With real-world samples in a variety of languages, this session will share practical, hands-on coding tips and tricks to help you turn the vision of loosely-coupled, simple components woven together with events into real code in your applications.

I presented on selling your software to businesses at last year’s Twilio conference.  (I’ll let you in on a little secret: while this presentation is applicable to Twilio-powered applications, it’s 99.95% applicable to B2B SaaS companies which don’t have anything to do with Twilio.)

Working from home gives you the freedom to get a lot done, away from the distractions of office life. On the other hand, it also gives the freedom to goof off all day!

F# is ideally suited to machine learning because of its efficient execution, succinct style, data access capabilities and scalability. F# has been successfully used by some of the most advanced machine learning teams in the world, including the Microsoft Research Machine Learning and Applied Games groups at Microsoft Research, Cambridge.

I’d like to share with you a mysterious internal secret kept within Microsoft for now a long time. It’s the real story behind the concept of the CSS Grid Layout imagined by Microsoft for IE10 and Windows Store Apps.

NuGet support for C++ projects in Visual Studio has arrived in NuGet version 2.5! This has been an elusive feature for VC++ developers so we are thrilled it's here. It's been around for about a month now so we figured we'd go talk to one of the developers who helped make it happen, Microsoft's Garrett Serack.

Testing your app throughout the development process can help you create a really great Windows Phone app. Testing helps ensure that your app is effectively represented in the Windows Phone Store as an app that offers Windows Phone users a high level of performance and quality. A small investment in the key areas described in this post can help you bypass common errors early in the development process, and help you get positive results in the long term. This post is part 2 of a 3-part series that outlines key test areas that you should consider before submitting your app to the Store. See part 1 for additional details.

When developing bots for classical games such as Chess and Checkers the depth to which the engine evaluates the game tree is limited by the amount of time and by computing power. However when we play Tetris, the game itself imposes a hard limit on how far we are able see into the future, the preview provided is typically only in the range of 1 to 5 pieces.

Not too long ago, I answered a question on stack overflow where the question was about how to join multiple bézier curves. What he wanted to do was to draw a continuous “Bézier Curve” along several thousand points as though it were one curve (assume that we’re talking about a cubic bézier curves). I answered the question fairly thoroughly, however I decided that I would take a minute to expand some more on the answer.

On November 26, 2012 id Software released the source code of Doom 3 BFG edition (only one month after the game hit the stores). The 10 years old idTech 4 engine has been updated with some of the technology found in idTech 5 (the game engine running Rage) and it was an interesting reading session.

Microsoft tech troubleshooter extraordinaire Gov Maharaj and I help walk you through troubleshooting solutions to your tech support problems. If you have a problem you want to send us, you can use the Problem Step Recorder in Windows 7 (see this for details on how) and send us the zip file to DefragShow@microsoft.com.

The phrase "agile development" has become common fare within the development community. As companies sought out new ways to innovate and optimize from within, Agile provided a new approach towards achieving productive results. Most developers have exposure to Agile in one form or another. Some companies have chosen to jump in while others have adopted select concepts. In either case, the Agile and Lean methodologies have produced frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban which have been well received. Although this might run the risk of over-simplification, Agile focuses on short cycles, fast results, and continued course corrections. After adopting this new mindset, an inevitable question arises. What do we do about technical debt? How does it fit within Agile? Does Agile eliminate or encourage technical debt?

I had this discussion many times over the last few years: - Should we have a class per file? - What about other types such as interfaces, enums, …? Opinions on this subject vary a lot. This purpose of this article is to provide you some basic guidelines and why you should follow them.

In the Star Trek Book of Management, there are two approaches to big data decision making: The Kirk way and the Spock way. Which type are you?

A fair question to ask is why should your organization consider adopting the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) process framework.  I believe that there are several clear benefits to doing so:

So you’re using Continuous Integration and Mercurial as your VCS. CI is great, you’re loving the feedback and feeling good after a green build. You’ve just got your project started and a couple of features are underway, but then you see a red build. “It’s nothing”, they’ll say, “just wanted to publish my changes, halfway through this big refactoring”. “One broken build is expected”, they’ll say, “just this one”.

Based on years of experience optimizing modern web applications, we invented a set of techniques for optimizing dynamic content. We refer to it as “InstantON”. InstantON takes content (such as a webpage), breaks it into small pieces, and caches those pieces on the Yottaa Network. When a page is requested, Yottaa delivers some pieces to the client instantly (response times typically under 200 milliseconds) while simultaneously fetching dynamic content from the origin server. Once the origin server produces the dynamic content, Yottaa delivers those pieces to the client with the intelligence to properly integrate them with the existing page.

In this talk, Paul Gerrard discusses continuous delivery, particularly as it pertains to long-term requirements. Testing up front, he says, helps to deliver "front-door quality, not back-door quality."

Sometimes is hard to test the SUT (System Under Test) because it depends on other components or sub-systems that cannot be used in the test environment.

AWS Cost Saving Tip 10: Make right choice between PIOPS vs Std EBS volumes for saving costs

There are lots of good ideas and practices in Agile development, ideas that really work. But there are several common best practices that you don't need to follow - if you don't do them, nothing bad will happen and your project will still succeed. And there are a couple of them that you're better off not following at all.