Author Archives: Brandon

Cross-Platform Mobile Dev, pure badassery – pt 1

This is part 1 of a 5-part series in which I explore and demonstrate cross-platform app creation for mobile and desktop platforms using iFactr, an enterprise-grade framework, and Monocross, the open-source core of iFactr. The other articles are easily accessible at the bottom of each post. Saw a tweet the other day referencing an article… Read More »

Outlook Productivity Tip–Back/Forward

For me, this has proven very useful. Since I have multiple accounts in my Outlook configuration, I quite frequently jump between folders in different mailboxes, etc. Sometimes it’s way faster to navigate around Outlook just like it’s a browser. Here’s how to set it up: 1) Click the drop down for the Quick Access Toolbar,… Read More »

Dear OEMs, putting ‘RT’ in your Windows 8 slate’s name is $%!^ing retarded

#justSaying Why on earth would you slap yet another acronym in the face of a consumer market that is more and more focused on EASE of use, EASE of understanding, EASE of portability? These poor people are already bombarded with USB, SSD, GB, TB, DDR3, DVI, HDMI, DVD, SD, MicroSD, Micro USB, and how many… Read More »

WP7 Will (Apparently) Still Require Zune in Windows 8

Was playing with VS2012 tonight working on a WP7 project and went to deploy to my device w/o having Zune launched just to see what would happen: Not sure I’d seen anybody confirm this yet, so thought I’d offer it up. It appears that the “Zune-less” setup touted for Windows Phone on Windows 8 is… Read More »

Windows 8 upgrade problems? Join the club

Turns out I wasn’t the only one having problems upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8 after the RTM went live for the lucky TechNet and MSDN subscribers. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t consider us worthy of support just yet – probably because we are self-proclaimed experts At any rate, I couldn’t give up on my upgrade.… Read More »

Social Camera is now free

After some back and forth in my mind, today was the day I finally pulled the trigger on Social Camera and decided to make it a free app on the Windows Phone marketplace. My hope here is that it might drive more folks to Cloud Transfer seeing the SkyDrive Transfer option already available in Social… Read More »

Stream SkyDrive media from your Windows Phone app

The app I’m working on could be given a little “oomph” by being able to stream media files from SkyDrive, so I looked in to it. I currently have a snipped of code that gets the downloadable URL for a SkyDrive file and uses that in some operations, but I’d seen an article on WindowsPhoneGeek (which… Read More »

Freakin’ AJAX call won’t pull the latest data

Was working on this really simple website at my job the other day. Since it was so simple, I decided to make the “data” area of the site a simple XML file that I’d just update and re-push out to the site to update data behind listboxes, etc. No big deal. Or so I thought.… Read More »