There's no right answer to "What technology should I learn next?" But there is a way to manage your skills to maximize the return you get from them.
It's a little more than one month into the new year, and there's a wave of new Visual Studio extensions available specifically for Visual Studio 2013.
- By Terrence Dorsey
- 02/10/2015
Xamarin's development lead offers insights into the Android 5 Lollipop update and how the speed with which Android releases spin out affects their own releases.
- By Wallace McClure
- 02/09/2015
There once was an invoicing system that, when it worked, it worked very well, indeed. But when it was broken, it was horrid.
Now that you know how to work with multi-swarm optimization, it's time to take it up a level and see how to train your network to use it.
- By James McCaffrey
- 02/04/2015
You don't have to give up using dynamic SQL just because you're using Entity Framework. The Entity Framework SqlQuery method will give you back the flexibility of dynamic SQL and still let you work with your data in an object-oriented way.
Forget post backs! Easily add REST services to enhance your legacy Web Forms applications.
- By Patrick Steele
- 02/03/2015
Android 5 Lollipop has a few new features -- including some UI and performance improvements -- that can now be incorporated into your apps. Here's how to work with the update.
- By Wallace McClure
- 01/29/2015
Peter finishes off his series on creating single-page applications by showing how jQuery integrates with Backbone to support updates and deletes (also: how to convert a string to a number in TypeScript).
If you really want to take full control of the exceptions you pass to your clients, you can write your own Exception class. Here's how to do that, complete with support for additional properties.
Nick Randolph dissects a Windows Phone 8.1 application package in order to inject analytics tracking code into a pre-build application.
- By Nick Randolph
- 01/22/2015
Microsoft made .NET Core and other .NET Foundation projects open to community collaboration. Want to make a contribution? Read these tips first.
- By Terrence Dorsey
- 01/21/2015
Multi-swarm optimization (MSO) is a powerful variation of particle swarm optimization. Understanding how MSO works and how to implement it can be a valuable addition to your developer toolkit.
- By James McCaffrey
- 01/20/2015
A complex ASP.NET MVC form can drive you to a big, ugly action method that handles all the functionality the page offers. The ActionMethodSelector provides a clean way to separate that logic over multiple methods, provided you understand a key distinction of which many ASP.NET MVC developers aren't aware.
ReSharper is a Visual Studio plug-in from JetBrains that brings an incredible amount of features designed to increase developer productivity.
- By Ondrej Balas
- 01/15/2015
Not just once, but repeated in various lucrative apps -- a humongous chunk of code that should've been reduced to a mere line.
Make Visual Studio do the hard work to simplify the creation of external lists that can be used to connect outside data to your SharePoint projects.
- By Malin De Silva
- 01/12/2015
JetBrains's .NET plug-in will make quick work of code inspections and refactoring. Here are a few tips to work with it that will have you wondering what to do with all your newfound free time.
If you're creating an XML document and want to write code that you'll actually be able to maintain … well, it may be time to learn a little Visual Basic, just so you can use XML Literals. It's a good solution even for C# shops.
Even Apple devices aren't immune to the dreaded OS fragmentation problem. Thankfully, Xamarin has a solution, and Wally looks into it this month.
- By Wallace McClure
- 01/06/2015