Introducing GeekFest: Screencasts for developers

For quite some time I’ve been meaning to start a video blog (or vlog) on interesting subjects and people so I’ve decided to waste no more time and get to work on a new series called GeekFest, a screencast for developers by developers.

A Windows Phone app from zero to store in 5 easy steps

For those savvy developers out there, who have great ideas for apps but not enough time to implement it, this comprehensive how-to guide will come in quite handy. The Windows Phone App Studio is an online WYSIWIG app builder designed to get you going in a snap. It allows you to build and test your app in no time for immediate publishing to the Windows Phone Store and share it with others. The great thing about this is that it generates the source code for you, enabling you to do more advanced modifications using Visual Studio. Oh and did I mention it compiles totally native code?

How T4 templates can help you with maintainable multi-page apps in JQM

We can utilize the power of T4 templates to generate a single HTML page which comprises of multiple separate HTML ‘children’ pages and a layout page, making multi-page apps more maintainable.

Leverage the power of Twilio from Azure Mobile Services

Ever wanted to send a simple text message from your web app? Well, now you can by using Twilio - an awesome cloud-powered API for voice calls & text messaging. Okay, I know that statement sounds like something out of an infomercial, but I recently had a simple need to send text messages from Windows Azure Mobile Services (WAMS), and after a bit of research, I came across Twilio which allows me to do just that.

Using Twilio from within WAMS can be quite tricky at first, but after a few practise rounds, I finally got the hang of it and realized that its actually very simple and easy to use, so I decided to write about how Twilio and WAMS together can solve a simple real-world scenario.

How RESTful is your service?

Web services are everywhere these days, from social media platforms to enterprise line-of-business solutions. It is extremely important to be able to expose APIs for your solution, in order to reach more external consumers on multiple platforms. As a modern trend, we see that more and more APIs are surfacing claiming to be RESTful, but in fact, they're actually just good old remote procedure calls (RPC).

Many of these proclaimed "REST"-style services are implemented not even knowing what the term means, so I've decided to help try explain REST and how to get your services RESTful.