Android tablets were a joke. I remember being at a MIX when the Xamarin guys (before Xamarin was Xamarin) were showing off Moonlight on Motorola Xoom tablets. I overheard them complain how bad the devices were compared to their iPad test machines. That was PN7 or Pre-Nexus 7. Sure the Kindle came first, but the real switch for Android tablets was the exceptional Nexus 7. They proved that the OS was usable and that a device was desirable. And they did it for $199. The Nexus 7 was a hit…very late into game. They knew that if they sold it at cost or better that people would learn to believe that Android was more than a haven for Linux-heads.

Thanks to all who showed up to see me talk about AngularJS at the recent Atlanta .NET User's Group. At the talk, I wrote the client-side code for an AngularJS app by hand. The slides are pretty thin, but the code includes all the functionality I showed. I promised the slides and code so here they are!

Are you getting ready to build a new website? Are you interested in shortening your development by using Bootstrap, AngularJS, Azure and ASP.NET? If so, my new course might be just for you.

A week ago I splurged and upgraded my Lumia 920 to the Lumia 1020. So to those of you who were expecting me to switch over the Android or an iDevice; I'm still entrenched in the Windows Phone world. And this phone cements my opinion to stay.  Let's talk about the good and the bad.

No I am not talking the promise that JavaScript will fix everything if you use it. I don't even believe that ;) I am talking about the concept of a promise object that several JavaScript libraries use (including AngularJS, jQuery, Dojo and WinJS).

Today I picked up a Lumia 1020. I am impressed with the camera as you'd expect but I am also loving the size. It's about the same size as the 920 except for the extra camera bump. It feels lighter than I expected. The AMOLED screen with Gorilla Glass 3 looks great too.

I am working with a client on an enterprise Win8 app that is for order taking. They have a specific page that they require to be only in Portrait mode while the rest of the app can support any orientation. Since I've done so much Windows Phone 7/8 work I thought this would be simple. Just specify the value on the Page. But this didn't work…

Ever get perplexed when designing your API for the web? My new course is now available on PluralSight that helps you design your API. The course covers:

I recently helped the Atlanta Code Camp effort by building them a new website. You can see it here: Atlanta Code Camp.  I am pretty proud of what I was able to accomplish in the scant number of hours I had to build it. It's not done as we need to improve it when we have the speakers chosen and set up the schedule, but so far I am pretty happy with it.

I've been honored to help put together the Atlanta Code Camp this year. This year's event is happening on August 24th here in Atlanta and we're expecting to have eight tracks covering a mix of developer, designer and some IT professional talks. I've attended this event the past eight or so years and it's always a good time. I decided it was time to help out.

In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems. In this same time, I've also done quite a number of HTML/JS/CSS talks where I didn't use Visual Studio. Some have conjectured whether I am moving away from the Microsoft stack as a result of the lessened use of Visual Studio in my demos. The frank answer is: nope.

I try to keep this blog relatively technology focused but sometimes something happens in my life that requires an announcement. I am also mentioning it here because I think it makes a good story:

If you build PhoneGap apps and test with the browser, moving to phones sometimes causes a boatload of problems. Because there isn't a great debugging story, being able to see the console window would be of great help.

After my recent talk on Mobile-First Design, one of the attendees tweeted that he thought it was ironic that my talk was on responsive design but my blog wasn't mobile-friendly. I told him that my company site was…but that was a cop-out. I hadn't had time to get the blog setup with a good template. So voila! I haven't confirmed that everything works the way I want but we should be close!

I had a great time at yesterday's online DotNetConf. I think my "Mobile-First Responsive Web Design" talk went pretty well. You can see the talk on YouTube (embedded below). The talk was focused on designing websites to be efficient on mobile platforms by starting with your design on a mobile and scaling up to tablets and desktops.

If you're interested in cross-platform mobile apps, I like the solution that PhoneGap has. It uses HTML5/CSS/JS as the UI stack and I find it compelling to build apps for iOS, Android, Kindle, Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store. I've just released a new course on PhoneGap that attempts to fill in some of the holes in building apps.  The course includes:

I've created a new example of a PhoneGap app for my talk at the Atlanta Windows Apps meeting. The talk I did tonight didn't go all that well, but I got it working and the result is something you can download and see how to use a minimum of WinJS to build your Windows 8 apps.

One of the things that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with lately is the ability to be able to build cross-platform apps. While I spend a lot of time in the Microsoft space (especially Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8), I need to be able to create and deploy apps to iOS and Android platforms. I've decided to do a series on building one of these using Single Page Application for the web, then deploying it to devices via PhoneGap:

Very short post today, but wanted to share something that happens more than I'd like to admit. I work for some clients who use TFS and when I can't in through their VPN I need to zip up my files for them to check-in manually. It's not fun (I miss being able to create a change set in Mercurial or Git). When this happens I need to have a quick way of copying all the files in a project that aren't marked as read-only. Robocopy to the rescue:

With the surprising news of Sinofsky's leaving Microsoft still fluttering in the winds, I knew I'd hear some rants about Silverlight be heard among the XAML-lovers out there. I decided I needed a blog post (albeit a short one) to say my peace.

(UPDATED 11/12/2012: Added links to meetups/groups)