Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm...

Over the past month I have had the opportunity to give some thought to what I wanted to accomplish this year in my life, career, and health. And during those times of thought I have often gone back to a speech I listened or re-listened to by the late Jimmy Valvano. Jimmy V was a great college basketball coach and was unfortunately diagnosed and later passed away from bone cancer. But shortly before his death he gave a riveting speech at the 1993 ESPN ESPY Awards. There are some great things he said, but one statement lost in many outtakes that stuck with me was "Nothing great was ever...

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Portable MVVM Light - Move Your View Models : Part 2

In the first part I covered how to get the initial project setup and share the ViewModels and ViewModelLocator between a Windows Phone 8 project and a Windows Store Application.  In this post, I'll add a DataService and a Model class that will be used to get the most recent posts from the Windows Phone Blog and display the results. Adding DataService and Async to Portable Class Library The purpose of the DataService in the context of this project is to retrieve the RSS feed from the Windows Phone Blog (http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/rss.aspx)...

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Portable MVVM Light - Move Your View Models

Portable Class Libraries  Portable Class Libraries were added as a project type in the interest of creating an assembly that you could use across the .NET Framework, Silverlight, Windows Phone 7, or Xbox 360 platforms without modifications.  Well, not really that easy.  There is some work to do and as you get into the development of PCLs you'll find out that there is really a sliver of what you'd hope is supported. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/gg597391(v=vs.110).aspx) MVVM Light Where I have found it for me is in Windows...

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Picking the Right Tools for Your Project

CodeProject Over the weekend I was able to release the first of many Windows 8 applications (Download and Rate here) into the store that I have been working on. This first one is just a RSS type application for DZone.com, but it just the first version and the next installment will add more content.  If you have ever planned a good, cross platform application before you may or may not understand that picking the right tools for job are important, and yes even what you're using for the front end language matters sometimes as it did in my case here. Here...

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