Microsoft Development Tools: Mobile Apps for Web Developers

Mobile Apps for Web Developers

The path of a mobile app developer often begins with a choice: develop for iOS, Android or Windows? It’s a choice that instantly diminishes the size of your potential audience, but developers often hold their nose and reluctantly make a decision. Those who need to reach all three app stores, choose to rewrite the application for each platform.

Visual Studio enables you to have maximum reach while achieving significant code re-use. With Xamarin, C# developers can share business logic across iOS, Android, and Windows applications. With Apache Cordova, web developers can achieve maximal code re-use by building cross-platform mobile applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In this post, we’ll take a close look at how you can use Visual Studio’s extension for Multi-Device Hybrid App Development to build a cross platform app using HTML, JS, and CSS. To follow along in the IDE:

•Download and install the extension on Visual Studio 2013 Pro Update 3, or…

•Try one of the trial VMs available on Azure.

Once you’ve installed the tools, create a project for “Multi-Device Hybrid Apps.”

 

Access Device Capabilities on any Platform Using the Same JS API

Before we explore the tools, let’s take a moment to look at the architecture of a Cordova app. The application itself is implemented as an HTML application (e.g. Single Page Application) hosted inside a webview control (or on Windows, as a WWA) that gives your app access to native device APIs. Most developers prefer to synchronize data with a server via RESTful web services (e.g. Azure Mobile Services), but all file assets like HTML, CSS, JS, and media are packaged with the application so that users can continue to use the app offline.

To access native device capabilities (e.g. camera, contacts, file system, accelerometer) from JavaScript, Cordova uses a construct called plugins. Plugins typically encapsulate two components: native code to invoke capabilities for each of the three platforms (i.e. Objective-C, Java and C#) and a normalized JavaScript API available for your app to use.

                                          

To use the API, you make an asynchronous call from within your JavaScript. The native code returns a response to the callback function. In the example below, the camera plugin returns the URI of a photo pointing to the file system on the mobile device.

// Retrieve image file location from the mobile device photo library

function getPhotoURI() { 

    navigator.camera.getPhoto(onPhotoSuccess, onPhotoFail, { 

        quality: 50, 

        destinationType: destinationType.FILE_URI, 

        sourceType: pictureSource.PHOTOLIBRARY 

    }); 

} 

// Callback from successful Photo Library event

Designed to Converge with Web Standards

Cordova plugins are generally designed to expose JavaScript APIs that will converge with web standards over time. The goal is for the plugins to eventually evaporate leaving the implementations of the W3C standards in their place. For example, the Web API for activating device vibration, navigator.vibrate(time), is already implemented by Cordova, Chrome, and Firefox. Over time all the mobile devices and browsers will use the same API, thereby making plugins obsolete as a polyfill. The ultimate goal is for Cordova to serve as a temporary bridge until the standard web platform supports the device capability.

JavaScript or TypeScript: Your Choice

Once you get started, a large part of your time will be spent writing code. Whether it’s HTML, CSS, JavaScript or TypeScript, we aim to provide our developers with help in context for the task at hand. For example, many developers depend on IntelliSense to avoid common syntax errors and quickly explore new APIs. Would you like to know what native device capabilities are available to your app? Visual Studio’s Tools for Apache Cordova include IntelliSense support for common Cordova plugins using both JavaScript and TypeScript.

If you write a custom plugin, you might want to enable IntelliSense for your component as well. To support the common Cordova plugin APIs, we use a JavaScript IntelliSense extension for the JavaScript editor. For TypeScript, we simply wrote TypeScript d.ts files to describe each API. You can see the d.ts files in the public home for open source d.ts files: DefinitelyTyped. Each d.ts file provides the meta-data necessary to provide rock-solid, accurate IntelliSense for Cordova plugins without executing JavaScript code in the background.

Three Ways to Preview Your App

To gain the highest productivity benefit, most developers choose to use the same code - 95% or more - amongst all deployment targets: iOS, Android, and Windows.

Since most developers choose to deploy a single shared HTML/CSS/JS codebase to all platforms, it’s important to be sure your apps look and behave as expected across the platforms you care about. We made sure that previewing your app would be as painless and efficient as possible by providing three options to test your app: (1) a Chrome-based simulator called Ripple, (2) native emulators provided by the platform vendors, and (3) deployment to an actual tethered device.

