I'm a regular jogger, but due to my travel schedule over the last six months, I'm no longer a member of a gym. That works out fine about 9 months of the year and whenever I'm staying in hotels, but if I'm at home during the winter, it gets a little brutal. That's why I've been out running like Forrest Gump this past week since the weather broke in Chicago and we've seen spring-like conditions all week. My favorite destination…

Gathering UI requirements is simple right? You just need to ask end users what they want, what they need and from there get on with the business of developing the solution they asked for - whether it’s an app, an Intranet or some other enterprise IT solution. If only things were so simple!

When we go about speaking to stakeholders, as part of our enterprise services, it’s very easy to listen to what one or…

We live in an era of information overload. At no other time in human history have we received communication and messages on anywhere near the current level. Our cell phones are constantly with us; colleagues, friends and family email, call and text us all the time. The Internet - where many of us spend our days working - is saturated with articles and content screaming “read me!”, advertisements and distraction…

The .NET Framework was been taking up a fair amount of time in the tech press in recent months, mainly due to Microsoft's bold move to open source much of the technology. One announcement you may have missed was the release back in November of a preview version of .NET 4.6. In this post we take a look at what you can expect.

The .NET Framework

The .NET Framework is a development platform for building apps for…

Apple recently announced a release date for their latest innovation: The Apple Watch (you’ll be able to place orders online from 10 April) and while it’s far from the first contender in the wearable tech market, it’s already getting a lot of attention from Apple aficionados. Much more than just a timepiece, Apple claim the kit will blend into the lives of owners, letting them connect with friends and…

Let’s not kid ourselves, when you’ve put hours of hard work and effort into developing an app, the last thing you want is someone to come and pick a load of holes in it. From conceiving an idea, to planning it out to writing the code, your app can end up being your ‘baby’. So, to have someone come along, asking questions and poking around for bugs can be infuriating to put it lightly. Nonetheless, your app will often…

As a developer you might think that when the code is written, the work is done. This is not true; the real challenge often starts when users begin using your tool. Crash reporting and analytics are a vital component to any app's success. When building mobile applications, implementing this kind of an app insights framework can take a lot of time because of multi-platform code bases and the wide range of devices available…

In the old days it was easy to develop applications. There was a machine on the developer’s desktop and it was fairly clear how that machine would behave in all circumstances. Even later, when every application began being targeted at web development it wasn't that hard because code would be on a single web server and (by and large) the code did what you expected it to do. And then there was the mobile revolution. Developers…

Any developer who has had to design apps for different mobile platforms will know just how time consuming writing code for different operating systems is. Any developer who’s ever mastered different languages for APIs will know just how cumbersome a task this can be, and any developer who’s wanted to test their apps on different devices or upload them to the App stores will be aware of just how frustrating this process…

Microsoft was slow to react to the step change in user experience provided by iOS and Android versus the first generation smartphone platforms. Windows Phone was then late to market and has finished a distant third in the smartphone platform wars. Smartphone adoption was consumer led and in the race to catch up, Windows Phone skipped some enterprise-friendly features that left it out of the running for business adoption…

Bryan Downing over at Quantlabs recently featured Infragistics finance dashboard sample applications in a recent post - take a look!

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C# is becoming an increasingly important language for mobile development, with or without Windows. For more info, check out our recent blog post about this topic and check out our latest infographic below!

Share With The Code Below!

Microsoft have been struggling to get traction with their mobile computing efforts, with Windows Phone stuck at around 3% share of the smartphone market. Windows 8 is doing a little better in the tablet market but is still a distant third to iOS and Android. Despite losing in the platform wars, Microsoft’s developer ecosystem is still strong and they’re not showing much sign of wanting to give up their tools. The …

Whether you’re a professional developer, a hobbyist or a student, regularly keeping up to date with events in the development world is crucial for understanding larger trends. These recent announcements. in particular, point towards considerable changes in policy and strategy around coding for different browsers and platforms.

While not everything that’s happened over the last few weeks will directly affect all…

Developers who work within Microsoft’s universe will treat recent announcements about the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) with some interest. The corporation are promising important improvements in performance, interoperability and new and improved tools which will likely impact how developers use the platform.

How the roadmap will pan out in the coming years and what impact this will have on the WinForms…

What is WinForms?

The .NET Platform provides you with a rich set of libraries to build GUI client applications. The concept of building rapid GUI applications has been borrowed from Visual Basic and it’s called WinForms (Windows Forms) on the .NET Platform. The WinForms API supports RAD (Rapid Application Development) and relies extensively on properties that enable you to tailor the WinForms to your needs. 

In the…

As web pages are accessed from ever more diverse devices and pages include increasingly complex elements, developers are faced with more and more complex challenges in their builds. At the same time, clients expect work to be completed sooner and to tighter deadlines. Long gone are the days of plain text pages; users expect interaction, sharp visuals and speed.

Many projects are restricted by strict deadlines, tight budgets…

The leading App Stores have over 1.25 million Apps available. An amazing number which will only continue to grow. With thousands of tools designed to help with anything from everyday tasks, travel, and entertainment to the truly bizarre, standing out from the crowd and getting potential clients to tap on your icon while browsing is an enormous challenge.

For many small tech startups, App icon design is often left to…

In the .NET, jQuery and HTML ecosystems, 2015 has been a year of exciting announcements. Among the various releases, teasers and previews, it’s been impossible to ignore the trend in Virtual developments (whether of the Machine or Reality kind). Some of these offerings still seem a little futuristic, and a little out of reach for the large majority of customers. Nonetheless, it’s exciting to catch a glimpse of what VR…

Microsoft surprised both their friends and rivals when they announced they would open source .NET Core in November 2014. Although now widely available on GitHub, it’s worth noting that not everything is open source just yet and is still work in progress.

However, before we get ahead of ourselves, we should ask the question, just what is .NET Core? To be clear, it is not the entire .NET Framework. Microsoft decided…

This month, Infragistics takes you through the creation of a financial cash flow dashboard using our Windows Forms controls, but without looking like a typical clunky Windows Forms application.

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To start with, Infragistics designers came up with a mockup of what they wanted the application to look…

As of January 2015 Chrome will be effectively dropping support for NPAPI, rendering it more or less obsolete. Google announced they would be phasing out the plugin in September 2013 and over the last fifteen months have been gradually reducing support on their browser, while simultaneously making it harder for developers to build components with it.

The Internet is constantly evolving and, according to Google, NPAPI was…

Around the world there is an urgent need for skilled developers. Even Barack Obama told us that the world needs developers and that kids should start learning programming skills as soon as possible. However, attending a job interview can be a nerve wracking experience and so in this post, we’ll look at what a .NET developer can expect in an interview and how they can prepare.

Many talented developers find they…