Some users have been reporting stutter in audio and laggy playback on certain devices. We think we’ve made some progress toward solving this problem, and we’d love to get your feedback. For best results, uninstall the old version before installing this beta.
Android player beta release – v0.98
Please leave a comment here and let us know how it works for you!
When you call a method on an object, are you sure the object won’t be null? Now you can be as Michael Perry shows in this video excerpt from his new course Provable Code. In the video he shows how to use the Code Contracts Visual Studio add-in from Microsoft Research to enable both implicit and explicit assertions of your code’s execution at compile time where defects are much easier to fix. In the complete course he covers other topics such as designing by contract, patterns, and degrees of freedom.
Paul Randal of SQLskills has just published a new course: SQL Server- Performance Troubleshooting Using Wait Statistics
Where do you start looking when trying to diagnose a performance problem with SQL Server? The answer is to use wait statistics! In this course, Paul will introduce you to the powerful ‘waits and queues’ performance tuning methodology. You’ll learn how SQL Server’s thread scheduling system works, what wait statistics are and how to use them; what more advanced synchronization mechanisms like latches and spinlocks are, and a wealth of detail about common performance issues and how to diagnose and solve them. The course is perfect for developers and DBAs who have been struggling to figure out how to start troubleshooting performance problems with SQL Server. The information in the course applies to all versions from SQL Server 2005 onwards.
In today’s episode of our Meet the Author podcast, Fritz Onion sits down with John Papa to discuss his new course JSRender Fundamentals. In the interview John explains exactly what JSRender does and why a web developer would want to use it. He also talks about its heritage of having derived from jQuery Templates. Finally he talks a little bit about why JSRender is more than just a templating engine and how it allows for extensions via features like custom tags.
Listen to the Audio (MP3)
Meet the Author: John Papa on JSRender Fundamentals
Transcript
[Fritz] Hi this is Fritz Onion. I’m here today talking with John Papa about his new course JSRender Fundamentals. John is a well known former Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft on the Silver Light and Window’s 8 client teams. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and author of 100 articles, more than 100 articles and ten books, specializing in professional application development with technologies including Windows, HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS, Silverlight, WPF, C#, .Net and SQL Server. Thanks for talking with me today John.
Jim Cooper has just published a new course: RhinoMocks Fundamentals
Donald Belcham is also a contributing author. He gives a brief overview of of hand rolled mock objects. Be sure to keep watching for the release of his next full course!
In this course you will learn how to use Rhino Mocks to isolate your tests from the dependencies of the classes you are unit testing. It will teach you how to use mocks to track dependency collaboration and how to use stubs to control program flow including how to use built in and custom constraints to create more specific mocks and stubs. It also includes a module on how to use StructureMap AutoMocker to reduce coupling between your tests and the classes you are testing. Click here to go directly to the table of contents to check out everything this course has to offer. We hope you enjoy the course!
Carlos Figueira has just published a new course: WCF Extensibility
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a very powerful framework for building connected systems in the Windows platform. WCF has many building blocks which can be used out-of-the-box to build complex applications. It also has many extensibility hooks where you can customize the framework by configuring or replacing many of these building blocks. In this course Carlos looks at the extensibility points in WCF, from its description, to the runtime to the channel model; he also covers the extensibility in the WCF serialization. Most of the extensibility points will be described and presented with code demonstrating how it can be used to solve a real-life scenario.
Google’s big developer conference kicks off today and the keynote centered around the next version of Android, version 4.1 or Jelly Bean to its friends. While not as radically different as the jump from Gingerbread to Ice Cream Sandwich, this release does include some nice feaures like improved performance via Project Butter, offline dictation, and a new start screen with resizable widgets.
Another key new feature is a redesigned search integration that includes improved voice features as well as the vaguely Orwellian Google Now app that uses your search and activity history to provide you with notifications relevant to your current location or schedule.
Google has said that Jelly Bean will be rolling out to Nexus and Xoom devices in mid-July but given that many Android devices are yet to receive the Ice Cream Sandwich update, availability on your device could be much longer.
Debugging services is not always an easy task, but in this video excerpt from Mario Hewardt’s new course Debugging Chronicles I you’ll see how to use DebugDiag to capture a memory dump on a running WCF service based on memory threshold triggers and then how to use debuggers to inspect the dump and find the culprit. In the complete course Mario takes a “Whodunnit” approach to each debugging lesson complete with crime scenes, victims, clues, and how to prevent criminal acts of programming in the future.
The recent announcement of Windows Phone 8 has left more than a few people shaking their head in confusion over Microsoft’s decision not to support current hardware devices with the new mobile OS. While the leap forward offered by a shared core with Windows 8 can provide developers with an easier transition between Metro UI apps running on desktop and tablets to the mobile phone, cutting off existing device owners limits an already small user base. Is this cross device compatibility and improved hardware more important than reaching the larger installed base of current Windows Phone 7 users? If you were going to write new app for Windows Phone devices, which platform would you target?
In this week’s newsletter check out our new courses, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals by Dan Wahlin, Debugging Chronicles by Mario Hewardt, and Algorithms and Data Structures – Part 2 by Robert Horvick. 
You can also learn about subscriptions for business and see who won our 100K User Accounts celebration contest.
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