CodeGuru Staff

This week Microsoft announced the release of the Windows Azure Toolkit (WAT) for Android, which includes native libraries for storage and authentication functionality, a sample Android-Azure application and unit tests. Updated toolkits for Windows Phone and iOS platforms were also released along with the Android WAT. The amazing growth of the mobile application market has […]

This week Microsoft released a new version for its Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac that includes support for the Windows Phone 7 Mango update. The new release of Connector, which enables users to backup and sync Windows Phone devices with their computer, also provides greater Mac OS integration. Users can also now drag and […]

Introduction CSV files are very popular for storing tabular data because they are simple textual files with a very few rules. This makes them very interoperable because CSV readers and writers are relatively easy to implement. Interoperability is, probably, the first reason why someone would choose to save the data in CSV format. Figure 1: […]

Recently developers received a preview of sorts when Sumit Kumar from the Microsoft VC++ team discussed some of the new IDE features of the upcoming version of Visual Studio. Some of the features are simply playing catch-up to VB/C#, while other enhancements could be extended to all of the languages. A new “Semantic Colorization” feature […]

Microsoft and Windows Phone 7 have a friend in Kik, a cross-platform mobile communication app development company. When Kik launched their Windows Phone 7 app in June, growth for the iOS and Android platforms significantly increased. They came to the conclusion that every registered user of the Windows Phone 7 Kik Messenger app was worth […]

C++ used to lack a special value to indicate a null pointer. It used 0 for this purpose, something that was inherited from C. This led to some problems, which we’ll show in this article. The new standard introduces a new reserved word nullptr, to designate a constant rvalue that represents a null pointer. NULL […]

This week a new Microsoft .NET Integration Pack was released by VaraLogix, a company that specializes in web application deployment solutions. The .NET Integration Pack includes Application Dependency Resolution for .NET, TFS integration, and Hyper-V virtual resource support. The CTO of VaraLogix, Robin Fuller, discussed the release, stating that “We’ve created a way for Microsoft […]

This week the initial production release of Python Tools for Visual Studio was announced, along with support for the four major Python interpreters, CPython, IronPython, Jython and PyPy. Python Tools integrates a Python REPL into Visual Studio and features syntax highlighting, visualizations and auto-completion. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is available with the Visual […]

Introduction Add-Ins are custom programs that helps extend the capabilities of a certain program. For example, we can create add-ins to make Outlook, or any other Office product more powerful. We can add cool features to existing programs. With this article series we will create Outlook Add-Ins to backup our important emails. This article ( […]

There are a lot of choices for database developers today, so why would Windows Azure be the best choice for database developers? Automated service management, cost-efficiency, and the ability to save on development time are among the reasons most cited by developers. Many developers find that Windows Azure is very similar to tools such as […]

The media has been all over the term “cloud” recently, as the concept of storing data in the cloud has revolutionized the functionality of database storage. Many of us, however, are unaware of just what the excitement is about, and aren’t sure why a service such as SQL Azure would benefit our particular application. Let’s […]

Enumerations are an important feature of C++, but unlike in other languages, enumerations are not type-safe. There are several problems with the enums: they export their enumerators (the members of an enumeration) to the surrounding scope, you cannot specify the underlying type and the enumerators implicitly convert to int. These problems have been addressed in […]