This document discusses several Microsoft technologies for app development including Xamarin, LightSwitch, Cordova, Azure VMs, Visual Studio in the cloud, Chef/Puppet, and PowerShell. Xamarin allows building native apps using C# that run across iOS, Android and Windows. LightSwitch is for quickly building line of business apps. Cordova uses web technologies like HTML/CSS/JS to build cross-platform apps. Azure VMs provide scalable cloud computing resources. Visual Studio in the cloud allows using VS via the internet. Chef and Puppet automate server configuration. PowerShell enables automation on Azure. Demos are presented on many of these topics.

1. HI
Robert MacLean
Microsoft Senior Developer @ AppFactory
@rmaclean
Means I am not in
sales & I don’t care if
you by licensing
Kidding! I want a raise
– by some licenses!

2. APP DEV WITH XAMARIN

3. WHAT LANGUAGE RUNS ON ALL
THESE DEVICES? As in programming
language smarty
pants

4. XAMARIN
Its Latin for hard to
spell correctly
Share all logic across all platforms
Native UI development
Full platform API access
Native performance

5. XAMARIN.FORMS
Common UI framework
Can mix & match with native

6. MSDN SUBSCRIPTION DEAL
Extended 90 day trial
Exclusive training
Up to 48% discount on Xamarin purchase

7. DEMO

8. DEV THOUGHTS
C# everywhere
Portable class libraries
MVVM, MVC, DI etc…
At Microsoft we only
speak in acronyms.
We use normal words
for your benefit

9. MORE
xamarin.com/msdn
scan.xamarin.com
Free tool to figure out
the difference
between your code &
Xamarin
Special offer page
The “Let me Bing that
for you” slide

10. BUSINESS FOCUS WITH
LIGHTSWITCH

11. BUSINESS APPS
Now 60% bigger!
Now 60% smaller so it
fits on Glass.

12. LINE OF BUSINESS (LOB) APPS
Connect to data source or create a data
source
Have forms on top of it
Have an API
Must scale
Mobile ready

13. LIGHTSWITCH
Have VS? you got it 
Powerful set of tools to build line of
business applications
Great integrations into SharePoint
Not getting a demo –
trust me, you’ll like
SharePoint a lot more
now

14. DEMO

15. MORE
Getting started page
for LightSwitch… or a
rick roll. Are you
feeling lucky?
aka.ms/Lhbs0j
youtu.be/tu5G8AsOlr0
Over an hour more of
me talking about
LightSwitch!

16. BUILDING HTML APPS WITH
CORDOVA

17. NO C#? NO PROBLEM
According to me –
my talk, I can say
anything
There are more HTML/JS/CSS developers
than C# developers
HTML/JS/CSS has changed to a seriously
powerful tool stack
No more using alert –
unless you are
debugging that is :P

18. CORDOVA
Engine that powers Adobe PhoneGap
Cross platform development using web
technologies
Greater platform reach (14 distinct
platforms)
Soon 13… just waiting
for BlackBerry to die
off…

19. MULTI-DEVICE HYBRID APP
DEVELOPMENT
In CTP
Amazing install experience
That is why marketing
gets the big bucks!
Getting a rename
Debug with emulators, Ripple or tethered
devices*

20. DEMO

21. MORE
cordova.apache.org
aka.ms/F0akbk
Good intro to the
tooling!

22. START FAST WITH AZURE
VM

23. WHERE WE ARE GOING, WE DON’T
NEED ROADS
Hardware is a limiting factor
Scaling
Demos, training and R&D
Staff setup
Offsite data backups & business continuity
Knowledge is expensive
Mandatory geek
and/or 80’s movie
related pun

24. AZURE VM
Created
by the
laziest
logo
designer
ever!

25. DEMO

26. Purple often is associated
with royalty which fits VS
since it is the king of IDEs
YOUR IDE IN THE CLOUD

27. THE LENGTH OF A NANOSECOND
Time between
robot going green & car hooting*
clicking the ok in a dialog box & saying f&!#
your boss phoning to say the website is down
& when he expects it back up
* At least in Joburg

28. SLIGHTLY MORE THAN A
NANOSECOND
Getting a developer machine ready
and if you have one ready
Get latest code, edit file, commit, wait for
CI

29. IDE IN THE CLOUD
Visual Studio pre-built Virtual Machines
MSDN Subscription Downloads
Project Monaco

30. DEMO

31. SCRIPTING YOUR
ENVIRONMENT

32. HAVE YOU TRIED TURNING IT OFF &
ON?
A business critical server must be moved,
the dev team no longer exists & it is old
hardware.
If it doesn’t turn on or it doesn’t work –
how long will it take you to rebuild the
environment?

33. CHEF OR PUPPET
Ensure your machines are setup a specific
way, that can be repeated & they stay that
way
Both open source
Both support Azure
Chef is more Dev focused & Puppet is
more Ops focused – but that isn’t a
specific rule

34. POWERSHELL
cmd.exe is not bash
PowerShell is a command line where you
work with objects, and can apply
programming logic to it!
PowerShell is extensible!

35. POWERSHELL + AZURE
Don’t read this – it is
just here to prove it is
a lot
Login, manage the environment, manage
the subscriptions, manage websites,
deploy websites, manage cloud services,
manage storage, manage SQL, manage
service bus, manage VMs, deployment,
manage virtual networks, manage media
services, manage HDInsight, manage add-on
purchases, manage routing, manage
traffic manager…. Almost everything in
Azure

36. DEMO

37. Intentional bad crop
to prove this is a real
screenshot

38. MORE
For this, IDE in the
cloud & Azure VMs
azure.microsoft.com
visualstudio.com
github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-tools
getchef.com
puppetlabs.com