Marc LaFleur

WebAuthenticationBroker & Facebook

MarcLaFleur — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 13:26:16 GMT

I needed to use Facebook authentication in a Windows Store app the other day. The Windows Runtime makes this trivially easy with it's WebAuthenticationBroker class. The web authentication broker allows apps to use Internet authentication and authorization...(read more)

Style In The Round

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:47:20 GMT

As part of my job I get to talk with a lot of developers, designers and product managers. When the subject of User Experience comes up (and it always does), I always emphasize the importance of thinking "outside the box". Yes, I know. It is a horrible...(read more)

A Better Sample Data

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:40:45 GMT

Scott Hanselman recently wrote about some placeholder images sites for web development. As is typical for one of his posts, it pointed me towards something I was completely unaware of. It also inspired me to solve a personally annoyance of mine. As a...(read more)

Do It With Style

MarcLaFleur — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:11:19 GMT

Along with the introduction of Windows 8 came the induction of formalized user experience design guidelines. This was a pretty revolutionary step in Windows development. The historic lack of any formal UX guidelines for previous versions of Windows had...(read more)

Word as Blog Editor

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:36:27 GMT

Did you know that Microsoft Word also makes an excellent blog editor? In fact, this post made using Word 2013. So how do you set up Word for blog editing? It is rather simple, albeit a little round about. The process starts by opening Microsoft Word and...(read more)

Custom Headers with HttpClient

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 13:53:33 GMT

I while back I talked about Basic Authentication with HttpClient. Kaysha posted an excellent question about custom headers for things like User-Agent and Content-Type. Here is how you handle those headers. HttpClient is extremely simple to use out of...(read more)

Too Clever By Half

MarcLaFleur — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 21:33:34 GMT

So I'm a bit of a stickler for fool-proof configuration, sometimes to my own detriment. In response to my earlier Bing Maps SDK issue with x64 I thought I would be really clever and just remove x64 as a target platform from the solution configuration...(read more)

Bing Maps SDK

MarcLaFleur — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 15:22:57 GMT

I've been playing around with the Bing Maps SDK over the holidays. The documentation includes a step-by-step guide for adding Bing Maps to my app that got me up and running. I had to make some small changes like targeting specific CPU and not the default...(read more)

Settings Charm

MarcLaFleur — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 04:10:19 GMT

One of the nice things about Windows 8 for developers adoption of some clearly defined (and long needed) user experience standards. While in the past we relied on conventions (Help -> About for example) those conventions were not always followed and...(read more)

Windows Store Apps

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 05:50:39 GMT

I've run into a couple of developers asking where "Metro Style Apps" went in the RTM version of Visual Studio 2012. Don't worry, they are still there. They just have a new name. That term "Metro" was just a placeholder during the beta phase. There are...(read more)

Moved to Azure

MarcLaFleur — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 05:25:12 GMT

Well now I've gone and done it, I've moved this site over to Azure. Overall the experience was pretty painless. Created a new Windows Server 2012 VM instance Installed WordPress and MySQL via the Web Platform Installer Imported my old MySQL Database I...(read more)

Basic HTTP Authentication in WinRT

MarcLaFleur — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 03:49:20 GMT

I’m on vacation right now, getting some much needed time with the family and preparing for my wedding at the end of the week. So what does a geek do in the midst of 6 kids and the chaos of wedding planning? Why build a Metro style app of course. Duh!...(read more)

The Internet is for FUD

MarcLaFleur — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:42:14 GMT

Sometimes I think Avenue Q got it wrong; The Internet is for FUD. When it comes to generating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt the internet reigns supreme. Oh the television was good, but it has limitations. When you need to simultaneously scare the pants...(read more)

Windows Azure for Amazon AWS Users

MarcLaFleur — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:21:29 GMT

One hurdle I run across while talking to AWS users about Azure comes down to terminology. Every cloud vendor has their own vernacular and this can be a source of endless frustration when one starts to compare the two services. Developers that have already...(read more)

Windows 8: Sleep, Restart & Shutdown

MarcLaFleur — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 15:40:56 GMT

Of all the questions I’ve seen regarding the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, “How do I shutdown?” seems to be the most prevalent. I’ve spent my share of time on various social networks showing people how to do it but that just doesn’t scale. As such, I’ve...(read more)