This Wednesday my son and I will be presenting "Teach Your Kid to Code" at BaltoMSDN [http://baltomsdn.com/?p=221]. We did this presentation in November at CMAP [http://www.cmap-online.org/] and had a great turnout! We hope to see you (and your child!) on Wednesday night [http://baltomsdn.com/?p=221]! This is the presentation abstract: Have you ever wanted a way to teach your kid to code? For that matter, have you ever wanted to simply be able to explain to your kid what you do for a living?...

I just posted an article on my company's blog on Sharing Code Between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 [http://blog.appliedis.com/2013/02/20/sharing-code-between-windows-8-and-windows-phone-8/] . It covers portable class libraries, view model patterns, linking source files, and more. Check it out here: http://blog.appliedis.com/2013/02/20/sharing-code-between-windows-8-and-windows-phone-8/ ....

Thanks to everyone who came out to our CMAP presentation [http://www.cmap-online.org/Meetings/Details/2012-11-06.aspx] last week! Despite being Election Day, we had a packed house with almost 70 people including a large number of kids. My son loved having the clip-on microphone and it was great having such an enthusiastic audience. All code samples and PowerPoint can be found here [https://github.com/smichelotti/TeachKidToCode-presentation]....

Now that Azure supports .NET Framework 4.5, you can use all the latest and greatest available features. A common scenario is to be able to use Entity Framework Code First Migrations with a SQL Database in Azure. Prior to Code First Migrations, Entity Framework provided database initializers. While convenient for demos and prototypes, database initializers weren't useful for much beyond that because, if you delete and re-create your entire database when the schema changes, you lose all of your op...

Next Tuesday I will be at the CMAP [http://www.cmap-online.org/] main meeting presenting Teach Your Kid to Code [http://www.cmap-online.org/Meetings/Details/2012-11-06.aspx]. Next Tuesday is of course Election Day so you have to make sure you vote early in order to get over to CMAP for the 7:00PM presentation. I will be co-presenting this talk with my 5th grade son. Here is the abstract: Have you ever wanted a way to teach your kid to code? For that matter, have you ever wanted to simply be a...