Tag Archives: Windows8

Is this my last Tech Ed as an attendee?

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I think this will be my last Tech Ed as an attendee.  I’m growing a bit impatient with the content available.  Please understand, that I consider myself a bit of an ‘alpha geek’ who follows MSDN, Channel 9, and many of the Microsoft bloggers on a daily basis.  Hence my problem:

Why should I spend my time at Tech Ed in developer content sessions that I have already seen online?  Additionally, the number of developer focused sessions at Tech Ed North America 2012 this year is significantly smaller than the number of IT focused sessions.  I am embarrassed by how little Asp.Net developer content and Windows 8 content is available.

If Microsoft REALLY wants to push the app store model, why aren’t they training us to deliver that content at the HUB of their training year?  On the TechEd website, when I search the session catalog by product there are ZERO sessions on Windows 8!

 Don’t get me wrong, I love Tech Ed as a show for junior to mid-level developers to learn a LOT at.  It is an absolute blast to meet and talk with all of these technologists that I have tweeted with over the past few years.  That interaction is INVALUABLE.  More than anything else, getting some face time with people like David Starr, Peter Provost, Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin have absolutely made my visit to Tech Ed a pleasure and valuable experience.

I just think that I may have outgrown the content at the show, and my talents would be more effectively used in presenting some more topical content or assisting in hands-on-labs when I return to this conference.

Announcing QUnit-Metro!

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As I started learning about writing JavaScript apps for Windows 8, I progressed through a few sample projects and found my way easily.  After all, I’ve been writing HTML and JavaScript for the past 10 years…  this shouldn’t be difficult.  I did however find that my practice of Test Driven Development to be nearly impossible to achieve.  You see, out of the box, Visual Studio 2012 and Windows 8 do NOT provide for unit testing your JavaScript.  However, if you opt to write your app in XAML, unit testing is available.

This was unacceptable, so I went to the drawing board.  I dug up my favorite unit test framework, QUnit and started to work with QUnit to test my sample Windows 8 projects.  Alas, QUnit expects to run in a browser and have full access to the DOM.  For those of you who have not developed a Metro app yet, you will find that DOM manipulation is very hard to do.

So, <TimAllenVoice>I re-wrote it!</TimAllenVoice> I have forked QUnit 1.5 and added some bindings to get it working in the Metro environment.  The result is something that I call “QUnit-Metro”.

By the time this post is published, I will have presented the framework at Tech Ed 2012’s Speaker Idol competition.  This is a very exciting time for me, as I have never presented at Tech Ed before.  Sure, I’ve done Code Camps and local user groups, but never anything of the size of Tech Ed. My hands are trembling with excitement as I type this post from the conference floor, mere hours before the competition starts.

I will post screenshots, a starter tutorial, and a quick screencast showing the framework over the next day or two.  For now, check out QUnit-Metro at:

http://bit.ly/QUnitMetro

Thanks for reading…. and I’ll update you with more Metro and Unit testing goodness over the next few months.