Unless you’re an otherworldly developer who can get an app running perfectly without ever running it, you’ll eventually need to deploy and test it on a device or emulator for each platform. However, that’s not necessarily where you want to start. Our general guidance is as follows:

1. For basic layout and early-stage debugging, use Ripple. Ripple is an open-source simulator that runs inside Chrome. Visual Studio automatically downloads and installs both Ripple and Chrome when you install our tools. Because Ripple uses Google’s V8 engine and blink-based rendering, it is ideal for simulating behavior on an iOS or Android device. Realistically, there are only a small number of substantial rendering differences between Chrome and IE11 these days, so it’s also a good proxy for Windows platforms. It’s nice to do your early development in Ripple because, quite frankly, it’s fast and familiar to web developers. Ripple benefits from all the CPU resources of your desktop and thousands of tiny performance optimizations designed to make desktop browsing snappy.
2. For final validation and full-fidelity debugging, use a device. As much as we love to debug in the desktop browser, there are some minor, but significant differences between it and mobile browsers. Unfortunately, tiny differences in CSS rendering or JavaScript interpretation can have a big impact, so it’s important to test your app on the real thing. The real source of truth will always be the device. Using the native build systems (i.e. Xcode, the Android and Windows SDKs), Visual Studio can build and deploy to devices tethered to your dev machine via USB.
3. If a device isn’t available, use an emulator. Given the range of devices and platform versions out there — especially Android versions — it’s not always possible to have a complete library of test devices. In our office, we keep a small library of representative devices including: iPods running iOS7-8, a Samsung Galaxy running Android 4.0, a Nexus 7 running Android 4.4, a Nokia 1520 running Windows Phone 8.1 and our dev machines running Windows 8.1. For everything else, we use an emulator.

 Blog by Hemant Bhagwat

Symantec and Hitachi partner for unstructured data governance

Today’s release of Symantec Data Insight adds data governance for Hitachi NAS Platform environments and enhances records management.

Today’s release of Symantec Data Insight adds data governance for Hitachi NAS Platform environments and enhances records management by offering a unique blend of information classification automation and data owner decision making.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Symantec Data Insight 4.5.1 which now enables:

• Data governance for Hitachi NAS 12.x.
• Records Classification Workflow: enables records owners to review classified documents related to a retention policy and automatically archive that information into Enterprise Vault.
• Additional filtering options for permission reporting and enhanced custom reporting ability for directory services.
• Alert policy options which provide a new policy and enhanced configuration options for access monitoring.

Symantec Data Insight integrates with Hitachi NAS Platform (HNAS) to discover and collect activity and permissions information. It provides a web-based interface to monitor and report on users’ access to data. Tim Durant, Hitachi’s Senior Director of Global ISV Alliances and Data Protection, is excited about this new opportunity with Symantec.  “Our customers face challenges in establishing what data exists, who owns the data, and how the data is being used.  Now they can benefit from performance at scale with both the Hitachi platform they store data on and the Symantec application they use to gain visibility into it.” 

Mr. Durant shares a customer perspective that Symantec has aligned its technology offerings to address.  With 69% of corporate data having no legal, business or regulatory value, effective data management and protection requires large-scale automation and accountability for taking retention and disposition actions on the growing amount of information.  This is why performance, scale and automation were built into the latest workflow in Data Insight.

“One of the challenges to traditional records management is the lack of a balanced approach between leveraging classification technology and user decision to automate the retention process,” says Ketan Shah, Director of Product Management at Symantec.   “With the new records classification workflow the integration between Symantec DLP, Data Insight and Enterprise Vault enables that automatic and seamless discovery and retention of a record once it has been confirmed by the data owner.”

As Symantec DLP discovers potential records throughout an organization, owners are engaged via the recently released Data Insight self-service portal to make records determinations.  DLP policies are then matched to Enterprise Vault retention policies and records are automatically archived under the appropriate retention period.

