Assume we want to automatically show the version number of your app in your UI, for example, the settings page or elsewhere. Your version number will normally be updated by your CI/CD system (updating Package.appxmanifest for UWP and AndroidManifest.xml for an Android Xamarin app). Create a property to bind to ViewModels and how they bind to your UI are out of scope for this post (as you’ll have already got this far).

I recently hit the classic case of trying to add Indexes to a large table. Whilst Entity Framework Core supports creating Indexes online during migrations, not all versions of SQL Server support this. In the case that your migration contains the code: migrationBuilder.CreateIndex( name: "IX_TableName_ColumnName" table: "TableName", column: "ColumnName").Annotation("SqlServer:Online", true); This will fail hard on SQL Server Express, which you are likely using for development locally, with the error message “Online index operations can only be performed in Enterprise edition of SQL Server.

One fantastic new feature in the latest version of Windows 10 is an add on you can install that allows you to use an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution natively in Windows. This opens up a whole new world for developers on Windows, including access to the same class of Git and SSH tools that are available on OS X (goodbye PuTTY!). To enable it, start by heading to Settings, Update & security, For developers and turn Developer mode on.

It is increasingly looking like the Surface 3 is going to be discontinued. Microsoft is running out of stock on the 128GB / 4GB RAM model. Third party vendors are heavily discounting it, suggesting a clearance. The biggest sign of its demise is that Intel are simply going to stop making the quad-core Cherry Trail Atom processors that power the Surface 3 and other tablets like it. This is a crying shame.

This is a follow up to my initial thoughts on the rental properties by Get Living London at East Village E20, approximately 18 months after moving back to the UK and settling down here. Get Living London are simply the best landlords in London. Period. If you have to rent and live in London, ideally it should be from them. They are now Private Landlord of the Year for two years in a row and it not hard to see why.

A few months ago I started to write a replacement for Windows Live Writer for Windows 10 using the new Universal Windows Platform, calling it Net Writer and putting it on the Windows Store in Preview. A few weeks later Scott Hanselman announces that Windows Live Writer has finally been open sourced as Open Live Writer licensed under MIT. It was time to throw away my code and use that!

Great news! In Windows 10 build 10130, Microsoft appears to have seen sense and brought back the perfectly functional Backup and Restore function that was removed in Windows 8.1. You can find it in the classic Control Panel under “Backup and Restore (Windows 7)”. No longer do you have to use the File History feature. The Windows 7 version of Backup and Restore supports a schedule you control, all files on your hard disk, includes a System Image at the same time and will include your OneDrive files!

.NET web applications tend to get treated very poorly in the real world – some people still think that copying and pasting the contents of their /bin/Release/ directory (lovingly referred to as “DLLs”) over Remote Desktop to a webserver and manually setting up IIS is acceptable – but this is now 2015 and the world has moved on. Here are my thoughts on some of the various ways you can deploy .

Update: I’ve posted an updated review after being here for 18 months. The following is a review of my thoughts so far about living at East Village, the former Athlete’s Village at the 2012 Olympic Games. My landlord is Get Living London and this will be from the perspective of myself as someone I imagine typical of a renter here – a young professional working at a firm in Canary Wharf in the technology field.

The community around .NET in Tokyo is pretty hard to find, so I’ve decided to do something about it. The Tokyo .NET and Mono Users Group has it’s first meetup on July 15th at the Hobgoblin in Shibuya. RSVP on Meetup.com here. We’ll be starting talks and presentations from the following meetup. Join us if you want to get to know some like minded .NET developers.

On December 5th, I delivered a live coding demo at Medidata’s UK office, going over some of the newer stuff for .NET Web Developers. It’s 48 minutes long and covers MVC5, VS2013, EF6, SignalR 2 and some other bits while I build a rudimentary Twitter clone called “MediTwit”. Nuget blew up about half way through but we recovered. Full video below (visit the full post page to view):

Update November 2014: Softbank has changed their WEP keys. This will no longer work. Sorry folks. I finally figured out how to get wifi access using a laptop on the Shinkansen (Nozomi N700 only I think) or any Softbank “mobilepoint” access point. iPhone and iPad users will already have free “Softbank Wifi” access – this is normally locked to only an iPhone or iPad. Softbank only check your user agent.

Windows 7 has been out for a few days for MSDN members and the public beta is due soon. One of the best new features is native DivX, AVCHD and mp4 video support. With the codec framework completely changed (as explained by Long Zheng here), usual MKV splitters for Windows Media Player no longer work and viewing HD MKV files now definitely requires VLC for now. On my travels I found an application called TSMuxer on the doom9 forums – this has the ability to very quickly convert HD video files between formats with no quality loss whatsoever.

Thanks to the ever-excellent Zman at The Z Buffer, I’ve been sent some screenshots of what Lines actually looks like on the New Xbox Experience. Awesome!

So my grand plan to rewrite my game for the Community Games launch didn’t quite go according to plan, so I decided to polish up the original version as a bit of practice. It has now been approved and is on Xbox Live Community Games – NXE users can download the trial and buy it now, while everyone on the old dashboard will have to wait until November 19th. The internet ranking site is up at http://www.