Hello, all, and welcome to the February, 2012 edition of the Telerik newsletter! As the newest employee at Telerik, I’m still learning all of the good stuff we’re doing just in the area of developer tools.

For example, the features in JustCode that fix up my using statements (Ctrl+Shift+U) and show me a type’s shape and implementation via the JustDecompile integration (F12) are now ingrained into my fingertips, but I just learned (JustLearned!) that if I want to get completions on types that aren’t even listed in my using statements, I can use Ctrl+Alt+Space and keep right on coding, which is one of a ton of new features in the 2012 Q1 release. More new features in the Just family of tools include a new decompilation engine in JustDecompile to more completely handle new .NET constructs, a new “Largest Memory Retainer” view in JustTrace to find memory leakers and the ability write your very own JustCode extensions. And the Reporting and OpenAccess ORM tools have great new features coming, too!

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the last post in this series, we looked at getting started building Metro style apps built using JavaScript (Metro/JS apps) with Microsoft Visual Studio 11 for the Windows Developer Preview (aka VS11) and Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview (aka Blend).

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

In the previous post in this series, we discussed how to build a deploy a Metro style app built with JavaScript completely from the command line. That’s a useful exercise to prove that there’s no real magic, but I don’t expect most people to do things that way. I expect most people to use Visual Studio.

DISCLAIMER: This post is targeted at the //build/ version of the Windows Developer Preview (aka Windows 8). Things are likely to change with future releases. On your head be it.

A “Windows Metro style app” is an application built for the devices running the new Windows user experience of Windows 8. A Metro style app built using JavaScript is a first class Windows application built with the technologies of the web, e.g. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG, etc. Unlike a web site, a Metro JS app is not deployed page-by-page from a web server, but rather installed locally on the user’s machine. Like any other first class Windows app, a Metro JS app has access to the underlying platform and is able to share information with other apps.

If you recall from REPL for the Rosyln CTP 10/2011, I’ve been playing around building a little C# REPL app using Roslyn. That version was built as a Console application, but I’ve refactored and rebuilt it as a WPF application:

In part 1 of this now multi-part series (who knew?), I discussed my initial attempts at moving my digital life into the cloud, including files, music, photos, notes, task lists, mail, contacts, calendar and PC games.There were some issues, however, and some things that I forgot, so we have part 2.

Before we get to that, however, it’s interesting (for me, at least) to think about why it’s important to be able to move things into the cloud. Lots of vendors are busy making this possible, but why? There are backup reasons, of course, so that a fire or other natural disaster doesn’t wipe out all of the family pictures. There are also the ease of sharing, since email makes a very poor file sharing system. Also, multi-device access is certainly useful, since the world has moved into a heterogeneous OS world again as smartphones and tablets take their place at the table with PCs.

With the exception of //build/, I haven’t really been a public part of the Microsoft developer community for about a year. So, to make up for some lost time, I’m giving a talk about some of the //build/ bits at the Portland Area .NET User Group first thing in the new year. This means that I need a running installation of the Windows 8 Developer Preview on my new laptop, ’cuz THE MAN took my old laptop back when I handed in my badge (although, to be fair, they paid for it in the first place : ).

My constraints were as follows:

For years, I’ve maintained a single “main” computer. It was the computer that was the central authority of all of the personal data I’d accumulated over the years and from which it made me uncomfortable to be separated. Because I needed a single computer for everything, it had to work on my couch, on a plane, on a desk and everywhere else I ever needed to go. Also, it couldn’t have a giant monitor or multiple monitors, because it had to go everywhere. All of this was because I needed all of my data with me all of the time.