Blog by Sanket Kadam

Autodesk: Diwali Offer

AV Solutions: Diwali Offer

Microsoft Windows 10: Secrets Revealed

Next year Microsoft is releasing its new operating system and its next Windows iteration will not be Windows 9 or Windows 8.2. Instead it has skipping straight to 10. A lot of people are making fun of this. People like order, and skipping numbers bothers the kindergartner in all of us.
According to me some plausible reasons for skipping directly to 10 might be:-
1. Christening new windows OS as windows 9 will send the message that it is merely upgrade of windows 8.1 and there is nothing new in it
2. In June 2015 Apple is going to launch IOS 9 and MS just to prove its superiority, jumped
to number 10.
3. The Japanese consider 9 to be an unlucky number because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for pain. What's Mr. T's prediction for Windows 9?
Anyways let’s see some salient features of windows 10.After using Windows 10 for almost a week, I’ve discovered some neat little changes and features that Microsoft hasn’t yet discussed — smart tweaks that, if you’re a mouse-and-keyboard user looking for a reason to upgrade from Windows 7/8.1, you will be very pleased with. Let’s dive straight in with my favorite secret/hidden features of Windows 10.
Explorer now has a “Home” tab
In the last few versions of Windows, opening My Computer or a new Explorer window would
show you your computer’s various storage locations and shortcuts to default folders like
Documents and My Pictures. In Windows 10, you now end up in a new view called Home, which
shows Favorites, Frequent Folders, and Recent Files.
You can finally put the Recycle Bin on the taskbar
Rather than having to poke around Explorer or minimize everything and find the Recycle Bin icon on the Desktop, in Windows 10 you can now add the Recycle Bin to both the taskbar and the Start menu. Yes, that is the sound of many brains exploding as they catastrophically realize the enormity of this change
The Windows 10 Start menu is resizable
This one is a bit odd: You can make the Windows 10 Start menu as tall or as wide as you like. If
you want to have a Start menu that takes up the entire left side of your screen, or a narrow strip
across the taskbar, then that’s now possible. The taskbar itself is also resizable, which means you can do weird stuffs. I am not sure if this is second bit is intentional or not. A resizable Start menu is quite cool, though!
Cortana is almost definitely coming to Windows 10
After a little bit of poking around (searching for “Cortana” in Explorer) I found a lot of references to Cortana in Windows 10 Technical Preview; there’s even aWindows.Cortana.dll, just sitting there in the System32 directory. You also get a bunch of Cortana-related hits if you search for “Cortana” within the Registry Editor.None of this is to say that Cortana is definitely coming to Windows 10 — there are lots of other reasons for those files/registry entries being there, such as the ghost of an early internal test — but I’d say it’s pretty likely. We should hopefully see Cortana in the next beta of Windows 10.
Notifications and toasts in Windows 10
While Windows 10′s rumored Notification Tray isn’t yet in the Technical Preview, there are some new pretty toasts/notifications that pop up in the top right corner of the screen. These notifications appear to replace the speech bubbles that used to pop out of the system tray (the bottom right corner of the taskbar, unless you’re one of those heathens who has moved the taskbar to a non-standard location).
The Command Prompt is getting so much more than just Ctrl-V
Somewhat unbelievably, despite the Windows 10 unveil event being only 40 minutes long, Microsoft actually dedicated a couple of minutes to Windows 10′s Command Prompt (cmd). At the time, Joe Belfiore told that Command Prompt is finally gaining the ability to paste with Ctrl-V (previously, you had to right click > paste). It turns out, there’s a lot more, too. If you right click Command Prompt’s title bar and head to Properties then Experimental, you get a bunch of new options (see above). In fact, you have to turn on the experimental options before you can use Ctrl-V to paste. With experimental options turned on, you can also use Shift-arrow keys to mark text (for copying and pasting with Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V). The other options are mostly self-explanatory, though I am still trying to discover what the “extended edit keys” are (let me know in the comments if you’ve found some!)
Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts for virtual desktops, improved snapping, task view
One of Windows 10′s bigger new features is virtual desktops — additional instances of the Desktop that you can use to better organize your workspace. There’s also improved snapping, and a new view called Task View that’s kind of like Alt-Tab, but it incorporates your virtual desktops as well. All of these new features have associated keyboard shortcuts to make using them a cinch.
 Task View is opened up with Windows Key-Tab. It looks very like the new Alt-Tab interface, but it stays open after you let go of the keys. You can also add, remove, and manage virtual desktops from this interface.
 Windows Key-Ctrl-Arrow (left or right) switches you to the next virtual desktop on the left or right.
 Windows Key-Ctrl-D creates a new virtual desktop. Windows Key-Ctrl-F4 closes the current virtual desktop.
 Windows Key-Up arrow and Windows Key-Down arrow can now be used to snap the current app to the top or bottom of the screen (this is in addition to Win-Left and Win-Right for snapping to the left and right of the screen). Tapping these shortcuts multiple times creates different effects: Tapping Win-Up once maximizes an app; twice snaps it to the top. Win-Down once snaps to the bottom; twice minimizes it. You can also use Win-Left/Right to move apps incrementally across a multi-monitor setup.

