opportuniy to do a little development in .NET Core. You can find exist-spoon on my GitHub page.

Azure Mobile Services provides a really easy way to integrate social login into web, mobile, and desktop applications. At Magenic, we’re using it in our client apps for the Modern Apps Live! conference demo application called MyVote. The web application and the native mobile clients share a common Web API backend deployed to a Web Role on Azure Cloud Services. For most of the Web API methods, we only want to allow calls from users who have successfully authenticated with Azure Mobile Services. Let’s dig into what it takes to develop a Web API authentication handler that verifies claims issued by Azure Mobile Services.

I presented at the Modern Apps Live! conference in Orlando this past November. The whole show was a smashing success. It was an incredible opportunity to connect with peers and colleages, taking a step back to think about the “big picture” of where application development is headed. The next show will be in Las Vegas on March 10-14. I’ll be presenting on building a Modern HTML5 “smart client” application. Use my registration link for a $500 savings!

I spoke at Silicon Valley Code Camp on October 5th. The title of my talk was “Responsive Re-Engineering,” and it focused on adapting desktop-only web sites to be mobile friendly. I want to thank the organizers and all of the folks who attended the talk. If any of you are reading this and you’d like to talk more about Responsive Web Design, get in touch! It was a great experience: lots of great questions and an awesome venue. The code samples and slides are online.

I just published a new release of my TFS Test Steps Editor. I’m pretty excited about this one, as it includes the first community contribution to the project!

Here’s a quick tip for those of you who’ve jumped into the Visual Studio 2013 Preview: hiding the “send feedback” smiley-face button in the upper-right of the window. I find it very distracting, and I know how to find the Connect site if I need to file a bug report. I searched the HKEY_CURRENT_USER Registry hive under Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config for “feedback” and found a key named {F66FBC48-9AE4-41DC-B1AF-0D64F0F54A07} under MainWindowFrameControls. Its default value was “Feedback Button,” which sounded like what I was looking for. After backing up the key to disk, I deleted the key and re-started Visual Studio. No more smiley!

Delete HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0_Config\MainWindowFrameControls\{F66FBC48-9AE4-41DC-B1AF-0D64F0F54A07}.

The term “Responsive Web Design” was coined in 2010 by Ethan Marcotte in his canonical article defining the technique. Recently, I spent some time researching the history and modern state of the art of Response Web Design (RWD). This article presents a survey of my findings, and provides examples of specific techniques. We’ll focus on Visual Studio / ASP.NET MVC tools and techniques for getting the job done.

At a client I was recently tasked with implementing a site that presents tooltips with a custom appearance. I thought I’d share some lessons learned about consistently displaying the tooltips and working around positioning problems.

I just pushed a small update to my WinHaste hastebin client (binary). Hastebin is a cool, minimal, login-free alternative to Pastebin. Now, when a command’s output is being piped to WinHaste, the output will be echoed to the console. This is especially handy if you are running an interactive command, so you aren’t entering values “blind.”

It’s time to dive into Windows Store application development. I’ve developed several tools for the Team Foundation Server (TFS) ecosystem, so I think an appropriate first project that will intersect my existing skill set would be a TFS Work Item browser.