FOR ANY QUERIES PLEASE CONTACT ME ON pushkar.nath@sujataindia.com

or +919850712300

Thanks

Pushkar Nath

Microsoft Visual Studio Development Tool Software

 

We Sujata Computers Pvt Ltd. are specialized partner for Microsoft Visual Studio Development Tool:-

Visual Studio is a complete set of development tools for building ASP.NET Web applications, XML Web Services, desktop applications, and mobile applications. Visual Basic, Visual C#, and Visual C++ all use the same integrated development environment (IDE), which enables tool sharing and eases the creation of mixed-language solutions. In addition, these languages use the functionality of the .NET Framework, which provides access to key technologies that simplify the development of ASP Web applications and XML Web Services Application Migration, like fire fox to asp.net. .

It is used to develop console and graphical user interface applications along with Windows Forms or WPF applications, web sites, web applications, and web services in both native code together with managed code for all platforms supported by Microsoft Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, .NET Framework, .NET Compact Framework and Microsoft Silverlight.

Microsoft Visual Studio Available in four different flavours as mention below:-

VS Ultimate with MSDN

VS Premium with MSDN

VS Professional with MSDN

VS Test Pro with MSDN

Microsoft Visual Studio Capabilities:-

What can you really do with Visual Studio? Following are some of the various applications that can be built using Visual Studio.

• Console applications: These applications run from the command line and do not include a graphical interface, but are great for small tools or anything that will be run by another application.
• Windows forms applications: These are Windows desktop applications written using the .NET framework; since they are .NET applications, they require that the .NET framework be on any computer that will run the application.
• Windows services: Services are applications that run in the background while your computer is running. These are usually applications that will have to perform scheduled tasks or handle continuous network requests.
• ASP.NET applications: ASP.NET is a powerful technology that is used to create dynamic web applications, often driven by a database. Many popular websites are written using ASP.NET, including those of e-commerce giants like Dell.
• ASP.NET web services: ASP.NET provides a complete web services model that allows you to quickly and easily create web services.
• Windows Mobile applications: Windows Mobile applications can run on devices that include the Compact framework; these include Pocket PC devices, as well as cell phones running the Microsoft Smartphone platform.
• MFC/ATL/Win32 applications: You can also still create traditional MFC, ATL, or Win32 applications using C++. These applications do not need the .NET runtime to run, but also don't include many of the benefits of working with the .NET framework.
• Visual Studio add-ins: That's right, you can use Visual Studio to write new functionality to be added into Visual Studio.
• And more: Visual Studio also includes projects to deploy your application, work with databases, create reports, and more.

ll\pVisual Studio provides an extensible model for adding new projects to Visual Studio; many other Microsoft applications now integrate directly into the IDE. Some of the most common include SQL Server Reporting Services and Visual Studio Tools for Office.

Microsoft Visual Studio Features:-

All of the above applications could be written using another IDE or some combination of freely available SDKs and your favourite text editor, so why would you pay for Visual Studio? Visual Studio is dedicated to making your development life easier through time-saving and convenient features; here are some of the most compelling of those features.

• IntelliSense: IntelliSense is the trademark feature of Visual Studio. IntelliSense simply helps you while programming by showing you the available classes and the methods and properties available on those classes. Can't remember what the name of that class, method, or property is? No worries, IntelliSense will help out.
• Designers: Visual Studio includes visual WSYIWYG designers for Windows applications, ASP.NET applications, and Windows Mobile applications. These designers make it much easier to get your application looking just right.
• Debugging: One of the most important features of Visual Studio is the ability to step through your application line by line as it is executing. Not sure why you are getting an error? Simply walk through and see exactly what is going wrong.
• Organization: Visual Studio is built for developing applications, so it provides intuitive methods for organizing your various code files into projects and your various projects into solutions.

Visual Studio includes way too many features to be listed here; even most seasoned developers don't make use of all of the various features available in Visual Studio.

FOR ANY QUERIES PLEASE CONTACT ME ON hemant.bhagwat@sujataindia.com or +919850362300

Thanks

Hemant Bhagwat

Sujata Computers Pvt Ltd